Medan
Province : North Sumatra
Founded : July 1, 1590
Area City : 265.10 Km2 ( 102.4 sq mi )
Medan started as a village called Kampung Medan ( Medan Village ). Kampung Medan was founded by Guru Patimpus around the 1590s. Because Kampung Medan sits on Tanah Deli ( Land Deli ), Kampung Medan is also referred as Medan-Deli. The original location of Kampung Medan is an area where the River of Deli meets River Babura.
The first inhabitants of Medan came from the Batak Karo community. It was not until the King of Aceh, Sultan Iskandar Muda, sent his warlord, Gocah Pahlawan Laksamana Khoja Bintan, to be the Kingdom of Aceh’s representative in Tanah Deli, that the kongdom of Deli started to grow. This growth stimulated growth in both the population and culture of Medan.
Medan did not enjoy significant development untul the 1860s, when the Dutch colonialists began clearing the land for tobacco plantations. Medan quickly became the center of government and commercial activity, dominating development of Indonesia’s western region.
The Dutch governed Tanah Deli from 1658, after Sultan Islami, ruler of the Kingdom of Siak Sri Indrapura. In 1915 Medan officially became the capital of North Sumatera Province, and officially a city in 1918.
Demography
The city Indonesia’s third most populous after Jakarta and Surabaya, with approximately 2.5 million people.
Medan means “field” in Indonesian and Malay languages but the name actually originated from the Karonese word Medan which means to “get better” or “healty” .
The City has a mix communities, reflecting its pre- and post-independence history. It is famous throughout Indonesia as the home of Batak people, although the ancestral sites of these people are scattered throughout northern Sumatra. In addition there is a large ethnic Javanese community, largely made up of the descendants of people shipped from Java in the last century as part of overcrowding on Java.
A highly componet of Medan’s population is the large number of ethnic Chinese, who control much of the business sector. Finally, the city has a sizeable community of Tamil descent, the people known as Keling. A wll-known Tamil market, is the Kampung Keling. In addition to Indonesia, Javanese, Hokkien, Tamil and English are spoken. |
