sumatra_java_S09.md

world/regions/sumatra_java/page/sumatra_java_S09.md

Section 9 — Minerals Resources and Trade Goods

CANON SUBORDINATION — this document is PROPOSAL-TIER: it serves canon and never outranks it.

The canon: the CVD · the T1 foundation docs · the T0 registries (registries/) · the spine

(docs/spine/CH_*.md) · the region pages (_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/). Authority order: docs/DOC_MAP.md § 0.

Canon served: NONE FOUND — this document cites no canon anchor anywhere in its body.

Do not build from it alone: open the spine node (docs/spine/CH_NN.md), the region page

(_source/02_Tier_2_Region_Pages/), and the T0 registry your work targets, and derive from those.

READ THAT CANON FIRST — open it and derive from it before you build anything from this document.

If this document disagrees with canon, CANON WINS and this document is the defect — fix the

document, never the canon. Nothing here is applied until it is ratified into canon.

The region's economic face in the harvest is not a mineral economy. It is a forest-produce economy

with two coastal outlets, a riverine gold interior, and a manuscript-materials craft that is the

richest resource surface the sources actually carry. Page numbers below are the sources' PRINT

folios throughout, checked against the running heads rather than taken from chunk metadata.

Section 2 owns the standing plants as gather nodes; this section owns the worked material, the

route it travels, and the hands it passes through.

The trans-Sumatran forest-produce trade — the region's real export face

The attested export commodities are forest resins and metals, not spices. Barus, also known as

Fansur, on the west coast, and Kota Cina near the site of present-day Medan on the east coast, were

the international marketplaces, Kota Cina thriving between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

Both were outlets for abundant forest products in high demand — highly priced camphor and benzoin

resins — alongside gold and other precious metals and gemstones, which the peoples of the interior

gathered and carried down to the coasts. Sumatra's resources drew merchants from all over Asia to

Barus and Kota Cina, among them men from Srivijaya, which held sway from its South Sumatran centre

from roughly the seventh to the eleventh century; later the east Javanese kingdoms of Singosari and

Majapahit claimed suzerainty over many archipelago trading places, Sumatra's included

[SRC: SRC_00226 — The Power of Writing: Batak Manuscripts, p. 12] · SUBSTRATE.

Three build consequences, and the third is the one a designer will get wrong by default:

• The direction of flow is interior to coast, and the interior peoples are the gatherers and the

carriers, not the cargo of somebody else's economy. Stage the highland marga as agents at both

ends of the route

• Kota Cina is LIVE in the 1200 CE present frame and so is the trade. The cutting of the interior

Batak off from their coastal entrepots belongs to early-sixteenth-century Acehnese pressure and is

a forward stratum, not the present [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 12; p. 14]. What the player walks is the

network open and working, which is exactly what makes selling it piece by piece worth doing

• The pass-1 line listing spices in this region's cargo has no anchor in the harvest and is retired

here. Camphor, benzoin, gold, precious metals and gemstones are what the record carries. Do not

import general Southeast Asian trade knowledge these sources do not attest

Gold, rivers, and the interior polity that mined it

The interior was not a hinterland waiting to be discovered. Excavation at Padang Lawas, in the

Angkola-Mandailing country south of Lake Toba, confirms a proto-urban site, apparently densely

populated, thriving from the ninth until the end of the thirteenth century. Its inscriptions

indicate a kingdom named Panai under a maharaja, corroborated by the toponym's appearance in the

fourteenth-century Javanese court poem Desavarnana; the same inscriptions name Rokan as a chiefdom

under a general. Other contemporary inscriptions to the west and east name further localities

interconnected by the working of gold mines and by transport that followed the river courses cutting

through densely forested country [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 13] · SUBSTRATE.

