Bukittinggi

Bukittinggi began as a market on a ridge in the Minangkabau highlands, at the meeting point of roads through the volcanic plateau. Its modern shape was imposed by war. During the Padri conflict, which set Islamic reformers against the traditional adat leadership from 1803, the Dutch intervened on the side of the adat chiefs and in 1825 built a fort on the hill above the market, naming it after the commander Hendrik Merkus de Kock. The town that grew around it became known as Fort de Kock, and the Dutch used it as a hill station and a centre of administration and schooling for the highlands.

That schooling mattered. The teacher-training and religious schools of the highlands produced a generation of nationalists, among them Mohammad Hatta, born in the town in 1902, who became the republic's first vice-president. The Japanese occupied the area in 1942, made Bukittinggi a regional headquarters and had tunnels dug into the canyon wall by forced labour.

After the Dutch occupied Yogyakarta, the emergency government of the republic was established at Bukittinggi on 22 December 1948 under Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, and its leaders moved about the highlands to avoid capture, keeping Indonesian sovereignty alive until it was dissolved in July 1949. The town was officially renamed Bukittinggi in 1949, its name meaning high hill. It was later caught up in the regional PRRI rebellion of 1958 and suffered damage in the earthquakes that periodically strike West Sumatra, but it has kept its role as the market, education and tourism centre of the highlands.

Bukittinggi is the natural capital of Minangkabau culture, and that culture is unusual: the largest matrilineal society in the world, and a devoutly Muslim one. Ancestral houses and rice land belong to the women of a clan and pass from mother to daughter, while men hold ceremonial authority as maternal uncles and are expected to make their own way. The saying that custom rests on religion and religion on the Book sums up how the two systems are held together.

Out of this comes merantau, the tradition of young men leaving home to seek experience and money elsewhere, which has scattered Minangkabau traders, restaurateurs and intellectuals across Indonesia and Malaysia and given the Padang restaurant its national reach. Those who leave are expected to send money back and to return for ceremonies; the plateau's villages are full of large houses built with outside earnings.

The town's visible culture is in its buildings and crafts: the horn-shaped roofs of the rumah gadang, songket weaving at Pandai Sikek and Koto Gadang, talempong gong-chime music, the martial art silek and the randai theatre that combines it with song. Weddings are large, matrilineal and organised by the wife's family. Manners are formal, speech is indirect and proverb-laden, and debate — for which Minangkabau people are known across the country — is enjoyed.

About 125,000 people live inside the city boundary, which makes Bukittinggi small by Indonesian standards but the busiest place in the highlands, serving a much wider population that comes in to trade, study and see doctors. The economy is built on the markets, on tourism from within Indonesia and Malaysia, on schools, universities and hospitals, and on the farms around the town, which grow rice, vegetables, chillies and coffee in volcanic soil.

Life is organised around the market days that bring villagers in from the plateau, around prayer times, and around the cool weather, which makes the town more active in the middle of the day than the lowlands. Horse carts still trot around the plaza alongside minibuses and scooters. Evenings centre on the clock tower, where families gather, and on coffee houses where men talk late.

Households are shaped by migration. A great many families have members working in Jakarta, Java or Malaysia, and the money and the returning holidaymakers are part of the local economy; the week after Eid al-Fitr fills every hotel and clogs every road. The pressing worries are the volcano, whose eruptions close farmland and disrupt the air, earthquakes, the price of vegetables, and the fire risk in the crowded markets.

West Sumatran food is among the most widely eaten cooking in Indonesia and its neighbours, and in Bukittinggi it is eaten at its source. The local version of the Padang meal is nasi Kapau, named after a village just outside town: rice served with dishes heaped on a stepped display and ladled out with a long-handled spoon, among them gulai tambusu, a stuffed intestine curry, jackfruit gulai, and beef stewed in coconut milk. Rendang, dark and nearly dry, and dendeng balado, thin crisp beef under red chilli, are everywhere, and sate Padang comes in a thick, spicy yellow sauce.

The highlands add their own dishes. Itiak lado mudo is duck stewed with green chilli, a speciality of the villages around the canyon. Dadiah, buffalo milk soured in a bamboo tube, is eaten for breakfast with sticky rice and palm sugar. Lamang tapai pairs glutinous rice cooked in bamboo with fermented black rice.

Drinks are as distinctive as the food. Kopi kawa daun is brewed from dried coffee leaves rather than beans, and is served in a coconut shell. Teh talua is tea whisked with egg yolk, sugar and lime until it foams. The town's best-known edible souvenir is karupuak sanjai, thin cassava crisps in a fierce red chilli coating, sold in boxes along the road out towards Payakumbuh.