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Dossier: Transactional Spaces

I Will Burn Tuan’s House: Tobacco, Opium, and the Villa Patumbah

Pas de fumée sans feu : tabac et opium à la Villa Patumbah
Will Davis

Résumé

It could simply be that guilt, rather than philanthropy, was the reason that Anna Grob-Zundel, widow of the tobacco planter Karl Fürchtegott Grob, donated their luxurious family home Villa Patumbah to a charity organization in 1910. When asked why she had made this gift to Diakoniewerk Neumünster, she said that she could not live in a place built with the blood of enslaved hands. This paper considers the Zurich mansion, completed in 1885 to plans by the Swiss architects Chiodera and Tschudy, alongside the plantation in Sumatra on whose profits it was constructed. Rather than working backwards from villa to plantation, I shall consider the villa itself as a plantation by thinking through it alongside the planter economy that funded it. Here I take up Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi’s points, that the plantation is both “alien, strange, and unpredictable,” and yet it takes life under control, “space, time, flora, fauna, water, chemicals, people.” Western Europe’s colonial “reckoning” of recent years has provided new methodological opportunities for historians of built and destroyed environments, and in turn new forms of criticality for understanding sites in erstwhile metropoles and distant colonies. This paper reads material from the architectural archive: photographs from tobacco plantations in Sumatra alongside plans and drawings of the Villa Patumbah. Chiodera and Tschudy’s stylistic excesses ingratiated the Swiss public for the better part of a century, but material and metaphorical licentiousness also provides a lens for understanding the plantation in its European metamorphosis. In Switzerland, conditions of tropical violence were required for visitors to comprehend a tropics of material indulgence. Towards the end of this paper, a cryptic letter is translated. It is a clue: the villa is a site of colonial encounter without having to house the violence of the colonial act itself. Like the swirl of exhaled tobacco smoke, the plantation transmutes, absorbs, engulfs.

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Entrées d’index

Index de mots-clés :

opium, plantations, tabac

Index by keyword:

opium, plantations, tobacco

Indice de palabras clave:

opio, plantaciones, tabaco

Schlagwortindex:

Opium, Plantagen, Tabak

Parole chiave:

oppio, piantagioni, tabacco

Index géographique :

Sumatra, Indonésie

Index chronologique :

XIXe siècle
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Texte intégral

1It is early morning on the Patumbak estate in Deli, northeast Sumatra, around 1880. The tobacco plants are almost ready to be cut. Giant stumps of hardwood trees among the rows of tobacco are a reminder of what lay before, and what, for now, still surrounds the estate. A Swiss plantation owner is conferring with his assistant in the field. The two men then enter the vast tobacco drying barn. The assistant points to a small piece of bamboo hanging in the entryway. It is bound together with a tuft of hair, some objects that resemble miniature weapons, and some small bones. The piece of bamboo is carved with several vertical lines of intricate script. The planter reaches up to untie the message, removes it, and takes it home, where he adds it to a collection of several others.

Figure 1: “Pattumbah Estate N&G,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.

Figure 1: “Pattumbah Estate N&G,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.

Source: Zürich (Switzerland), Stadtarchiv Zürich, VII 537.3.1.

2This text considers the Villa Patumbah, built in 1885 in the Riesbach neighborhood of Zürich by Swiss architects Chiodera and Tschudy, alongside the plantation of the same name in Sumatra that paid for the villa in Zürich. Taking up the theme of this issue, I identify an imperial transaction as a translation and transmutation, evoking a change in state and its relation to mutant, mutation, monstrum, from plantation to villa, villa to plantation and back again, a villa as a plantation. To think this through, I turn to the nebulous visual specter of smoke itself as a tripartite theoretical framework for this text: first, the clouds of tobacco smoke exhaled through European lips; second, smoke swirling up from the bowl of an opium pipe; and finally, smoke billowing into the sky produced by a tobacco barn in flames: teak, bamboo, and thatched palm roof, set alight at dawn.

Figure 2: Architektonische Rundschau, 5. Jahrgang 1889. 6. Heft. Tafel 48.

Figure 2: Architektonische Rundschau, 5. Jahrgang 1889. 6. Heft. Tafel 48.

Source: Heidelberg (Germany), Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

3I take this approach because I’m interested in an architectural history of materials in transition, a history that follows a material as it transforms and breaks down, becomes something else. Such a transformation is the essence of architecture and its inevitable decay. Not fixed, but changing. There is a transaction happening here, but it is more sinister than simply imperial cashflows. The history of plantations is one of violence, wherever they may be: brutal labor conditions; land dispossession; the reorganization and destruction of complex ecologies; the clash of world systems represented by plantations in tropical environments.

  • 1 Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone(...)

4To bring these histories into focus in a European setting, the villa purchased by this plantation provides opportunities to reflect on an imperial transaction. Villa Patumbah illuminates the intermingling flows of form, culture, and taste to inform an understanding of the plantation as a site in Europe as well as its tropical elsewhere(s). Featured in Architektonische Rundschau four years after it was completed (fig. 2), it is depicted with flourish: a figure twirls a parasol. Is that a banana plant in the foreground? A palm on the balcony? Is the villa a kind of intellectual plantation? According to Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi, the plantation (in their case, the palm oil plantation that replaced the tobacco plantation of Patumbah’s day) is “alien, strange, and unpredictable,” while simultaneously being a place that “takes life under control: space, time, flora, fauna, water, chemicals, people.”1 This text examines the Villa Patumbah in immediate proximity to its Sumatran counterpart, the Patumbak (pronounced “Patumbah”) tobacco plantation. The villa, like its plantation, can be alien, strange, and unpredictable; and it is also an example of the attempts to take life (flora, fauna, space, time) under control.

  • 2 Patricia Purtschert, Francesca Falk and Barbara Lüthi, “Switzerland and ‘Colonialism without Coloni (...)
  • 3 Ibid., p. 7.
  • 4 Hanna Hilbrandt and Julie Ren, “Refracting Eurocentrism, Operationalizing Complicity: The Swiss Son (...)
  • 5 Of the extensive Dyrham Park estate in Gloucestershire, for example, Rupert Goulding and Louis P. N (...)
  • 6 “Grob war als Tabakpflanzer in Sumatra zu grossem Reichtum gekommen, den er in seiner Heimat in eig (...)

5Swiss mercantile capitalism is characterized by what Patricia Purtschert, Francesca Falk, and Barbara Lüthi call “colonialism without colonies.”2 The concept helps to understand how some nations built their self-perception on the notion of having been “colonial outsiders.” Switzerland’s self-presentation as a neutral, humanitarian nation, Purtschert et al note, “does not stand in contradiction to its imperial demeanor […] rather, these traits stand in constitutive relation.”3 Swiss economic interests were woven into other countries’ colonial possessions. Thus, Switzerland was relieved first of the need to establish its own territorial claims, and secondly of the geopolitical tensions that weighed on other colonial European metropoles in the 20th century. In this way, Swiss colonialism has been retold and recapitulated as one of many elements of a textured past, rather than embarrassing debacle (as with colonial latecomers Belgium or Germany). As Hanna Hilbrandt and Julie Ren argue, the claim of colonial innocence, and in turn, the claim of exceptionalism—the infamous Swiss sonderfall—makes it possible for functional complicity to redistribute the burden of redress.4 The Villa Patumbah is a relatively modest edifice compared to the country homes British plantation owners began building in the late 17th century. It doesn’t come close to the Blathwayts’ Dyrham Park estate, the sprawling Gloucestershire property of a family that had prospered for generations thanks to the Crown’s shipping, trading, plantation, and military exploits (recently discussed by Rupert Goulding and Louis P. Nelson).5 Nevertheless, a strict social code governed expressions of wealth in 19th-century Swiss society, and Villa Patumbah clearly transgressed against it: as late as 1977 the local press observed that its owner took a very “un-Zürich” approach to exteriorizing his wealth.6 It is an ironic coincidence that today the Villa Patumbah houses the main offices of the Swiss Heritage Society, Schweizer Heimatschutz.