• The road is the river. A gold-route traversal in this region is a river-and-portage traversal, not

a mountain-pass one

• Padang Lawas is live in the present frame, in the last century of its span. It is a real interior

Sumatran state contemporary with the player, and it is the honest weight against any

isolated-highland-tribe reading of the Batak country

• The site sits south of Lake Toba and is not a samosir_highlands surface. It is offered as a

named off-map polity the port and trail talk about, and is queued for Section 15 if it is ever

staged

The coast-to-highland trail — the caravan, and what the caravan carried

The Aek Tarum rises in the Bukit Barisan north of Lake Toba, and the abandoned village site of

Pasaguan above it was said by a local informant to lie on an ancient trail leading from the coast up

into the Toba highlands around the southern end of the lake [SRC: SRC_00152 — McKinnon, A

Malayo-Batak Group of Images near Aek Tarum, p. 1] · SUBSTRATE. At the coastal end, John Anderson,

an East India Company officer based in Penang, visited Batubara slightly north of the site in 1823

and found a flourishing trading settlement of no fewer than six hundred perahus. Batubara's own

productions he judged trifling; the principal exports were rattans, salt-fish, horses and silk

cloths [SRC: SRC_00152, p. 12] · SUBSTRATE.

Three honesty conditions bind the caravan beat, and all three make it better rather than smaller:

• Salt is not in Anderson's export list. The claim that salt was perhaps among the most important

commodities traded, and always in demand in the highlands along with salt-fish, is McKinnon's own

hedged suggestion at p. 1, and the source never joins his trail to Anderson's port. The pack run

is a legitimate build synthesis of two adjacent real facts, and it is recorded as synthesis, not

cited as one route the record describes

• The port record is 1823, some six centuries after the present frame. It ships as evidence of the

SHAPE of the coast-to-highland economy — perahu fleets, forest produce down, manufactures and

livestock moving both ways — and never as a 1200 CE cargo manifest

• Both ends of this trail are OFF-MAP on this page. The route runs from the Asahan and Batubara

coast up through the Bandar Pulau corridor past Pasaguan toward the southern end of the lake, and

the Zone Catalog carries no Asahan zone. Palembang, on the Musi and most of the length of the

island away, is not the coastal terminus and may not stand in for it; palembang_port carries the

strait-network trade web, not this trail's port. The trail itself is staged as a named off-map

approach reaching the page at the caldera rim

The same sentence that gives the caravan its commodities also records that enslaved people and

horses were brought down from the interior in considerable numbers [SRC: SRC_00152, p. 12]. That is

built, not dropped. The route the player can run is the route that moved people, and the build

carries it as follows:

• The cause is the institution and its real economics — debt-bondage, captive-taking, and elite

brokerage at BOTH ends of the route under real economic pressure. Concentrating a documented

regional traffic into one named villain would spare the coastal and highland polities their own

history and teach the player something false, so the apparatus is the cause and any individual

the player meets stands inside it

• Highland communities stay agents inside the network, never only its freight
• The player's participation or refusal is a playable integrity test with a community consequence,

which is why the colonialism-and-displacement lens sits on this material at all

• The record of the traffic comes to us from a Company officer describing a network the Company

profited from, and the build can let a player notice that

The colonial ledger the player can read — attributed, and contradicted on its own page

The same page of Anderson's account calls the inhabitants of the interior Kataran and describes them

as cannibals of a peculiarly ferocious and untractable disposition [SRC: SRC_00152, p. 12]. It ships

as a readable colonial document, on its face, attributed to Anderson and to the Company's commercial

interest in the people it traded with. It is never repeated as fact and never spoken by the

narration.

It does not need a rebuttal written for it, because Anderson wrote the rebuttal himself in the very

next sentence, and it is a trade-goods passage:

• The Batak are dressed principally in coarse cotton cloths of their own manufacture, chiefly dark

blue with red and white lines intermixed, the texture coarse and the cloth harsh to the touch

• The cotton is grown in the country
• The blue dye is obtained from a species of indigo, tarum, abundant throughout the island
• The lakar and other woods furnish the other colours

Cotton grown at home, woven at home, dyed with home-grown indigo and forest-wood colorants, and

traded through a six-hundred-perahu port, on the page that calls the growers savages. Put both in

the player's hands together. The defamation and the manufacturing economy that refutes it are one

document, and that is the teaching. A second European register is available for the same treatment

in the sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts of the mysterious interior, framed critically by the

catalogue itself [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 11-12].

