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The Admiral's Isles
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THE SON OF THE SULTAN: MEDAN
Visiting Zheng He's Indonesian ports of call isn't exactly a scenic journey. There's beauty, not least in the spirit of people who will without fail return a smile with a bigger smile, but most of these places don't show up on postcards. The next leg on Sumatra is a prime example: between the dusty, trashy port town of Dumai and the city of Medan some 10 bumpy hours by car to the north, the eye catches on the bare-bones shacks with their thatched roofs and cleanly swept earthen yards, smarts through the smoke of fires that eclipse the midday sun and loses focus after miles of palm oil and rubber plantations. The only constant is a Caltex pipeline, gray and monotonous, elevated just high enough so that families have to climb either under or over it to reach their homes from the road. It's just another reminder that the land's riches are going somewhere else.
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Disunited Nations
Once a patchwork of sultanates and kingdoms, this teeming region now struggles to tame its multiple—and often conflicting—identities
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At night, the hazy roadside darkness is broken by a fluorescent-lit restaurant, its plastic tables and chairs idle; by an illuminated badminton court, its lines drawn in the dirt, its players immaculate in their whites; by an overturned lumber truck, its wheels still spinning. And finally, having finished a bag of snakefruit bought on the Dumai docks, I reach Medan, a typically crowded and polluted Indonesian city in a region that was the Deli Sultanate when the lofty sails of Zheng He's fleets darkened these skies.
Tengku Lukman Sinar, born in 1933, lives in one of Medan's leafier neighborhoods in a spacious house with a driveway and a satellite dish. He can use the honorific "tengku" because his father was a Sultan, the last Sultan of Serdang. Other descendants of Sultans dropped the tengku because their fathers, many of whom were allied with the colonizing Dutch, were jailed or murdered during the independence campaigns of the 1940s. Sinar's father died in 1946, but of natural causes. He had allied himself with Sukarno. A wise choice, though his family was still marched out of its home at gunpoint by communist forces. Sinar hated the communists for that. "But we got our revenge," he says a little too gleefully, when Suharto purged the communists in the 1960s following Sukarno's overthrow, leading to the deaths of up to a million Indonesians.
Sinar himself has always been comfortable, Sultan or not. He inherited a palm oil plantation and he teaches history and ethnomusicology. His life, he says, goes from "one seminar to the next." As a tengku, he blesses a ceremony here or there and performs the local equivalent of supermarket openings. Neighbors come to him for advice, interactions he enjoys though "it's hard if they arrive when I'm having a siesta." In his living room, above the couch, is a picture of his father in full regalia. He is stunning, all sashes and ribbons. Sinar, sitting in a high-backed blue chair that makes him seem even smaller than he is, has on slacks and a short-sleeved shirt.
He loves talking history. His eyes dance behind his gold-rimmed glasses—one of the few pairs of glasses I saw on this trip—as he runs through the various sultanates that existed in the 16th and 17th centuries, the various colonial dealings of the 18th and 19th and the upheavals of the 20th. Pulling out a tattered pink folder, leaning forward, he describes his ongoing campaign to regain for local Malays the right to cultivate land held by the government. Back in the sultanate days, it was called tanah ulayat, communal land, and that's what he thinks it should be now. His group is called People in Waiting. Opening the folder, he extracts clippings that describe its progress: demonstrations, occupations, promised concessions that never materialized. He's not saying he thinks Sultans should be reinstated (anyway, his older brother would be first in line); he wants people to be able to grow vegetables that they can sell or eat, to make some money, to send their kids to school. Sinar has no kingdom, just a neighborhood, but maybe he can be of more use out of power, trying to advocate for the poor and powerless before their frustration turns to rage.
You hear it and see it all over Indonesia. People laugh at the suggestion that the government can or will improve their lot. It's not a happy laugh. It sounds more like resignation, a self-preserving suppression of hope. Politicians are considered corrupt until proven innocent, and if they are proven innocent, then the judge is probably corrupt. "They can change Presidents 10 times a day and my life will still be the same," Saharudin's brother had said. Sinar is disillusioned by the treatment of Malays in the area. In Java, grown men fight tears when they recall the day milk for their children became too expensive. In Aceh, the perception that the people are being ripped off leads to bloodshed. There's a constant military patrol even in the provincial capital Banda Aceh, a supposedly peaceful enclave in a region defined not by its wonderful coffee or the sparkling blue water off the northern coast—almost shocking after the prevailing brown of what passes for harbors and rivers elsewhere—but by atrocities that have piled up over two decades of guerrilla warfare. Collectively, the voices make "Indonesia" seem like a contrived fantasy—seriously, 17,000 islands as one nation?—not a country.
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China
Photographer Fritz Hoffmann finds a country on the move
Indonesia
John Stanmeyer explores the jostling peoples, religions and cultures that define the country
India
The grandeur of Cochin and Calicut has long disappeared
Middle East
The cities that were once the center of the world now hover at its remotest margins -- but a few traces of their glory days linger on
Africa
In the 15th century, Zheng He's fleet went to Africa seeking exotic treasures. The Chinese still do
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CHINA: In the Wake of the Admiral
SOUTHEAST ASIA: Disunited Nations
INDIA: Misplaced Majesty
THE MIDDLE EAST: Arabian Twilight