Smoke I (tobacco)

  • 7 Ann Laura Stoler, “Perceptions of Protest,” American Ethnologist, vol. 12, no. 4. 1985, p. 644. URL (...)
  • 8 The word for river in northern Sumatra is often sei instead of the Bahasa Indonesian sungai. Sei co (...)
  • 9 Andreas Zangger, “Die Geschichte vom schnellen Geld,” in Gaby Weber, Karin Artho and Renata Münzel, (...)

6“Patumbak” is the Batak name for the roughly 13,000 acres of land, mostly rainforest at the time, that Karl Fürchtegott Grob and his Bavarian business partner Herrmann Näher leased from the Sultan of Serdang in 1871. They were taking advantage of the Dutch colonial “open-door policy,” an 1870 revision of the cultuurstelsel Cultivation System that between 1830 and 1870 required that a portion of agricultural production be devoted to export crops. With the opening of Deli to international investments, the Dutch administrators aimed to bring islands such as Sumatra more squarely under Dutch control by overseeing and controlling new agricultural export commerce in the region.7 By the time Grob and Näher sold off their tobacco plantations in 1889, their estates had expanded to 63,000 acres—roughly nine times the size of an average Sumatra tobacco plantation at the time. In the end, they owned a strip of land roughly forty kilometers long and seven kilometers wide. They had expanded their holdings along the banks of the Blumei River (present day Sei Belumai), and an 1889 survey map shows how their company (now named the Senembah Maatschappij), expanded to both sides of the Blumei valley (fig. 3). The plantation lands ran from the outskirts of the small port town of Rantau Pandjang toward the foothills of Karo country, all the way to the border of the residency. They were thus able to ship tobacco in small sampan boats directly to the harbor, where it could be picked up by steamers en route from Singapore to Penang and on to Europe.8 Unlike the European planters that surrounded them, who named their plantations after homes left behind (Helvetia, Säntis, Winterthur, Ludwigsburg, or Germania), Grob and Näher gave their estates local names. The land they leased from the Sultan was old-growth forest at the edge of the plantation region of Deli, inhabited by the Indigenous Karo Batak peoples. The forest was razed with axe and saw to make way for tobacco planting. Historian Andreas Zangger has speculated that Grob and Näher gave their estates local names to placate the local population, consolidating natives with a plantation economy in which the rights of the former were not infringed upon.9 To indicate alliance in such a way may have seemed unusual at the time, when the narrative of the civilizing European properly cultivating fertile soils and endowing the colony with European ways and names with them still persisted. But it was not without context.

Figure 3: 1889 Survey map of Senembah Maatschappij land contracts.

Figure 3: 1889 Survey map of Senembah Maatschappij land contracts.

Source: C.W. Janssen, Senembah Maatschappij, 1889-1914,Amsterdam: Roeloffzen, 1914, p. 6.

  • 10 Edy Ikhsan and Saidin Saidin, “Tobacco Plantation Concessions and Communal Land Rights in East Suma (...)
  • 11 Ibid.
  • 12 Anthony Reid, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumat (...)
  • 13 Andreas P. Zangger, “Die Geschichte vom schnellen Geld,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 59; Muhammad Rivai, (...)

7Widespread changes to land rights began in the 1870s. The new laws contained provisions for long term contracts (such as Näher and Grob’s 75-year lease) and the undermining of formerly communal lands (whether Batak Karo or Malay). The Sultanate granted them to foreign tobacco planters by implementing what legal scholar Edy Ikhsan describes as “legal pluralism,” taking advantage of the ambiguity of the term “wilderness.”10 Vast tracts of land were leased to Europeans by the Sultan of Deli without the knowledge or permission of local Malay groups who already resided there. This practice antagonized an already tenuous relationship between certain Sultanates and the Batak peoples with whom they had previously had only sporadic contact. The rapid growth of the plantation system in the 1870s laid bare this gap between polities, coastal elites and highland Indigenous groups. The bitter land disputes came to a head when one local chief, the Datuk of Sunggal, launched a series of skirmishes against plantation owners, the Dutch colonial police, and the Sultan of Deli (an incident often referred to as the Sunggal War or Batak War).11 Although the Datuk of Sunggal was forced into submission by the Dutch in 1872, Karo attacks continued sporadically into the late 1890s.12 As Zangger observes, at the very least, Grob and Näher may well have named their plantation Patumbak in an attempt to ease tensions at the edges of the plantation region. In fact, it may have been an effort to occlude the fact that this land was leased at all. The planters nurtured a close relationship to the Deli Maatschappij (Deli Plantation Company), a large Dutch firm founded by Jacob Nienhuys that ran ten large tobacco estates and eventually monopolized exports. When the Deli Maatschappij began construction on a railway in 1881, the line did not just lead north to Labuan harbor but was extended south to Grob and Näher’s tobacco estates at Tandjong Morawa, the center of Grob and Näher’s company, the Tandjong Morawa Company.13

8Swiss planter Ferdinand Tritschler’s photo albums contain a variety of depictions of plantation life in Deli during his time in Sumatra from1881 to 1892. One image in Tritschler’s Reiseerinnerungen (travel memories) shows the silhouette of a watchtower at Patumbak plantation against a backdrop of planters’ houses, razed fields, and onlookers dressed in white tunics (fig. 3). The menacing watchtower gives a sense of the pervasive militarization of plantation life, a militarization again evident in a staged photograph of Tritschler’s residence (fig. 4). Cannons line the driveway, a tiger’s hide adorns a gun, and men pose with swords and rifles. Tritschler, presumably, sits at center atop a cannon.

  • 14 Robin Hartanto Honggare, “Of Seeds and Sheds: Designing Uniformity along the Production Lines of Pl (...)
  • 15 Sasha Roesler, “How to Use the Winds: On the Venting System of Large Scale Tobacco Barns in East Su (...)
  • 16 Karl J. Pelzer, Planter and Peasant, op. cit. (note 8), p. 58.
  • 17 Amanda Achmadi, “The Architecture of Cultuurstelsel in Nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies: Built (...)

9Heavily guarded tobacco plantations have been described as both factories and machines, places that, in Robin Hartanto Honggare’s telling, reflected the uniformity of the commodities they would later produce. By the 19th century, plantations engaged in a form of environmental management that replicated factory production lines. In this case, the factory was turned inside-out, spread out on large tracts of land, and the product, the clipped leaves of the tobacco plant, was enclosed in giant drying barns prior to being packed off to port. On these estates, indentured plantation laborers from China and Java lived in barracks segregated along racial lines. Estates were strictly regulated around the process of tobacco production—harvesting, curing, and fermenting—a process that followed a cycle of three planting seasons. The drying barns were dismantled and rebuilt according to the location of the crops for that season, and as such were designed to be temporary, with as many as fifty curing sheds on an estate.14 For their giant roofs, these sheds utilized nypa atap, a traditional type of woven roof thatch used on buildings across coastal Southeast Asia, where nypa palms (sometimes spelled “nipa”) are plentiful in brackish water. Nypa atap is lightweight and allows ventilation; it could also be layered thickly to reduce the temperature range inside the drying barns.15 With the plantation boom of the 1870s, a cottage industry of nypa atap manufacture was created: the local peasant population went to work to supply nypa atap to plantation owners for the various buildings they commissioned.16 This appropriation of local building techniques to the benefit of the plantation economy created a hybrid industrialized architecture which made use of prefabricated local elements, a phenomenon that Amanda Achmadi has identified as an architectural appropriation that mirrored the expropriation of Malay peoples from their land and livelihoods during the tobacco boom decades in Deli.17

Figure 4: “Pattumbah Estate N&G,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.