Reveal discipline, stated affirmatively: this beat is a colonial document and its own refutation,

read side by side. It teaches the economics of the defamation and stops there.

The estate ledger — what the plantation took, and the place nobody can find again

The colonial-provenance story on this shelf has two halves, and the sculpture half is as buildable

as the manuscript half. The Aek Tarum site became known at all because the manager of the Aek Tarum

rubber plantation reported it — an estate formerly under tea, then belonging to the Haboko Tea

Company, in the Bandar Pulau sub-district of Asahan regency. Before that report, a family group of a

mother and two children had already been removed from the site to the Sungei Bedjangkar Estate south

of Lima Puluh in Batubara regency, and its whereabouts are not known. The one visit to the site took

no measurements and carried no GPS, so the exact location of the site is no longer known

[SRC: SRC_00152, p. 1; p. 4] · SUBSTRATE.

• The stronger build is an absence the player investigates, not a fourth statue standing where the

record says it is gone: an empty base, a local account of what was taken and to which estate, and

a site the estate's own records cannot quite relocate

• The plantation economy is ordinary trade-goods substrate here. Tea and rubber estates, their

labour, and their movement of objects off village ground belong to the same forward stratum

Anderson's port does, and reach the player through the chapter's fluctuation windows

• It is told with Batak agency intact and without moralising: the removal is stated, the loss of the

location is stated, and the community's own relationship to its honored dead is left theirs

Dyes, pigments and textile stock — two palettes that must not be merged

The dye chemistry is real and followable: indigo is a vat dye worked by reduction and oxidation, and

the lakar and other forest woods give the remaining colours [SRC: SRC_00152, p. 12] · SUBSTRATE.

Cotton, indigo and dye-wood are the region's Trade-6 Tailoring substrate at seed level.

The stone sculpture uses a different palette and a different craft, and the distinction is the more

interesting observation:

• The ancestor images carry red and black stripes representing cloth on the chest and torso

[SRC: SRC_00152, p. 5; p. 7], the colouring supplied by haematite and possibly charcoal or lamp

black [SRC: SRC_00152, p. 12]. The hedge is the source's own — this is a 1975 visual inference

with no sampling and no analysis performed, and no build text may say the stone was assayed. The

stripes are attested for the images alone; no painted-cloth claim is extended to any other class

of carved stone here

• The woven cloth Anderson describes is dark blue with red and white lines. A carver paints in the

pigments a carver can get; a weaver dyes in the dyes a weaver can grow. The images depict cloth,

they do not depict THIS cloth

• The reading that the river name Aek Tarum takes its name from tarum, the indigo plant, is

linguistically plausible and is OURS. The source says only that the blue dye comes from a species

of indigo called tarum and never comments on the toponym. A curious player may be told it as a

reading, and is told that it is a reading

Stone and earth

The building and carving stone this region actually attests is cadas, the soft welded volcanic Toba

tuff known by that local name, from which the ancestor images at the Aek Tarum site were cut

[SRC: SRC_00152, p. 1] · SUBSTRATE. It is genuinely soft and carvable, and it was laid down by the

Toba supereruption of roughly seventy-four thousand years ago — the same deep-time layer the chapter

reads as geology beside the Naga Padoha cosmology, held BESIDE it and never collapsed into it, and

never as evidence of anyone but the Batak having carved Batak stone.

• The attested carving ground is Asahan, not Samosir. The images, the trail and the abandoned

village sit in Bandar Pulau sub-district on the Aek Tarum, and the source names no Samosir

surface at all. No image-carving shed, carver's community or craft ground is sited at

samosir_highlands on this source's authority

• What samosir_highlands may carry is caldera tuff as a MATERIAL — the same welded ignimbrite the

eruption laid across the whole caldera country — as a declared page-side stand-in for an off-map

Asahan tradition, and nothing sited there is cited to SRC_00152 as located there. It feeds the

Trade-2 Mining echo (the Mining home roots at Ch 19; nothing homes here)

• Sulfur is attested as a local supply in this same caldera country, in the powder tradition below.

