The Bien-Hua of Medan City

There are no better words in the world that can fully describing my hometown, in one phrase than the phrase bien-hua. Bien-hua is a chinese phrase, literally means as “changing”, but not just an ordinary one—it is a vibrant, lively, positive, and exciting changing. The Medan City, for the whole of its history, has experienced this bien hua. Today it is still changing and I believe it will remain to be so in the future. This so lively changing has made Medan becoming an unique city that probably the one and only in the world. Below, I will show you the bien-hua of the Medan City and its implication to the life of its people.

The history of Medan itself is fully resemble the bien hua progress. Medan appeared from the mist of myth around 16th to 17th centuries, when two powers in northern Sumatra—Aceh and Aru—went to war ("Medan" is a Malay word for "battle field", the place where the fight between two contesting powers took place). The battle was finally won by the famous Sultan Iskandar Muda of Aceh in a decisive showdown at Tanah Deli in 1612. To celebrate this victory, the Sultan established the Deli Sultanate Kingdom and appointed his warlord of the battle, Gocah Pahlawan, as the first king. This Deli Sultanate is the seed of the present Medan. As you can see, Medan has entered the civilization by evolving from a deserted area into a kingdom. From the 1632 up to 1888, along with the growth of international trading, the Deli Kingdom had experienced magnificent growth in both population and culture of Medan. In the 1861, while the Labuhan Deli, the port town of the Deli Sultanate, had become the biggest and the busiest port on the Malacca strait, many Fujianese, Hokkianese, Tamils, Arabic, British, Dutch, and Karo Bataknese of the outland areas began to settle in Medan and mixed with the Malayan native inhabitants. For the first time ever, Medan enjoyed the multiethnic and multicultural environment. At this era, the Medan City is associated with "Medina", the Islamic city in Arabia where a peaceful and prosperous civil-society once was achieved under the reign of Prophet Muhammad. In 1865, when the Dutch colonialists began clearing the land for tobacco plantations, Medan quickly became a center of colonialist government and commercial activity, dominating development of Indonesia's western region.

Today, Medan is a 500-years-old city that marked by rapid growth and development over the last 50 years; however, unlike any other cities, its old style architecture is not dying (because it is bien hua—the positive changing). From the perspective of architecture, the City reflects the combination of, traditional and modern, cultural and cosmopolitan architecture. While the upper-part of town has rapidly transformed into the modern sky crappers and modern metropolis; some parts of the city still retain their Dutch classic architecture—these include the old City Hall, the central Post Office, the Water Tower (which is Medan City's icon), and Titi Gantung (a bridge over the railway). The other parts which preserving the old historical Malayan architecture are like the Sultan Mai’mun Palace and the Great Mosque of Medan; the exotic Hindustan Tamil architecture in Kampung Keling; the oriental Chinese architecture in the Chinatown. The modernity in one hand, and the past on the other, combined with more and more parks and green open spaces that are recently built in Medan, making the city become the most beautiful Twinn Stadd (Garden City) with unique mixed architectural style in Indonesia.


However, the most wonderful changing process that becoming the charm of the Medan City is not on the architectural but on its people. As stated before, the city is a multiethnic and multicultural one. Since Bataknese (Mandailing, Toba, and Karo) make up the majority, Medan become famous throughout Indonesia as the home of the Batak people. Other large ethnic groups are the Malayan (traditionally inhabiting the Eastern coast of Sumatra), the Minang (from central Western Sumatra), and Javanese transmigrants, largely made of the descendants of people shipped from Java as part of the government's transmigration policy. A highly visible component of Medan's population is the large number of Chinese, who control much of the business sector. Finally, the city has a sizeable community of Tamil descent, the people known as keling. A well-known Tamil market, is the Kampung Keling. While Medan transmigrants usually do identify their ethnic background, I have always found that their identity is much more Medanese than their real ethnic. The people of Medan are more outgoing and less self-restricted than those in other parts of Indonesia. For example, Medanese expresses theirself in all aspects of public daily life, but is most evident in communication, which trully expresses outgoing character of the Medanese. In short, Medanese has their own character. This makes a particular brand of freedom, as well as of chaos, which you must live here for a while to capture this atmosphere.