Figure 4: “Pattumbah Estate N&G,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.

Source: Zürich (Switzerland), Stadtarchiv Zürich, VII 537.3.1.

Figure 5: “Villa Tritschler. 1884–1887, Soengie Radja Estate Pagoerawan,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.

Figure 5: “Villa Tritschler. 1884–1887, Soengie Radja Estate Pagoerawan,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.

Source: Zürich (Switzerland), Stadtarchiv Zürich, VII 537.3.1.

  • 18 That it was so common for the Europeans to write these works pseudonymously (“Multatuli” was Eduard (...)

10In both their tropical plantation estates and their European villa building, Grob and Näher were following a well-trodden path. Shrewd Europeans, returning enriched from “the Indies,” recounted their exploits to a white audience that was by turns intrigued, suspicious, respectful, or disgusted at their exotic tales. Such was the vainglorious atmosphere of 19th-century mercantile colonialism. The era inspired a whole body of literature critical of the brutal working conditions of the time. In the Dutch context, the classic is the 1860 satire Max Havelaar, Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, a novel that would inspire not only reforms in Dutch parliament but other novelists’ own accounts of colonial excess in sarcastic tones. The Philippine luminary José Rizal wrote Noli mi tangere (1887) and Swiss author Korang Trang, much later, published Die Unverbindlichen (1935).18 Such novels, penned by revolutionaries, dissenters, or exiles, decried the plantation system and the colonial regimes that entrenched their position in society. They featured grossly exaggerated characters and scenes that ridiculed colonizing white and mestizo elites, often featuring a protagonist middleman that comes to the belated realization that the system is rigged against locals. In these works, searing in their critique, it was clear that the plantation system was a questionable way to make money, and in its worst iterations, a brutal example of feudal conditions.

  • 19 Not dissimilar to the type of rapid and artificial urban growth that the Congo Free State saw with (...)
  • 20 Karl J. Pelzer, Planter and Peasant, op. cit. (note 8), p. 41.

11The tobacco “boom” in Sumatra of the 1880s is described as such due to the speed with which new plantations carpeted the region of Deli, rich in fertile volcanic soil that created the prized thick tobacco leaves suitable as cigar wrappers. So fast was the growth of the region that entirely new urban centers and trading posts sprang up, such as the city of Medan.19 Tobacco plantations were labor intensive, each estate requiring hundreds of migrant workers contracted through Straits middlemen in Singapore, Java, Malaysia, and China. Planters considered local Malay peoples as unsuitable to intensive agricultural work. Instead, the locals were recruited to clear rainforest, harvest nypa palm, and fabricate construction materials, prior to erecting the actual buildings: dwellings for the European planters and estate overseers; workers’ barracks; small stores; giant tobacco-drying sheds of lightweight bamboo and nypa; and more sturdy fermentation sheds near barracks and residences. This array of buildings, each with different uses and spatial requirements, provided locals with a constant source of income. In his history of the tobacco-boom era in Sumatra, historian Karl Pelzer describes Grob and Näher’s successor company, the Senembah Mij, as having pioneered an exemplary approach to social relations on the plantation.20 The Senembah Mij improved the relationship between planters and their laborers and the conditions under which each worked. They recruited employees with agricultural training in Europe, and at the small Swiss-German colony of Tanjung Morawa, the company set up a hospital where several European doctors gained experience in tropical medicine.

Smoke II (opium)

12For planters, the fantasy of a return to Europe newly enriched was embedded in the system. The Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer, the main character of Joseph Conrad’s 1895 novel Almayer’s Folly, epitomizes this figure, who “absorbed himself in his dream of wealth and power […] in the vision of a great and splendid reward.”

“They would live in Europe, he and his daughter. They would be rich and respected. […] Witnessing her triumphs he would grow young again, he would forget the twenty-five years of heart-breaking struggle on this coast where he felt like a prisoner. All this was nearly within his reach. […] Such were Almayer's thoughts as, standing on the verandah of his new but already decaying house—that last failure of his life—he looked on the broad river.”

13The novel, and its film adaptation by Chantal Akerman (La Folie Almayer, 2011), examine the psychology of the lonely European in the tropical world, caught between expectations of racial supremacy and illusions of colonial grandeur as the 19th century was eclipsed by the 20th. To Almayer’s chagrin, the house he built for himself at the edge of a Borneo jungle is chided as a folly by passing traders. Self-evidently ridiculous, the building, like the man, is a mausoleum of foreign fancy. Almayer becomes addicted to opium and dies in solitude, the building a shell for unrealized ambitions.

  • 21 “Karl Krüsi - Ein Appenzeller in Der Fremde - Blog Schweizer Geschichte.” URL: https://blog.nationa (...)
  • 22 “So viel bezahlte die Familie Escher für ihre kubanischen Sklaven,” Tages-Anzeiger, May 8, 2018. UR (...)
  • 23 See also: Monique Ligtenberg, “Eine Reise durch Zürichs koloniale Vergangenheit,” Tsüri, June 21, 2 (...)

14Quite different, then, is the example of the Villa Patumbah. It appears to be the fulfillment of Almayer’s dream, and bears witness to the power of buildings to attest to a successful return from the colonies. Nineteenth-century Zürich was peppered with such fantasies of returning traders. The notion that Switzerland, or Swiss individuals, played no role in a colonial past is less amnesia than myopia, since many such examples still exist in the urban landscape. Though Karl Krüsi’s sprawling Villa Sumatra is now demolished, the street still bears its name (Sumatrastrasse). The neoclassical megalith, sumptuously decorated with stained glass windows and marble staircases, overlooking the city from its own street, was evidence of the provenance of its owner’s immense profits. Krüsi was a tobacco planter in Sumatra between 1874 and 1893 who supposedly returned with a fortune of 17 million francs.21 A few streets away lies Nelkenstrasse, “Clove Street,” and on the opposite shore of Lake Zürich sits the grand Belvoirpark, home to the Escher family, whose wealth derived in part from their Cuban plantations.22 Schwarzenbach, a luxury grocery that has served the Niederdorf quarter since 1864, still displays a sign on its façade advertising its stock of “colonialwaren,” colonial wares. Grob’s business partner, Näher, built his own villa, Schloss Holdereggen, on his return to Lindau on Lake Constance. The examples are a fabric of the city’s history now being retold with Europe’s colonial “reckoning” of the past decades.23 Yet what distinguishes the Villa Patumbah from these examples is more than just the blank check its architects were handed. Material and metaphorical license and licentiousness also provide a lens for understanding the plantation in its European metamorphosis, where conditions of tropical violence were the condition on which visitors would comprehend the tropics of material indulgence.

  • 24 Debora Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I,” We (...)

15To trade in taste in its accumulated distance between metropole and colony was hardly a uniquely Swiss pursuit in fin de siècle Europe. Using the tropical flora and fauna of colonial possessions as inspiration in art and design has been explored in detail in other contexts, notably the art nouveau of Leopoldian-era Belgium, as art historian Deborah Silverman has pointed out. The distance between metropole and colony—the difference between damp winters and tropical humidity, between swaggering colonists and noble natives, between the extreme brutality of labor conditions and civilized indifference to them—provided a spectrum of difference that defined European cosmopolitanism. The lure of these fantasies served an array of motifs from which European designers drew inspiration. In Henry Van de Velde’s work, Silverman writes, “the rubber vines of the distant jungle, brought near, embodied a quintessential quality of symbolist abstraction: the liane interiorized its own essence and value, hid its treasure beyond the surface of appearances.”24 That is, the vine hid the latex beneath its skin rather than revealing its essence on the surface, and thus the beauty in the obscured value of tropical forest products, and perhaps the obscured value of the tropics themselves. While Silverman’s analysis focuses on the aesthetics of violence, the terms can be expanded in the example of Villa Patumbah, where, in terms that were more than purely representational, the architects were in a position to toy with an aesthetics of expropriation. Razed forests and the tedium of plantation life became, in Europe, a series of luxurious spaces designed to evoke a mystery and intrigue appropriate to the exotic, unknown colonial exploits of the owner.