Volcanic sulfur is therefore the region's second named mineral, and its extraction surface is a

fumarole field rather than a mine

• The Java-side building stone for Borobudur and Prambanan carries NO anchor in this harvest.

Section 7 already owns the Borobudur andesite as the Trade-2 Mining and Trade-8 Engineering

substrate seed; what is missing is its citation, and that is owed at the Section 16 pass

The manuscript-materials economy — the region's strongest resource surface

Treat literacy as a supply chain and it becomes a playable economy rather than set-dressing. Every

element below is attested.

The stock. Pustaha are concertina, or leporello, manuscripts made of long strips of bark from the

eaglewood tree Aquilaria malaccensis, stitched or glued end to end and folded like an accordion. A

manuscript can be a single sheet of writing material up to sixteen metres long, or several sheets

joined; formats run from four by six centimetres up to twenty-eight and a half by forty-two and a

half [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 65-66] · SUBSTRATE. The species identification carries a hedge the build

keeps: it rests on how contemporary craftsmen make pustaha today, and no material tests have

compared samples from historic books against specific plant species [SRC: SRC_00158 — Between mind

and soul: pustaha manuscripts, p. 165, n. 3].

The preparation, which is the craft minigame's real spine [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 66]:

• Scrape the inner bark off the outer bark
• Dry it, cut the edges straight, and even the surface
• Smooth and polish it with leaves, for example those of a Ficus ampelas tree
• Fold by hand, and break the bark with a mallet where a deep fold is wanted
• Apply rice water or another starch so the ink will hold on the bark
• Rule blind lines where wanted, with a balobas ruler or a panggorit bamboo knife
• Add wooden covers, the front sometimes painted or carved and the back normally plain; leather and

goatskin covers occur rarely

• Pierce the covers near the edges for a cotton or other fibre string, which served to carry the

manuscript or to hang it on the house wall for storage

• Close the whole with a plaited rattan strip of varying length

The string is a carrying and storage fitting, and wall-hanging is what the record attests for it.

Whether a hung pustaha hung OPEN is the source's own hedge — probably open [SRC: SRC_00158, p. 169]

— and it ships as a hedge, never as a build fact.

The inks. Text is written in black; the extensive illustrations and other decoration use black, red

or yellow [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 66]. The black is baja, a tarry soot obtained by burning resinous wood

of the Manggistan tree, deposited on a knife, sword or potsherd and then scraped off. Albumin, floral

gums, oils, resins, saps and juices serve as additives; dammar resin and blood albumin improve the

ink's adhesion to the base fibres, and chicken blood carries strong magical and religious

significance besides. The same baja soot was used to blacken teeth ritually [SRC: SRC_00158,

p. 171] · SUBSTRATE.

That gives the region a complete, purchasable, forageable materials list: bark, Ficus ampelas leaf,

rice-water starch, Manggistan resin-wood, dammar, albumin, cotton or fibre cord, rattan band, carved

cover wood, and red and yellow colourants. It is Trade-4 Herbalism substrate and Trade-9 Inscription

substrate at seed level; neither homes here.

Two further material facts that shape the economy:

• Nusantara scribes across the Batak, Rejang, Kerinci, Lampung, Bugis, Makasar and Philippine

traditions generally did not use stone inscriptions or metal manuscripts, working instead on

perishable stock — bamboo, tree bark in Sumatra, and lontar palm in Sulawesi [SRC: SRC_01758 —

Kozok, Sejarah aksara Batak, section Silsilah Aksara, line 107] · SUBSTRATE. The hedge is the

source's own and it stays: this is the general rule, not an absolute, and the same source carries

