Rumor had it—and rumors in those days were like coal
dust, settling into every crack and corner where fear lived—that he’d killed a
man. Maybe he had. Maybe he hadn’t. In the end, it didn’t matter much, because
either way they’d sentenced him to fifteen years in chains at Sawahlunto.
That’s what Samsul Bahri said, anyway, telling the story of the exiled man who’d
shared his ship on that god-awful journey from Batavia to Padang. The man had
jumped into the sea with his hands still shackled. Imagine that. Imagine
choosing the ocean over what was waiting for him in those mountains.
The novelist Marah Rusli wrote about it in 1922, in Sitti
Nurbaya, and maybe he understood something the rest of us take too long to
learn: that some prisons are worse than death, and some places—well, some
places just eat men alive.
Sawahlunto. Even the name sounds like something whispered in
the dark.
They call it the oldest mining town in Southeast Asia, and
maybe that’s true, but what they don’t tell you in the tourist brochures—and
brother, they’ve got tourist brochures now, can you believe that?—is that it
was built on the backs of the damned. The settlements fill a narrow valley that
snakes through the Bukit Barisan mountains like an old scar that never quite
healed right.
The geography tells its own story, if you know how to read
it. The northern part is relatively flat, almost peaceful-looking, like the
suburbs of some New England mill town where nothing ever happens until it does.
But head east or south and the land rears up steep and mean, slopes shooting
past forty percent, as if the earth itself is trying to throw you off.
In his 2016 study, Andi Asoka described how Sawahlunto split
into two parts: the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town—577.7 hectares of
it—sits in a valley shaped like a giant cauldron. The locals called it “Cauldron
City,” and Jesus, if that isn’t the kind of name that should make you want to
turn around and never look back. A cauldron. Where things get cooked. Where
things get consumed.
The New Town spread outward later, over 27,000 hectares,
losing that ominous bowl shape. But the Old Town—that original settlement—it
kept its secrets close, the way old places do.
Before the Dutch came with their machines and their chains
and their terrible efficiency, local communities had lived there for
generations. They had their nagari—Kubang, Lunto, Sijantang,
Pamuatan—each with its own social structure, its own way of doing things. They
managed their land according to customary law, respected communal ownership and
inherited lineage. They knew about the coal, too. Called it lidah arang—“tongues
of charcoal”—and you have to wonder if they knew even then that those black
tongues would eventually speak a language of suffering that would echo for more
than a century.
They found the coal on the surface and used it for cooking,
traded some of it on boats along the Ombilin River. Small-time stuff.
Sustainable. Nothing like what was coming.
Because underneath that ordinary-looking land lay wealth
beyond measure. And wealth, as any good horror story will tell you, always
demands a price.
---
The Dutch East Indies government wanted independence from
British coal imports. Dependence made them nervous, cost them money. So they
sent their Corps of Mining—the Dienst van het Mijnwezen—to scour the
archipelago starting in the mid-1800s. Looking for black gold. Looking for
power.
C. De Groot Van Embden made the first expedition in 1858,
but the real beginning—the moment when Sawahlunto’s fate was sealed—came in
1867. That’s when Governor-General Pieter Mijer sent a geologist named Willem
Hendrik de Greve into the Minangkabau interior.
De Greve spent May 1867 hiking along rivers and hills, and
what he found must have made his heart race and his hands shake when he wrote
up the report. Massive coal deposits, scattered along the Ombilin River like
gifts from a god who’d forgotten to mention the curse that came with them. Two
hundred million tons, he estimated, across five fields: Parambahan, Sigalut,
Lurah, Sugar, and Sungai Durian.
He published his findings in 1871. The report had one of
those long, bureaucratic titles that the Dutch loved, but the message was clear
enough: this coal was high-quality stuff, 7,000 calories of energy content, and
with the right transportation infrastructure—a railway, preferably—they could
move it efficiently to a port and make a fortune.
De Greve never lived to see what his discovery became. On
October 22, 1872, his expedition boat capsized in the Batang Kuantan River. He
drowned. Maybe that was mercy. Maybe, if there’s any justice in the universe,
he never had to see the chains.
---
It took the Dutch twenty-three years to figure out who
should run the mining operation. Twenty-three years of parliamentary debates
and bureaucratic tangles and lobbying from various parties who wanted their
cut. Erwiza Erman documented this in her thesis, and reading it you get the
sense of something inexorable building, like a storm you can see coming but can’t
do a damned thing to stop.
Finally, in 1892, the colonial government decided to run it
themselves. They acquired the land in 1886 and started building the railway bit
by bit: Pulau Air to Padang Panjang in 1891, then Padang Panjang to Solok in
1892, Solok to Muaro Kalaban that same October. The last stretch from Muaro
Kalaban to Sawahlunto was completed on January 1, 1894, connecting the mines to
Emmahaven Port in Padang like a vein carrying blood—or maybe, more accurately,
carrying life away.
While they built the railway, a small town grew near the
Sungai Durian mines. They made it official on December 1, 1888. That’s
Sawahlunto’s birthday, if you want to think of it that way. The birth of
something that would consume thousands of lives over the next century.