  • 25 In 1889 Grob entered into a contract with Nordostbahn in 1889 to build a tunnel beneath the grounds (...)
  • 26 Regula Michel makes this assertion in “Baugeschichte und historisches Umfeld der Villa Patumbah,” i (...)
  • 27 Regine Abegg, “Von der Türkischen Villa zum Kino Orient – Neo-islamische Bauten und Interieurs zur (...)

16The Patumbak plantation in Sumatra financed fantasies of form and material that could be expressed at the Villa Patumbah back in Zürich. Tigers peer out from a marble façade, dragons dance in stained glass above the piano nobile, and the name of the plantation—now altered from Patumbak to Patumbah—is stamped across the frieze facing the street. Not only was the Villa Patumbah a lavish art and design operation, but it was also landscaped to fit into the growing infrastructure of Zürich. A planned train line that would have cut through the land below the villa impelled Grob to pay one hundred thousand francs to build a tunnel, thus sidestepping the prospect of train smoke billowing across his garden and obscuring a view of the lake of Zürich.25 The building was a statement angled to a particular section of society. Like his father, Grob was a member of the Zunft zum Weggen, one of Zürich’s fourteen guilds, which provided connections to city elites and businessmen. It is likely that he first experienced the work of Zürich architects Chiodera and Tschudy on visiting their renovation of the guild house of the ironworkers (Zunft zur Schmiden), completed in 1883.26 Likewise, he may also have heard of the synagogue recently completed in St. Gallen by the firm, built in an eclectic Arab-Byzantine style, or Villa Kann, completed in 1880, which featured a neoclassical dome lifting above the third story. These new builds coincided with a mania for “Neo-Islamic” eclecticism in architecture and design in Switzerland and Europe. Clearly, Chiodera and Tschudy were surfing the wave.27 Villa Patumbah was a different kind of commission, because the design of this villa could speak directly to the tropical context and source of its owner’s wealth, and combine selective aspects of the worlds that he traversed.

  • 28 Beat Waldispühl, Martina Müller and Kathrin Harsch, “Der asiatische Kuppelraum im 1. Und 2. Oberges (...)
  • 29 Thank you to Latticeil Oryza for helping to translate these panels, and positing that it was possib (...)
  • 30 Marc Lettau describes this juxtaposition in Grob as wanting to distinguish himself as a “member of (...)

17The exterior surfaces of the Villa Patumbah were an opportunity for Chiodera and Tschudy to paint a pastel-tinted patchwork of imported Veronese limestone and Carrara marble, while the interior structure offered them the occasion to play with the surfaces and light filtering into the villa, making use of the renowned Zürich stained-glass industry of the time. In the main house the rooms are organized around a central quad at which five squares meet, with a circle in the very center. This was the piano nobile, the main reception room that the architects nicknamed the Malaiischen innenhof, “Malayan courtyard” (fig. 6). Whereas the ground floor speaks to a lavish Italian neoclassical renaissance atmosphere, the floors above appear to come from a completely different house. Around a glass-domed void space, the walkways, columns, and panels are decorated in exuberant, almost delirious motifs of all colors, and the light-filled central space, surrounded by a gallery and rooms, resembles a Chinese courtyard house. Dragons or naga (serpents) peer up from skirting boards; a bird of paradise flits between a butterfly, a lobster, and two dancing frogs, on an intricately painted wall panel; the life-size painting of an apparently East Asian man in robes peers quizzically out from behind a curtain. These images are either painted directly onto the wood and plaster panels of the walls and ceilings or painted in repetitive sections onto wallpaper. The restoration team, in a chapter discussing their work between 2010-2013 on these rooms and the gallery, make the supposition that this approach was at the behest of Grob, who very likely visited the Chinese courtyard houses of wealthy Chinese merchant emigrees in Penang and Singapore. He certainly hired indentured plantation workers through such Straits middlemen and very likely visited their homes. That there is a selectivity to which part of Asia the “asiatische Kuppelraum” speaks—not Sumatra, but China—shows the version of Straits cosmopolitanism Grob felt comfortable with during his time in Sumatra. Advising Chiodera and Tschudy to play with the form and idea of a Chinese courtyard house (albeit on the second story rather than ground floor of his villa) was a conscious emulation of worldly tastes that would have played well into the mania for East Asian art in Switzerland after several World’s Fairs across Europe.28 The vertical Chinese script on the wooden panels framing the borders of the atrium reiterate this point (fig. 7). They must have been copied directly from a source that Grob supplied, or that the architects themselves found, since the script is unintelligible, and the brush strokes are mixed and misaligned. The four characters on the right-hand panel, “應翠譜全,” can be loosely translated as “respond/should, green/jade, score, complete.” They may have been copied from the title page of a musical score that Grob acquired. The left-hand panel, however, is almost completely illegible.29 These texts were not meant to be read and understood, however; instead, the exotic Chinese script was purely decorative, to be admired and appreciated by the non-Chinese-speaking upper crust of Zürich society. It was proof of the distance Grob had traveled, and an insight into his worldliness.30

  • 31 For example, the Sun Yat-sen Penang Base and the Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi clanhouse in Penang, or (...)

18Certainly, the homes of Straits merchants also borrowed and mixed neoclassical European elements with East Asian courtyard building practices in their homes in Southeast Asia. In fact, they constitute some of the best-known examples of the region’s Peranakan heritage buildings today. But the fact that Chiodera and Tschudy imported this version of Straits cosmopolitanism to Zürich is in itself an unusual example of the plantation world making its way to Europe.31

Figure 6: Architektonische Rundschau, 5. Jahrgang 1889. 6. Heft. Tafel 48.

Figure 6: Architektonische Rundschau, 5. Jahrgang 1889. 6. Heft. Tafel 48.

Source : Heidelberg (Germany), Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.

Figure 7: Chiodera & Tschudy, 1883.

Figure 7: Chiodera & Tschudy, 1883.

Source : Zürich (Switzerland), Baugeschichtliches Archiv Zürich.

Figure 8: Asiatische kuppelraum, Chiodera & Tschudy, 1884.

Figure 8: Asiatische kuppelraum, Chiodera & Tschudy, 1884.

Source : Photograph by Dudli Hanspeter, 2006. Zürich (Switzerland), Baugeschichtles Archiv Zürich Record 131990. URL: https://baz.e-pics.ethz.ch/​catalog/​BAZ/​r/​175931/​.

19Seen in section, the Malaiischen Innenhof demarcates a volume that extends through the center of the villa, linking a stained-glass roof to the vestibule. Looking up from the vestibule, you can see a circular opening in the ceiling, into which a glass lens was fitted. This lens would have refracted and amplified the sunlight coming through the stained glass above it, filtering colored light into the vestibule where the master of the house received guests. Nicknamed the Drachenauge (Dragon’s Eye), the lens transformed the void space running through the central core into a prism. Because Zürich lies north of the equator by 47°, the sun would never have shone directly vertically from above the way it did at Patumbak (at 3° North latitude). But at Patumbah the Dragon’s Eye would have enabled the colored light emanating from the stained glass above it to give the illusion of tropical sun filtering through jungle leaves into the Malayan Courtyard below. On a chilly, bright winter’s day in 1890, the visitor entering a villa in Zürich would perhaps have had a fleeting, uncanny feeling that he or she had just stepped into a jungle clearing.

  • 32 Ririn Darini and Dyah Ayu Anggraeni, “The Life of Deli Tobacco Plantation’s Workers in East Sumater (...)