Indonesia's oldest writing ON stone and metal in Pallava script. Manuscript materials are

therefore a consumable economy. Books are made, spoiled, remade and run out, and a datu's supply

line is a real thing a player can interrupt or resupply

• Medium tracks content. Divination prescriptions go on bark in a pan-Batak spelling meant to read

across dialects; stories, laments, ditties, narrative riddles and poems go on bamboo in one

dialect's phonetic spelling [SRC: SRC_00228 — Van der Tuuk's Collection of Batak Manuscripts,

p. 13] · SUBSTRATE. A materials merchant's stock is therefore also a register, and buying bamboo

rather than bark tells a reader what you intend to write. The European-paper manuscripts in the

same three-way ecology are a nineteenth-century collector-driven stratum and are not present-frame

stock

The bark book is not Batak alone. The leporello form was used in Southeast Asia not only by the

Batak but by the South Sumatran Lampung, and the oldest bark folding book known is not Batak at all

but a South Sumatran manuscript of bintangor bark, Calophyllum species [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 66]. That

widens the manuscript web along a shared material rather than asserting that anyone taught anyone.

Bone and bamboo are the third stock. Objects inscribed to raise their power, and protective amulets,

were made more often from bone than from bamboo, traditionally from triangular buffalo shoulder

blades and tapering buffalo rib bones; the commonest bone amulet is the sarang timah, a piece of

buffalo shoulder cut triangular [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 83] · SUBSTRATE. The bullet-warding property

attested for it belongs to a much later era; the present frame carries the underlying belief that an

inscription wards a weapon, and firearms stay in forward-stratum windows.

The book as a commodity — the market, the fakes, and where the books went

This is trade-goods material and it is told honestly, with Batak hands on both sides of every

transaction.

• Roughly two thousand pustaha survive in private and public collections around the world, the

single largest holding around two hundred at Leiden University [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 65]. From

colonial times onward they were often carried to Europe as souvenirs and kept in national and

private collections [SRC: SRC_00158, p. 165]. Van der Tuuk's collection alone accounts for a

hundred and fifty-two pustaha, gathered on the west coast at Sibolga and then Barus between 1851

and mid-1857 [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 10-11]

• Since roughly the eighteenth century pustaha were bought and taken to Western countries by

collectors who valued them less for their contents, which the buyers generally could not read,

than as curiosities or works of art [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 11]. That is the object's actual price

history and it is the honest answer to why a museum can show one

• The collection is extraction and preservation at once, and the build says both. It was assembled

before Christianity, Islam, modernization and globalisation together changed Batak life in North

Sumatra; much of what it holds is now considered forgotten and some of its languages endangered;

the manuscripts sit largely unread because the number of scholars of Batak languages is

dwindling; and the same collection saved an important part of the Dairi heritage from oblivion,

including at least thirty stories written down for the first time from the Dairi-speaking

storytellers of Kelasen near Barus [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 10; p. 19]. Plural causes, plainly stated —

a single-cause telling would be the falsehood

• Batak agency is SHOWN, not routed around. Van der Tuuk learned to interpret pustaha with the help

of datu and employed them to write and copy many of the manuscripts he collected. Ompu ni

Manungkol Langit, head of Aek na Uli, did not want to part with his pustaha at all, and did so

only on his own terms — one European dog as large as a calf, a dozen flasks of jenever, ten

Spanish mats and three padang rusak, a kind of Acehnese shawl [SRC: SRC_00228, p. 11; p. 19]. A

Batak owner setting a hard price on a Dutch collector is a trade beat, and it is a better one than

any loss-only framing

• Pustaha knowledge was itself costly. It was difficult to learn and expensive to obtain, so that

access ran to the sons of wealthy people, clan leaders, and close relatives of a datu

[SRC: SRC_00228, p. 11]. Literacy in this region has a price, and that price is a legitimate gate

on the learning surface

• The market in objects made for outsiders has existed for at least a hundred years, and some items

in museum collections were probably acquired from tourist markets and through middlemen

[SRC: SRC_00226, p. 65]. Bone artefacts made for sale go back at least to the early twentieth

century, with a centre of the industry near Berastagi on the Karo plateau; the bone pieces in

Batak collections exhibit an inconsistent style of writing and text structure, and Karo specimens

are to be regarded with suspicion, their texts making little sense [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 83-84].