Once the railway was running, coal production exploded. From
48,000 tons in 1892 to millions more in the years that followed. The coal
powered everything—steam plants, ships, the colonial economy itself. Emmahaven
Port, built specifically to ship this black treasure, had the best loading
facilities in the Dutch East Indies. Mechanical systems. Coal depots. Ships
sailing to Europe with hulls full of Minangkabau’s wealth, transformed into
Dutch prosperity.
Progress. Efficiency. The march of industrial civilization.
And in the tunnels beneath the earth, men died in chains.
---
Here’s where the story gets dark. Darker than coal dust.
Darker than those tunnels that went down and down into the earth like throats
leading to hell.
To run the mines, the colonial government needed bodies.
Lots of them. In 1896, nearly all the miners were forced laborers taken from
prisons across the Dutch East Indies. They called them kettingganger—a
word that sounds exactly like what it means. Chain-men. Shackled men.
Deddy Arsya’s 2017 study describes the conditions, and
reading it is like watching a horror movie you can’t turn off. The prisoners
came from everywhere—murderers, rebels, robbers, political prisoners. They
brought them from the Muaro Padang Prison at first, but the men kept escaping
(wouldn’t you?), so they started importing them from Batavia and other prisons.
To stop the escapes, the Dutch implemented a chaining system
that would make a medieval torturer nod in approval. Feet shackled. Hands
shackled. Some poor bastards even had chains around their necks. Daily rations:
1,375 grams of rice, 125 grams of salted fish, 250 grams of vegetables, and 125
grams of lepeh-lepeh, some traditional food that probably tasted like
despair.
The tunnels went deep. Lubang Mbah Suro. Lunto Tunnel.
Sungai Durian, Panjang, Waringin. Each one a mouth leading down into darkness.
The strong men got the worst jobs: carrying wood to support
the tunnels (because nothing says “good morning” like knowing the ceiling might
crush you at any moment), cutting coal, extracting it, pulling loaded carts
through the dark. The weaker prisoners got lighter duty—guarding barracks,
caring for the sick. Small mercies in a system built on cruelty.
They had technology, sure. Mechanical ventilation. Dynamite.
Rail systems. Processing machinery on the surface. Even a steam locomotive they
called Mak Itam, numbered E1060, that later became famous as a tourist
attraction. Imagine that. A machine that hauled coal extracted by dying men,
now a photo opportunity.
But all that technology ran on human suffering. Long hours,
day bleeding into night with no rest. Inadequate food. Wages that were
insulting even by the standards of exploitation. And inside the tunnels—Jesus,
inside the tunnels it was worse. Coal dust so thick you could taste it, smell
it, feel it settling in your lungs like a slow poison. High humidity. Constant
threat of collapse. Lung diseases. Fatal accidents. On average, each forced
laborer got whipped three times a year.
Three times a year. As if that were normal. As if men were
machines that needed periodic maintenance.
---
The structural violence created resistance, the way pressure
creates diamonds. Labor uprisings erupted, especially in 1926–1927, when the Persatoean
Kaoem Boeroeh Tambang organized strikes. The colonial government crushed
them with military force, arrested the leaders, and—this is the part that
really gets me—held a ceremonial feast with animal slaughter to celebrate
crushing the rebellion.
A feast. To celebrate breaking men who’d already been
broken.
Lindayati’s 2017 research documents it all, and though the
resistance usually ended in defeat, something remained. The memory of the
chained workers left an imprint on Sawahlunto’s culture that you can still feel
today, if you know where to look. Like bloodstains that never quite wash out.
The Japanese took over during World War II, and production
dropped. After Indonesian independence, the mines passed through various
government hands, reaching peak post-independence production in 1976 with over
1.2 million tons per year. But the golden era couldn’t last. Technology
changed. Alternative energy sources emerged. National energy policies shifted.
By 2002, the easily accessible coal was gone. Underground
mining would have required massive investment that nobody wanted to make. They
shut down commercial operations, ending more than a century of mining history.
---
Today, Sawahlunto is a tourist destination. A “culturally
rich mining tourism city,” they call it. The Tansi Language—a creole formed
from ten different languages in those old barracks, Indonesia’s first labor
language—got recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2018. Mak Itam, that
old steam locomotive, runs tourist routes now. There’s a Railway Museum. You
can even tour the Mbah Soero Mining Tunnel, walk through those dark passages
where men once died in chains, and feel like you’re having an authentic
cultural experience.
In 2019, UNESCO declared the Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of
Sawahlunto a World Heritage Site.
Heritage. That’s what we call it now. Heritage.
But sometimes, late at night when the tourist trains have
stopped running and the museums are closed and the guides have gone home, you
have to wonder: Do the tunnels remember? Do they hold the echoes of chains
rattling in the dark, of men coughing up coal dust, of desperate prayers
whispered in ten different languages?
History has a weight to it. And some places—some places
never really let go of their dead.
Sawahlunto remembers. The earth remembers.
The chains remember.
And maybe that’s the real horror story—not that these things
happened, but that we’ve turned them into attractions. Souvenirs. Photo
opportunities. Something to check off a bucket list before heading to the gift
shop.
The cauldron still sits in its valley, and the black tongues
of charcoal still whisper their stories to anyone willing to listen.
Not all prisons are made of stone and steel. Some are made
of memory. Some are made of coal.
And some of them—some of them we build ourselves, one
tourist dollar at a time.
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