The Real Villa Patumbah
Villa Patumbah is located in kecamatan Patumbak in North Sumatra 3° 31' 3" N, 98° 43' 1" E. This is the original villa Patumbah.
Deli tobacco started on the east coast of Sumatra in the late 1860s. Few Dutchmen found that deli tobacco leaves fetched a high price in Europe and USA. They were “thinner than cigarette paper, and softer than silk,” and became highly valued as a cigar wrapper.
The brown “gold rush” of Deli tobacco started in the late 1870s, attracting Dutch, Germans, and Swiss planters. The planters started formalizing a brutal system of exploitation of imported Chinese and Javanese indentured workers or what they called as coolies.
Beside the Dutch, Swiss entrepreneurs were very active in the first decade of establishing tobacco plantations Deli. Although Switzerland did not colonize other countries, but Swiss merchants participated as colonizers. In paticular they were active in the early exploitation in Deli, Sumatra.
Swiss merchant Brecker opened the plantation company Helvetia and contributed to the formation of the Deli Planters Vereeniging. Michalski, a Polish nobleman by birth, but a Swiss citizen founded Polonia. Peyer, arrived in Laboean in 1866, founded the company Persévérance, which later became Paja Bakung. Krüse established Maryland, which the local called Marelan. Küng founded Saentis, Schlatter had Poengei, Huber opened Amplas, Sturzenegger with Rotterdam, Roemer of Bekalla, Weber of Bunda Hara, Bluntschli with Soengei Bamban.
Carl Grob a Swiss, and Hermann Naeher, a Bavarian, came to Deli in 1870 to seek fortune from the brown gold.
In 1871, they obtained a land concession of 5,300 hectares on the banks of the Blumei river near Tanjung Morawa on the border of Deli and Serdang. The area was under the Sultanate of Deli. It was an urung (small kingdom) of Senembah, with a capital of Patumbak or Patoembah. The company then successively expanded and founded Patoembah, Tandjong Morawa, Tandjong Morawa Kiri, Dolok naga and Sungei Behasa. They were the first to open tobacco culture in the district of Padang and Bedagei.
Grob and Naeher employed experienced agriculturists to manage their farms. Although the soil is not the best, derived from alluvial of acidic rhyolitic materials, the plantations still produced abundant of good quality tobacco leaves. Senembah was considered a progressive plantation, with its own hospital, and a doctor researching on tropical diseases.
Thanks to the cheap labour, within ten years, Grob earned a substantial wealth that in 1879 he returned to Zurich. In 1889, Grob and Naeher converted the plantation into a limited liability company, Senembah Maatschappij, in Amsterdam in 1890 with a capital of f 1,500,000. The Deli Company took over the management.
In 1883, Grob bought the 13,000 square meter property in Switzerland with an unobstructed view of the city, lake and mountains. He commissioned famous Zurich builders, Chiodera and Tschudy, to build Villa Patumbah. Evariste Mertens designed the spacious garden.
This exotic name and extravagant villa was built from the wealth of soils and labour of cheap coolies. According to the Swiss Castles website: “This exceptionally wealthy builder had acquired his wealth with a tobacco plantation on Sumatra.”
Indeed, the castle was built from wealth accumulated from the tobacco company Senembah in Tanjung Morawa, North Sumatra.
Grob died in 1892 of a “tropical” disease that he had brought with him from Patumbak.
So here you have the majestic Villa Patumbah in Swiss, build from money produced in the land of coolies.
And here today, the actual Patumbak in Tanjung Morawa, where the tobacco came from, an industrial and plantation area, still desolated.
