Word: sumatra
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...This was a China that sought to dominate the region. On one journey, as recounted in Louise Levathes' 1994 book When China Ruled the Seas, Zheng He put down an uprising in Sumatra and brought the rebel chief back to Nanjing for confinement; the Emperor had the man executed. On another, the fleet landed in Sri Lanka and captured the Sinhalese King - punishment, according to one version of events, for his refusal to hand over to the Chinese Emperor a sacred tooth of the Buddha. He and his family were taken to China and imprisoned. Impressed by such power, rulers...
...Zheng He's Indonesian ports of call isn't exactly a scenic journey. There's beauty, not least in the spirit of people who will without fail return a smile with a bigger smile, but most of these places don't show up on postcards. The next leg on Sumatra is a prime example: between the dusty, trashy port town of Dumai and the city of Medan some 10 bumpy hours by car to the north, the eye catches on the bare-bones shacks with their thatched roofs and cleanly swept earthen yards, smarts through the smoke of fires that...
...visible on a rutted, auburn-hued dirt track outside Pangkal Pinang, where Cung A Siuk lives. There are a handful of houses out here. Cung says there used to be fewer. There is no news, either. She's never heard of the persecution of Chinese people in Java and Sumatra. John, the photographer, and I are the first white people she has ever seen, and she's 73 years old. "If I were scared," she says, "I would have closed the door and stayed inside." Her words are translated from the Chinese-Indonesian hybrid she speaks into Indonesian, then into...
...because of the chaos the country has fallen into and the brutal economics of development, the orange apes were on the verge of a grisly distinction, in danger of becoming the first ape to disappear from the wild. Perhaps 5,000-6,000 survive on Sumatra, half the number that existed as recently as 1998. There are 10,000-15,000 on Borneo, a decline of one-third in the same period. "Orangutan survival totally depends on the survival of the tropical forest," says Birute Galdikas. "It's as simple as that." Galdikas has been studying orangutans since the late...
...mistake of speaking up for three Javanese colleagues with whom he was traveling. All four had their throats cut. Van Schaik abandoned his mission soon afterward. He now spends most of his time teaching at Duke University in North Carolina and has never been able to return to the Sumatra swamps that were so central to his life's work. He can't carry on his experiments because, he laments, the human-trained orangutans are "intellectual paupers from the dark ages." Short of a miracle, though, these dark-agers, thrust into small patches of remaining forest to bumble around, surviving...