20Moreover, there is something peculiar about naming this trick “the dragon’s eye,” to describe light playing through the building’s center, considered in the context of plantation life in 19th-century Sumatra. By the turn of the century, tens of thousands of Chinese and Javanese tobacco-plantation laborers in eastern Sumatra were registered as legal opium users.32 The practice of smoking opium is known in Chinese as “chasing the dragon”—referring to the smoker using a long pipe to chase and inhale wisps of smoke produced by burning a paste derived from the opium poppy. Opium use was an important aspect of plantation culture in the Dutch East Indies, since plantation workers became addicted to and relied on smoking opium in order to endure brutal working conditions. Indeed, the misery of addiction is strikingly depicted in Multatuli’s 1860 satirical novel, Max Havelaar, referred to above. In the shape-shifting Villa Patumbah, the dragon’s eye, cutting an optical cross-section through the building, acts as an opening to consider the building as a sinister realization of the indentured late-19th-century plantation economy. It is cleverly disguised in the language of a rococo, neoclassical orientalism that threaded light through the building. Even the evocation of illicit substances served to augment the villa’s exotic palette: the awareness of suffering, pleasure, and wealth, taken together, became intricately bound with the threading of light through the space that relied on all of these connotations to function. It is the delicacy of the idea of illicit substances and experiences that shapes this architecture.

Smoke III (arson)

  • 33 Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narrati (...)

21Violence was part of plantation life in the years of Patumbak’s operation, and the region was full of Europeans operating plantations that engaged an itinerant, indentured workforce. Many of these workers, who were brutally exploited, deserted the plantations, formed alliances with Indigenous peoples in the region, and raided the plantations that previously employed them. Planters frequently repressed the locals violently, terrorizing them with arbitrary punishment and extrajudicial means of settling disputes.33 Plantations, and especially their tobacco-drying barns, were perfect targets for the prospective arsonist: lightweight, well-ventilated, and crucial to the production process. Indeed, Näher and Grob’s estates were set alight twice during the revolts of the Sunggal War, once in 1876, and again in 1882.

  • 34 Uli Kozok, “On Writing the Not-To-Be-Read: Literature and Literacy in a Pre-Colonial ‘Tribal’ Socie (...)
  • 35 The Batak languages comprise a subgroup for each of the six groups of Batak peoples, not all of whi (...)

22Bequeathed to the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zürich is a collection of four “Brandbriefe,” which translates as “fire letters.” Known in the Batak-speaking world as pulas, the letter is a declaration of war by an individual who would be transformed into a musuh berngi, a “nightly enemy until their matter is settled.”34 These objects consist of pieces of bamboo into which text is carved. Sometimes soot was rubbed into the cuts, to make the writing stand out. The bamboo was bound up with a piece of bone, tufts of horsehair, and smaller carved items that resemble miniature weapons. Depending on the circumstances in which they were delivered, these items symbolized different things. Ostensibly, the letters were threats of arson, sent to plantation owners, and later sold or traded as curious keepsakes. They differ from other forms of Batak literature such as pustaha (books of spells and remedies written on small, folded pieces of bark) in that they were intended to be left at a specific location, almost as a declaration of war. Perhaps this is why the they are called “brandbriefe” or “driegbrief” in Europe, like ransom notes. Pulas have an ominous air, deriving in part from the context within which they arose. The threat would be suspended in the doorway of the drying barn at night, to be found by workers entering the barn first thing in the morning. It would have been impossible to miss them.35

  • 36 Faizah Zakaria, The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime South (...)

23The uses of writing among Batak groups in the mid-19th century changed, due to the introduction of church missions at the same time as coffee and tobacco plantation culture. As environmental historian Faizah Zakaria points out, where literacy was previously a way to communicate with unseen ancestral and spiritual kin, now it was shifting to deconstructing and managing nature. It intersected with changes in the landscape brought on by the new spirituality of capitalism, a secular faith that invested “wonder in objects rather than a sanctified nature.”36

Figure 9: Various musuh berngi messages in the Völkerkundemuseum Zürich. “Fire letters” (Brandbriefe)

Figure 9: Various musuh berngi messages in the Völkerkundemuseum Zürich. “Fire letters” (Brandbriefe)

Source : Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich.

  • 37 The Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich bequeathed the collection of musuh berngi lett (...)

24The file card attributed to Brandbrief 01006 in the Ethnographic Museum of Zürich is a riddle. Dated 1875-80, it indicates that the letter was at some point given by Grob’s business partner, Näher, to the Geographic and Ethnographic Society of Zürich (GEGZ), an organization founded in 1899. A year after Näher’s death in Lindau in 1909, the GEGZ sold the collection of letters to the Ethnographic Museum Zürich.37 Oddly, the file card contains two separate descriptions of the item, which vary slightly. The first reads as follows:

  • 38 “Brandbrief der Battaker. Halbdurchgeschnittenes Stück Bambus mit eingeritzten Buchstaben; dessen I (...)

Brandbrief of the Battaker. Half-cut piece of bamboo with inscribed letters; the content of which is: “I posted this incendiary letter. If the boss doesn’t pay 500 dollars within 2 days, I will set the barn on fire with all its contents.” The following models made of bamboo are attached as additions: a sword, a rifle, a fire striker, a tuft of hair, and a broken piece of bamboo: all are signs of threat.38

  • 39 “Wenn nicht innerhalb 4 Tagen der Preis meiner Hütte bezhlt wird, stecke ich das Haus in Brand, so (...)

25The file card also recommends a book for further reading, Paul Naef, Unter Malayischer Sonne, a memoir published in 1925. Another handwritten note titled “Symbolische Briefe” is included with the object, and it includes a slightly different translation: “If the price of my hut is not paid within four days, I will set your house on fire, as I am your constant fiend, I will murder people, destroy your rice, kill your horses.”39

26The discrepancies between dates and translations led me to question their veracity, and I wondered what was actually inscribed on this piece of bamboo.

27I got in touch with Uli Kozok, a professor of Indonesian and Malay languages at the University of Hawaii and an expert in Batak and other traditional languages of Sumatra, to see if he could help me translate what this letter said. This is his translation:

  1. wula la Iyuliḥkun I kuta juruŋ si tu
  2. rikut di la yiUliḥkun kusuluḥ rumaḥ
  3. tuwan kubunuḥ julma kutaku dauḥ
  4. I pakpak40

28In contemporary spelling this would read:

  1. Ula la iulihken i Kuta Jurung Si Teriket = Don't you not give [me] back Teriket in Kuta Jurung
  2. Di la iulihken, kusuluh rumah tuan = If you don't return her, I will burn Tuan’s house
  3. kubunuh jelma = I will kill people
  4. Kutaku dauh i Pakpak = My village is far away in Pakpak
  • 41 Email exchange with Uli Kozok, January 2024. “Recently I read another manuscript from another plant (...)
  • 42 Email exchange with Uli Kozok, January 2023. On the 1876 survey map, Blumei is spelled “Balomei.”

29By email, Kozok continued that Si Teriket, “the attached,” is often used as a synonym for wife. Kozok wrote, “I assume that the writer worked on his plantation, and someone (likely a family member) was held by force by Fürchtegott [Grob],” in Kuta Jurung, a Karo village located on the banks of the Blumei River at its confluence with the Serdang River.41 According to the December 1876 survey map produced for the government of the Netherlands Indies, Kuta Jurung was surrounded by Grob and Näher’s plantation estates on both sides of the Blumei valley.42 Far from the throng of European planters clustered around the Deli River in what would become the city of Medan, Grob and Näher’s estates sat roughly forty kilometers to the south at the edge of the plantation region, in Karo territory. If tobacco was indeed grown in Sumatra under rugged “capitalist frontier”-like conditions, then Grob and Näher’s estates were located at the very edge of this frontier.