That gives a real connoisseurship test — script consistency and whether the text means anything —

and it is reached only through the chapter's forward-fluctuation windows. The genuine craft is the

anchor; the curio is the derivative, and the framing sits on the market, never on the makers

Metal, forging, and one pass-1 correction

The Batak were renowned for skill in warfare and used a wide array of swords and knives. The piso

sanalenggam is a single-edged metal blade with a water-buffalo-horn handle finely carved as a human

figure, usually associated with the Toba and Pakpak groups. Because feuds between Batak groups were

frequent, the manufacture of metal blades was in former times the blacksmith's most important task,

and the handles appear to have been carved by other specialists [SRC: SRC_00446 — Art of Island

Southeast Asia: The Fred and Rita Richman Collection, p. 66] · SUBSTRATE.

• The two-specialist split — blade-smith and hilt-carver — is the region's most useful trade-skill

structure and should survive into the Trade-3 surface as a two-hand commission

• The catalogued blade appears to be iron, and no materials analysis has been made. Blades welded up

from thin strips of steel are documented for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century examples

and are undoubtedly a later development [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 66, n. 1]. The 1200 frame does not

inherit that technique

• CORRECTION, scoped to this section's mineral list: the pass-1 line placing pattern-welding

materials for the keris pamor among this region's minerals is retired. Pattern-welding is a

specific decorative-structural technique this source never claims, and the pamor metallurgy the

project can actually cite is anchored on the bali shelf, not this one. The keris-and-pamor CRAFT

seed itself stays where the page already keeps it, in Section 6 and Section 14, routing to the

Trade-3 home at Ch 7; what leaves Section 9 is the mineral claim. The Sumatra-side anchor here is

iron, buffalo horn, and the specialist split

• No ore body, smelting site or charcoal-burning surface is attested for this region in the harvest.

Flagged and owed at Section 16 before any mining node is placed

Buffalo horn — the region's keystone worked material

Water-buffalo horn does more structural work in this region's material culture than any metal. The

naga morsarang is the datu's medicine vessel: the hollow horn, its outer surface incised with

curving foliate designs, its pointed end carved as a seated human figure, its wide open end plugged

with a wooden stopper depicting the singa with four human figures riding on its back, and in some

examples the earth deity Boraspati Ni Tano rendered as a lizard inside the bore [SRC: SRC_00446,

p. 45] · SUBSTRATE. Horn is also the piso hilt [p. 66], the chief's powder flask [p. 68], and, as

shoulder blade and rib, the amulet stock [SRC: SRC_00226, p. 83].

• The commission-or-restore surface is real content: which horn, which stopper figure, which

interior emblem a legitimate vessel carries. A player who learns the grammar can read a fake or a

defiled vessel at a glance, which is a Section 13 investigation payoff earned in a Section 9 craft

• The naga morsarang is a working ritual vessel of a living tradition, not loot. Weight, never curio

Applied chemistry — the powder tradition, and where it sits in time

Gunpowder was manufactured from a local supply of sulfur, melted down and mixed with powdered

charcoal, saltpeter and lime extract. To increase its efficacy, shredded leaves gathered during a

thunderstorm and herbs harvested during an earthquake were stored and added, so that the mixture

would carry the destructive power of earthquake and of thunder. The powder was kept inside the house

in large gourds, and the chief carried his own supply in a carved water-buffalo-horn container worn

suspended from a chain around his neck [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 68] · SUBSTRATE.

• The chemistry that works is sulfur, charcoal and saltpeter in proportion. The storm-leaf and

quake-herb components are the tradition's own reasoning about potency, rendered as such — neither

endorsed as chemically causal nor mocked

• The lime is CITRUS, not calcium. The catalogue states that the citrus juice was added to magic

potions and to gunpowder to improve their efficacy, and explains that nineteenth-century German

texts say lemon because the local citrus fruit is really a kind of lime [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 69,

n. 1]. A build implying calcium oxide would teach false chemistry

• Time placement, stated plainly: firearms and the finished powder are a forward material-culture

stratum against the 1200 CE present. What the present frame carries is the mineral input — local

volcanic sulfur, charcoal, saltpeter — the gourd and horn container craft, and the timed foraging

of storm-gathered leaf and quake-harvested herb. The powder-mixing craft itself plays in the

chapter's fluctuation windows

• Geography, and this correction is load-bearing: the Batak powder tradition belongs to the Toba

caldera highlands of North Sumatra. It is NOT Java's Mt Merapi and NOT West Sumatra's Gunung

