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230
INVALUABLE CULTURAL HERITAGE AT RISK: AN APPEAL FOR THE CONSERVATION OF
IMPORTANT ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES AT KOTA CINA DELI TUA
E. Edwards Mckinnon Introduction
This paper is an appeal for the conservation of two important, indeed unique historical sites that embody the spirit of
urban development in the Medan region. The first, Kota Cina, is an important early trading settlement located a short distance
northwest of Labuan Deli and dates from between the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries C.E. The second is Deli Tua, the
erstwhile site of the power centre of the former important historical Malayo-Batak polity of Aru.
The name Kota Cina suggests that it may once have been a Chinese settlement
– the equivalent of ‘China Town’. There is, however, an alternative explanation in that the name
may once have been Cinna Kotta, the Tamil name for a small settlement, the Tamil word cinna meaning small, and thus a
small, but nevertheless important, node in medieval inter-regional trade between the Middle East, southern India and Sri Lanka in
the west and eastwards to Java and to southern China in the
northeast. Kota Cina is perhaps the earliest known ‘urban’ settlement in this part of northern Sumatra and as such would
have had its own special spirit. The second site is Deli Tua, ‘old Deli’, in all probability
once the former capital of the Malayo-Batak polity of Aru. The name Aru derives, in all likelihood, from the ethnic name Karo
which appears to have been occupied, perhaps continuously, between the twelfth and early seventeenth centuries. Although
completely different from the riverine harbour settlement established at Kota Cina, it is also urban in nature and reflects the
early spiritual expansion of an indigenous north Sumatran settlement.
Far from there being “nothing here before the Dutch came” – a remark made by a rubber planter to the author on his
arrival on the Begerpang rubber plantation in 1960, the Medan region of northeast Sumatra has a long and interesting history.
The first mention of this region in ancient Chinese texts appears in the Chu-fan-chi
, “A Description of Barbarous Peoples”, a thirteenth century geographical account written by Zhou Rugua
published in 1225, where the toponym ‘Batta’ is mentioned along with a number of other Indonesian locations. Batta, which may
have referred to the whole of the coastline of north eastern