  • 43 Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narrati (...)

30Were Grob and Näher keeping people hostage on their plantations? Clearly this musuh berngi concerned the location of their estates, but since it simply addresses the recipient as Tuan (master), it is not easy to ascertain whether it concerns them or another planter or overseer, who later gave or sold the letter to Näher to keep as a curiosity. Perhaps, like the wall panels of Chinese script in Villa Patumbah, the assumption was that nobody would ever translate these letters and find out what they communicated—written in an unfamiliar script, far from Zürich. One can be sure that Grob and Näher knew what was meant by these letters and were aware of the consequences. Emboldened or desensitized by the quotidian nature of violence on plantations at this time, maybe they took some retroactive satisfaction in having been part of a world in which locals’ discontent, dangerous animals, and exuberant tropical plants contributed to the fantasy of plantation life that could be comfortably recounted in fabulous tales on return to the homeland. According to Ann Laura Stoler’s telling, “fact with fantasy together constituted the realizing of violence and what were deemed appropriate measures to counter it.”43

31It is tempting to view the Villa Patumbah as the result of an imperial transaction. Indeed, the kind of external wealth it embodies was not plausible within the Swiss environment alone, and the villa presents a foreignness both in terms of the extraordinary budget and the cosmopolitanism conjured in its design details. The malaiischen Innenhof; the piano nobile; the drachenauge: all are flights of fancy. The trade took place elsewhere, but the fleeting temporariness of taste occurs in the present. Yet such an analysis suggests a unidirectional force of colonial entanglement, where the building can be discussed as if abstracted from the empiricism of empire. The standard of living in the villa depended on a certain violence that was dislocated and disavowed, and the mistaken interpretations riddling the villa are deliberate. If the villa is a plantation, then it is a translation thereof, rather than a metaphor.

  • 44 The rules of the Diakonissenanstalt Neumünster stated that according to Anna Grob-Zundel the use wa (...)

32At the Ethnographic Museum of Zürich, the bamboo letter sits in a plastic tray, stored away in a bunker beneath the former botanical garden. The letter was a portal between worlds, a bridge from the Karo world system, in which landscapes are inhabited by the spirits of animals, kin, the living, and the deceased, attempting to reach into the brutal economics of the plantation system that had come to occupy the Karo Batak environment. Today it is a portal between the Ethnographic Museum and the Villa Patumbah. The letter concerns a different kind of bunker, a rumah tutup, as the jails on plantations were called. After her husband’s death in 1893 of an unnamed tropical disease, Grob’s widow, Anna Grob-Zundel, along with their two daughters, continued to live at Villa Patumbah. Then, in 1910, they donated their family home to a women’s charity organization, Diakoniewerk Neumünster, who converted the Villa into “a house for women in need of recovery.”44 It would be convenient to assume that giving away an expensive villa to charity was a routine thing to do at the time, as indeed it was, and that Anna Grob-Zundel had no further thoughts upon or interest in the exploits of her husband prior to their marriage, the year he returned from Sumatra. But the guided tour of today’s Villa Patumbah doesn’t begin in the piano nobile. Instead, visitors descend to the basement and gather around a map of Sumatra drawn on the floor. When I joined the tour, I asked why Grob’s wife donated her luxurious home. The tour guide hesitated and gave me a quizzical look. “Schlechtes Gewissen,” she replied. Guilty conscience.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the researchers and local historians that provided guidance, questions, and friendship throughout this research. In Medan, thanks to Budi Agustono, Muhammad Rasyidin, Kiki Maulana Affandi, Junaidi, and Indira Shindi. Thank you to Uli Kozok at the University of Hawaii who translated the first musuh berngi message to me from Pakpak and Karo script to english (aka VMZ 01006). Thank you to Andreas Isler for assistance with the musuh berngi at the Ethnographic Archives at the University of Zürich. Thanks to the other authors in this issue for valuable comments in a workshop organized by the editors, Rixt Woudstra and Michael Faciejew, who provided sensitive and thoughtful feedback throughout the process.

This article was researched and written as part of the Voyaging Vapors research project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione scheme (project number 216182).

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Notes

1 Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi, Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2021, p. vii.

2 Patricia Purtschert, Francesca Falk and Barbara Lüthi, “Switzerland and ‘Colonialism without Colonies,’” Interventions, vol. 18, no. 2, 2016, p. 8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1042395. See also: Patricia Purtschert, Kolonialität und Geschlecht im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Geschichte der weißen Schweiz, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019 (Postcolonial Studies, 33). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839444108; for notions of white (western) European innocence, see: Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

3 Ibid., p. 7.

4 Hanna Hilbrandt and Julie Ren, “Refracting Eurocentrism, Operationalizing Complicity: The Swiss Sonderfall as a Vantage Point,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 40, no. 4, 2022, p. 589-606. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221107.

5 Of the extensive Dyrham Park estate in Gloucestershire, for example, Rupert Goulding and Louis P. Nelson describe how the plantation world of the building’s commissioner made its way into the greenhouses: “To wander through Blathwayt’s greenhouse was not only to see the empire but also to smell it, touch it, even to taste it—and, when the doors between the greenhouse and the rooms of the main house were open, to hear the unfamiliar song of the Virginian red cardinal emanating from the birdcages Blathwayt kept around his house.” Rupert Goulding and Louis P. Nelson, “Cartography, collecting and the construction of empire at Dyrham Park,” in Jon Stobart (ed.), Global Goods and the Country House: Comparative perspectives, 1650-1800, London: UCL Press, 2003, p. 374. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800083837.

6 “Grob war als Tabakpflanzer in Sumatra zu grossem Reichtum gekommen, den er in seiner Heimat in eigentlich unzürcherischer Art nach aussen sichtbar werden lassen wollte” [as tobacco planter Grob came into enormous wealth, that in rather un-Zürich style he chose to make visible in his home] (trans. Will Davis), Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 83, 9 April 1977, p. 39.

7 Ann Laura Stoler, “Perceptions of Protest,” American Ethnologist, vol. 12, no. 4. 1985, p. 644. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/644174. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1985.12.4.02a00030.

8 The word for river in northern Sumatra is often sei instead of the Bahasa Indonesian sungai. Sei comes from old Malay, as with many other toponyms in the Malay archipelago. Karl J. Pelzer, Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrarian Struggle in East Sumatra 1863-1947, Leiden: Brill, 1978 (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 84), p. 40. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbnm4v6. Accessed 12 December 2024. Pelzer’slandmark study on land relations in Sumatra dedicates a small section to the Senembah company that Grob and Näher founded, noting that they recruited employees who had agricultural training in Europe, giving their plantations a reputation for scientific management.

9 Andreas Zangger, “Die Geschichte vom schnellen Geld,” in Gaby Weber, Karin Artho and Renata Münzel, Die Villa Patumbah in Zürich - Geschichte und Restaurierung, Egg: FO-Fotorotar, 2014 (Monographien Denkmalpflege, 7), p. 35-36. Zangger writes: “Näher und Grob hielten sich hingegen an die von der Deli Mij und den niederländischen Kolonial behörden empfohlene Namensgebung und benannten ihre Estates (Ländereien) nach den darauf liegenden Dörfern: Tandjong Morawa, der Hauptsitz der Gesell schaftGesellschaft, Tandjong Morawa Kiri, Soengei Bahasa, Patoembah, Batang Kwis, Goenoeng Rinteh. […] Der Grund für diese Namensgebung liegt in der Art der Landnutzung: Das Gebiet, das die europäischen Pflanzer zur Pacht erhielten, war zwar weitgehend von Urwald bedeckt, wurde jedoch von einheimischen Malaien und von Batak genutzt. Nach einer ungefähren Zählung der Haushalte lebten 1875 etwa 12,000 Malaien und 20,000 Batak in Deli und Umgebung. Sollten diese nicht einfach verdrängt werden, so mussten die Europäer ihnen gewisse Rechte an der Nutzung des Waldes gewähren. Die lokalen Namen der Plantagen sollten gewissermassen ein Nebeneinander von Einheimischen und Plantagen wirtschaft betonen, bei dem die Rechte der Ersteren nicht angetastet wurden.” [Näher and Grob took a different approach to the Deli Maatschappij and the Dutch colonial authorities in the naming of their estates after the already existing villages: Tandjong Morawa, the main headquarters of the company, Tandjong Morawa Kiri, Soengei Bahasa, Patoembah, Batang Kwis, Goenoeng Rinteh. […] The reason for this naming lies in the type of land use: the region that the European planters bought was, though widely covered in rainforest, still in use by the Indigenous Malay and Batak there. An approximate census of the households put the number at, in 1875, 12,000 Malay and 20,000 Batak in Deli and its surrounds. If they were not to be simply displaced, then the Europeans were to give certain rights to their use of the forest. The local names of the plantations were intended to emphasize a coexistence between the locals and the plantation economy, in which the rights of the former were not infringed.] (trans. Will Davis).