Marapi, which are two further and distinct peaks. merapi_slopes carries no Section 9 resource

node; the sulfur and the foraging sit at samosir_highlands

Imported ceramics — the trade good that crosses into the sacred

A pupuk container in the collection is a Batak carved wooden stopper fitted to a translucent green

moulded jar manufactured in China, probably thirteenth or fourteenth century, Yuan. The use of

imported Chinese ceramics by the Batak and other Indonesian groups reflects a highly developed trade

network flourishing in the region centuries before Europeans arrived; contact between China and

Sumatra is traceable to the seventh century, when the Srivijayan capital stood at Palembang.

Imported ceramics were probably carried farther inland to interior groups such as the Batak as

north-eastern ports rivalling the earlier southern ones emerged between the twelfth and fifteenth

centuries, and excavation at Kota Cina has yielded large quantities of white and green wares

[SRC: SRC_00446, p. 50 and n. 2] · SUBSTRATE.

• This is the clearest measure the page has of how deep the strait network reached inland, and it is

a two-way join: the port zone stocks the ware, the caldera zone consecrates it

• Object biography is the playable idea. A traded jar arrives as merchandise and is re-valued on

arrival as a potent object; the same vessel is a commodity at palembang_port and a sacred

container at samosir_highlands, and the player can watch the transition happen

• The catalogued jar is Yuan and therefore later than the present frame. The NETWORK is

seventh-century onward and the twelfth-to-fifteenth-century north-eastern ports are live in 1200;

the specific object is not, and no ware attribution for the present frame is asserted here

• The catalogue's generic jar term, martaban — large ceramic jars made in China and imitated in

Southeast Asian kilns, named for the lower Burmese port, with Burma-to-Indonesia maritime trade

reaching back to the early eleventh century — is attested in this catalogue on a Bornean Dayak

object, and the catalogue notes those owners do not call the jars martaban at all but use their

own local names [SRC: SRC_00446, p. 26, n. 2]. It is used here as a regional jar-trade category

with its siting named, and never as a Batak word

Currency, markets, and the build map

No coinage, weight standard or currency circulation is attested for this region anywhere in the

harvest, and none is invented here. The exchange shapes the sources do carry are commodity export to

the entrepots, riverine transport of gold, the pack load on the coast-to-highland trail, and

straight barter-in-kind at a price the owner names. A currency layer is owed at the Section 16 pass

if one is wanted.

Build map:

• samosir_highlands — caldera-tuff working face as a declared stand-in for the off-map Asahan

carving tradition; sulfur and foraging nodes; the bark-and-ink preparation bench; the buffalo-horn

vessel craft; the consecration end of the ceramic object-biography

• palembang_port — the strait-network trade-web edge, the imported-ware and forest-produce stock,

and the market where the ledger arc already lives; it is NOT the coast-to-highland trail's port

• off-map, named but not staged — the Asahan and Batubara coast, the Bandar Pulau corridor and

Pasaguan, the Aek Tarum estate, Kota Cina and Barus, and Padang Lawas; queued for Section 15

• merapi_slopes — traversal only; no resource node, by the correction above
• borobudur — no Section 9 trade node; the andesite stone seed is Section 7's and is owed a citation

at the Section 16 pass

• Trades: Trade-2 Mining echo (caldera tuff, sulfur; home Ch 19), Trade-3 Blacksmithing seed (home

Ch 7), Trade-4 Herbalism seed (bark, resins, inks, horn vessels), Trade-6 Tailoring seed (cotton,

indigo, dye-woods), Trade-9 Inscription seed (the manuscript stock). No trade home base roots in

this region; every entry above seeds

Generated by harness/site/structure_site.py — the URL path is the repo path. review root