10 Edy Ikhsan and Saidin Saidin, “Tobacco Plantation Concessions and Communal Land Rights in East Sumatra: Analysis of the Four Standard Concessions in the Colonial Era (1877-1892),” Cogent Arts & Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2023.2286060.

11 Ibid.

12 Anthony Reid, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra, Oxford; Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 4.

13 Andreas P. Zangger, “Die Geschichte vom schnellen Geld,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 59; Muhammad Rivai, Erond L. Damanik, Hafnita Sari Dewi Lubis and Apriani Harahap, “Die Geschichte vom schnellen Geld Development in East Sumatra, 1880s-1930s,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Innovation in Education, Science and Culture, ICIESC 2022, 11 October 2022, Medan, Indonesia, Medan: EAI, 2022.

14 Robin Hartanto Honggare, “Of Seeds and Sheds: Designing Uniformity along the Production Lines of Plantation Crops in Colonial Sumatra,” DocTalks, March 14, 2023 (dissertation draft shared privately). URL: https://doctalks.net/14-March-2023-DocTalks-x-MoMA_Hartanto-Hortig. Accessed 9 December 2024.

15 Sasha Roesler, “How to Use the Winds: On the Venting System of Large Scale Tobacco Barns in East Sumatra (Indonesia),” in Marc Angélil (ed.), Spaces of Change, Zurich: ETH/FCL, 2014, p 36-43.

16 Karl J. Pelzer, Planter and Peasant, op. cit. (note 8), p. 58.

17 Amanda Achmadi, “The Architecture of Cultuurstelsel in Nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies: Built Traces of Colonial Agricultural Industry,” in AnnMarie Brennan and Philip Goad (eds.), Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 33, Gold, Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016, p. 21.

18 That it was so common for the Europeans to write these works pseudonymously (“Multatuli” was Eduard Douwes Dekker; “Korang Trang” was Alfred Keppler) is perhaps indicative of the kind of social environment within which these works found themselves—if the perception of critique was well-received, it was not publicly done so. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, House of Glass. A Novel [first published in 1988, trans. Max Lane], New York, NY: Penguin Publishing Group, 1997; Korang Trang, Die Unverbindlichen, Zurich: Oprecht & Helbling, 1935; Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or, the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company, London; New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987; José Rizal, Noli Mi Tangere, [s.l.]: Editorial Minimal, 2014.

19 Not dissimilar to the type of rapid and artificial urban growth that the Congo Free State saw with the discovery of rubber in the region in the 1880s.

20 Karl J. Pelzer, Planter and Peasant, op. cit. (note 8), p. 41.

21 “Karl Krüsi - Ein Appenzeller in Der Fremde - Blog Schweizer Geschichte.” URL: https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2017/05/ein-appenzeller-in-der-fremde/. Accessed 7 April 2022. See Andreas Zangger’s comments to the blog post, in which he points out Krüsi’s considerable advantages—social connections—making his hardly a rags to riches (Tellerwäscher zum Millionär) story.

22 “So viel bezahlte die Familie Escher für ihre kubanischen Sklaven,” Tages-Anzeiger, May 8, 2018. URL: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/so-viel-bezahlte-die-familie-escher-fuer-ihre-kubanischen-sklaven-271399620020. Accessed 12 December 2024.

23 See also: Monique Ligtenberg, “Eine Reise durch Zürichs koloniale Vergangenheit,” Tsüri, June 21, 2019. URL : https://tsri.ch/a/Aq1g4X5fdAro60bv/eine-reise-durch-zurichs-koloniale-vergangenheit. Accessed 12 December 2024. In 2021 the Zürich Kolonial association also created a walking tour audio guide around Zürich. URL: https://www.zh-kolonial.ch/. Accessed 12 December 2024. In September 2024 the Swiss National Museum opened a large scale exhibition titled “kolonial. Globale Verflechtungen der Schweiz” [“colonial: Switzerland’s Global Entanglements”] on the history of Swiss colonialism. URL : https://www.landesmuseum.ch/en. Accessed 12 December 2024. Andreas Zangger’s Koloniale Schweiz: Ein Stück Globalgeschichte zwischen Europa und Südostasien (1860-1930), Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014, and The Swiss in Singapore, Singapore: Éditions Didier Millet, 2013 are both key works in this genre.

Other recent works that consider Swiss colonial entanglements are: Noémie Étienne, Claire Brizon and Chonja Lee, Exotic Switzerland?: Looking Outward in the Age of Enlightenment, Exhibition Catalogue (Lausanne, Palais de Rumine, 24 September 2020-28 February 2021), Zürich, Berlin, Paris: Diaphanes, 2020; Philipp Krauer, Swiss Mercenaries in the Dutch East Indies. A Transimperial History of Military Labour: 1848-1914, Leiden: University Press, 2024 (Global Connections: Routes and Roots, 9); Bernhard C. Schär, Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900, Reihe Globalgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015.

24 Debora Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, vol 18, no. 2, 2011, p. 164-165. URL: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/662515. Accessed 12 December 2024.

25 In 1889 Grob entered into a contract with Nordostbahn in 1889 to build a tunnel beneath the grounds of the park in the Riesbach neighborhood, the resulting trainline connects Tiefenbrunnen and Stadelhofen stations and is still in use to this day. A year later he paid a further 25,000 francs for the lengthening of the Mühlebachstrasse, closing off the park grounds to the villa on the lakeside and providing exclusive access to it through the garden.

26 Regula Michel makes this assertion in “Baugeschichte und historisches Umfeld der Villa Patumbah,” in Die Villa Patumbah in Zürich - Geschichte und Restaurierung, op. cit. (note 9).

27 Regine Abegg, “Von der Türkischen Villa zum Kino Orient – Neo-islamische Bauten und Interieurs zur Zeit des Späthistorismus in Zürich,” in Von der Türkischen Villa zum Kino Orient – Neo-islamische Bauten und Interieurs zur Zeit des Späthistorismus in Zürich, De Gruyter, 2019, p. 13. DOI : https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588330-002.

28 Beat Waldispühl, Martina Müller and Kathrin Harsch, “Der asiatische Kuppelraum im 1. Und 2. Obergeschoss: Holzwerk und Malereien.” in Die Villa Patumbah in Zürich - Geschichte und Restaurierung, op. cit. (note 9), p. 303-305.

29 Thank you to Latticeil Oryza for helping to translate these panels, and positing that it was possibly a musical score.

30 Marc Lettau describes this juxtaposition in Grob as wanting to distinguish himself as a “member of Zurich's highest social class.” Original text: “… mit dem Villenbau auch als Mitglied der obersten gesellschaftlichen Schicht Zürichs.” (trans. Will Davis). “Ein Zuhause voller Fernweh,” Schweizer Revue, June 2013, no. 3, p. 18.

31 For example, the Sun Yat-sen Penang Base and the Leong San Tong Khoo Kongsi clanhouse in Penang, or the Baba House in Singapore. An interesting parallel is the house that Jaconus Nienhuys, one of the founders of the Deli Maatschappij built for himself in Amsterdam in 1890, it also had unusual rooms and elements juxtaposed (a Moorish bathroom, for example), and like Grob’s house, a naturally lit atrium.

32 Ririn Darini and Dyah Ayu Anggraeni, “The Life of Deli Tobacco Plantation’s Workers in East Sumatera, 1880-1930,” IHiS (Indonesian Historical Studies), vol. 5, no. 1, 2021, p. 40; Carl A. Trocki, “Opium and the Beginnings of Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2002, p. 297-314. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14710/ihis.v5i1.11150; Abdul Wahid notes that “In the former region [of East Sumatra, where Patumbak was located], where numerous Chinese and Javanese labourers worked in vast tobacco plantations, 22,269 Chinese and 2,796 Indigenous registered themselves as legal opium users,” in “‘Madat Makan Orang’; Opium Eats People: Opium Addictio as a Public Health Issue in Late Colonial Java, 1900-1940,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 51, no. 1-2, June 2020, p. 33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463420000247.

33 Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations, no. 37, special issue Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories, 1992, p. 154. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928658. Accessed 12 December 2024.

34 Uli Kozok, “On Writing the Not-To-Be-Read: Literature and Literacy in a Pre-Colonial ‘Tribal’ Society,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 156, no. 1, 2000, p. 51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90003852.

35 The Batak languages comprise a subgroup for each of the six groups of Batak peoples, not all of which are mutually intelligible. Linguist Uli Kozok details several accounts of 19th century Europeans’ encounters with Batak writing, of which the German biologist Franz Junghuhn and two separate missionaries all noted widespread literacy among different Batak groups, observing how teenagers would write short poems or laments on pieces of bamboo and send them to one another. Kozok enquires as to the “contradictory evidence with regard to the spread of literacy among the Batak people in pre-colonial times. […] The picture is furthermore incomplete because of the fact that all these accounts refer to only a particular region at a particular period of time.” Uli Kozok, “On Writing the Not-To-Be-Read,” op. cit. (note 34), p. 36. Musuh berngi, however, are not to be mistaken for the well-known pustaha, or bark books, of which several thousand have been preserved and can be found in the ethnographic collections of most major museums in the world, especially in the Netherlands and Germany.

36 Faizah Zakaria, The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2023 (Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia), p. 73-74.

37 The Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich bequeathed the collection of musuh berngi letters to the Ethnographic Museum of Zürich University in 1909.

38 “Brandbrief der Battaker. Halbdurchgeschnittenes Stück Bambus mit eingeritzten Buchstaben; dessen Inhalt lautet: Ich habe diesen Brandbrief aufgehängt. Wenn der Herr Majoer nicht innerhalb 2 Tage 500 dollars bezahlt, stecke ich die Scheune in Brand mit all ihrem Inhalt. Angebunden sind als Beigaben folgende Modelle aus Bambus: ein Schwert, ein Gewehr, ein Feuerstahl, ein Büschel Haare und ein abgebrochenes Stück Bambus; alles sind Zeichen der Bedrohung.” (trans. Will Davis).

39 “Wenn nicht innerhalb 4 Tagen der Preis meiner Hütte bezhlt wird, stecke ich das Haus in Brand, so bin ich Dein beständiger Fiend, ermorde ich die Menschen, vernichte ich Deinen Reis, tote ich Deine Pferde.” (trans. Will Davis).

40 Kozok clarified in his email that the author was probably from the Pakpak region, despite living in Kuta Jurung: “Karo and Pakpak are very similar languages, but this manuscript is written in what I would describe as 100% Karo. This is probably due to the fact that he lived in Kuta Jurung, which is a Karo settlement. However, the script is clearly not Karo. […] Capital I and U denote a vocalic character, lower case i and u are diacritics, ḥ and ŋ are diacritics. The writer uses the diacritic u for both u and the schwa. This is something you would not find in a letter written by a Karo.” And in another email, “The manuscript uses the southern variant of the letter Ta (ᯖ) instead of ᯗ used in Karo and Pakpak. Although Pakpak shares borders with Toba, where both variants are prevalent, it's likely that the writer acquired his writing skills in Pakpak, before moving to Medan. The language used in the manuscript is entirely Karo, which is understandable considering the writer's residence in the outskirts of Medan, where the predominant language is Karo. As a bilingual, the writer opts for the Karo language, though it is not quite clear why he uses Pakpak letters. It's possible the writer learned the script as a young man in Pakpak but never felt the need to adjust to the Karo script after relocating to Medan. While only minor adjustments are needed to write in Karo script, it appears the writer didn't bother to make such modifications.” [Email exchange between the author and Prof. Uli Kozok (University of Hawaii at Mānoa), January 2023 and March 2024]

41 Email exchange with Uli Kozok, January 2024. “Recently I read another manuscript from another plantation with reference to a rumah tutup as the jails on the plantations were called.”

42 Email exchange with Uli Kozok, January 2023. On the 1876 survey map, Blumei is spelled “Balomei.”

43 Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” op. cit. (note 33), p. 152.

44 The rules of the Diakonissenanstalt Neumünster stated that according to Anna Grob-Zundel the use was “ein haus für Erholungsbedürftige weiblichen Geschlechts” [A house for women in need of recovery] (trans. Will Davis). Zollikerberg (Switzerland), Archiv Diakoniewerk Neumünster.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: “Pattumbah Estate N&G,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.
Crédits Source: Zürich (Switzerland), Stadtarchiv Zürich, VII 537.3.1.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 285k
Titre Figure 2: Architektonische Rundschau, 5. Jahrgang 1889. 6. Heft. Tafel 48.
Crédits Source: Heidelberg (Germany), Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 412k
Titre Figure 3: 1889 Survey map of Senembah Maatschappij land contracts.
Crédits Source: C.W. Janssen, Senembah Maatschappij, 1889-1914,Amsterdam: Roeloffzen, 1914, p. 6.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 132k
Titre Figure 4: “Pattumbah Estate N&G,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.
Crédits Source: Zürich (Switzerland), Stadtarchiv Zürich, VII 537.3.1.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 322k
Titre Figure 5: “Villa Tritschler. 1884–1887, Soengie Radja Estate Pagoerawan,” Reiseerinnerungen von Ferdinand Tritschler.
Crédits Source: Zürich (Switzerland), Stadtarchiv Zürich, VII 537.3.1.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 423k
Titre Figure 6: Architektonische Rundschau, 5. Jahrgang 1889. 6. Heft. Tafel 48.
Crédits Source : Heidelberg (Germany), Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 178k
Titre Figure 7: Chiodera & Tschudy, 1883.
Crédits Source : Zürich (Switzerland), Baugeschichtliches Archiv Zürich.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 131k
Titre Figure 8: Asiatische kuppelraum, Chiodera & Tschudy, 1884.
Crédits Source : Photograph by Dudli Hanspeter, 2006. Zürich (Switzerland), Baugeschichtles Archiv Zürich Record 131990. URL: https://baz.e-pics.ethz.ch/​catalog/​BAZ/​r/​175931/​.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 180k
Titre Figure 9: Various musuh berngi messages in the Völkerkundemuseum Zürich. “Fire letters” (Brandbriefe)
Crédits Source : Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16588/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 228k
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Référence électronique

Will Davis, « I Will Burn Tuan’s House: Tobacco, Opium, and the Villa Patumbah »ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 11 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16588 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13937

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Will Davis

Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland ORCD ID: 0000-0002-1903-5743

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