The Story of the First Hakka Landing in Sanggau: Toapekong and the Chinese Quarter as a Legacy

Historical novel: The Hakka people in Sanggau.

By Apen Panlelugen

This historical novel traces the migration and arrival of the Hakka people from China to Sanggau, weaving documented facts into a carefully crafted literary narrative. 

It brings to life the first Hakka landing along the Kapuas River, the building of the toapekong, the emergence of the early Chinese quarter, and the earliest conversions to Catholicism, allowing these moments to unfold as lived, human experiences rather than distant historical markers.

Moving beyond stories of migration and settlement, the novel enters a darker terrain by uncovering the political scripting behind the ethnic and social unrest that swept West Kalimantan in 1967. Grounded in careful research and rich storytelling, it shows how power, policy, and provocation tore at the fabric of shared life, inviting readers to reflect on the fragile ties between history, identity, and the land itself.

Arrival by Bamboo Raft

This historical novel opens not with treaties, borders, or proclamations of state power, but with bamboo rafts cutting through the brown current of the Kapuas River in the mid eighteenth century. A group of Hakka migrants arrive quietly on the riverbank they name 桑高, read as Siang ngau, later known as Sanggau. Led by Kwee Seng Ong, who would become better remembered as Ban Theng Thua, they face the violent rush of Pancur Aji with a resolve that feels less heroic than necessary. Survival, not glory, is the motive force of this opening scene.

Masri Sareb Putra writes this moment with restraint. There is no romantic excess, no mythologizing of arrival. Instead, the river is allowed to be dangerous, the landing uncertain, and the future undefined. The migrants erect temporary shelters near the mouth of the Sekayam River, on land described as uninhabited at the time. Today, that site is known as Vihara Tridharma on Jalan Kartini in Sanggau, West Kalimantan. The transformation from riverbank to religious and cultural landmark becomes the novel’s first quiet lesson. History often begins in places no one thought worth recording.

What distinguishes this opening is its refusal to frame migration as destiny fulfilled. The Hakka do not arrive because the land is promised. They arrive because elsewhere has become impossible. The river is not a symbol of welcome but of risk. In this sense, the novel aligns itself with a long tradition of social history that privileges lived experience over nationalist narrative. It insists that before a place becomes territory, it is first shelter.

A Shared Landscape of Names and Lives

As the story unfolds, Sanggau becomes less a point on a map and more a dense social field. Putra introduces a constellation of figures whose lives intersect across ethnic and cultural lines. Hakka names such as Liu Shan, Tong Guan, Loh Tian Hui, and others appear alongside local Dayak figures including Dara Nante, Babai Cinga, Lampon, Macan Luar, Macan Gaing, and Panglima Kumbang. These are not decorative inclusions. Each name signals a relationship, a negotiation, sometimes a tension that reshapes the shared landscape.

The novel’s strength lies in how it handles coexistence. Harmony is present, but never assumed. Conflict appears not as an aberration but as a condition of proximity. Trade, intermarriage, rivalry, and mutual dependence coexist in uneasy balance. The Hakka are not portrayed as outsiders frozen in their difference, nor are the Dayak reduced to a static indigenous backdrop. Both communities change, adapt, and at times misunderstand one another.

Putra resists the temptation to offer a single moral center. There are no pure victims or flawless hosts. Instead, the narrative suggests that wisdom emerges through long habitation rather than inherited identity. The forest, the river, and the surrounding land function as silent witnesses to this process. They are not passive settings but active participants, shaping how people move, farm, worship, and remember.

In this sense, the book reads less like a conventional historical novel and more like a social chronicle. It accumulates meaning gradually. Scenes of everyday life carry as much weight as moments of confrontation. By allowing multiple voices to coexist, the novel challenges the reader to abandon simplified binaries. History here is not a straight line but a braided river.

When Policy Becomes Violence

The novel’s tonal shift is deliberate and unsettling. The year 1967 arrives not with spectacle but with bureaucratic language. Government Regulation No. 10 of 1959 and Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 1967 enter the narrative as cold instruments of state power. Their consequences, however, are anything but abstract. Chinese communities, including the Hakka in Sanggau, are forced to leave the interior. Homes are abandoned. Networks of trust collapse. What had taken generations to build is dismantled in a matter of months.

Putra is particularly incisive in showing how state policy operates through division. Dayak communities, initially positioned as instruments within a broader political strategy, soon find themselves ensnared in the same machinery of violence. Provocation and divide and rule politics ignite tensions that leave no one untouched. The novel refuses to isolate suffering. It insists that violence radiates outward, consuming those who were never meant to be targets.

This section of the book is its moral core. The prose becomes tighter, more restrained, as if excess language would be a betrayal of the subject. There is no attempt to soften the implications. The state appears not as a protective entity but as a distant force capable of erasing entire ways of life. By anchoring this critique in individual stories, Putra avoids polemic while delivering a devastating indictment.

What emerges is a portrait of how easily shared history can be fractured by policy. Neighbors become strangers. Memory becomes dangerous. Silence becomes a survival strategy. The novel makes clear that 1967 is not merely a historical episode but a rupture whose effects continue to reverberate.

History as Witness, Not Ornament

One of the most striking features of this novel is its scholarly discipline. Supported by 107 footnotes, the narrative never loses sight of its evidentiary foundations. Yet these references do not weigh the story down. Instead, they function as ethical anchors, reminding the reader that imagination here is accountable to research, testimony, and archival labor.

Putra writes as a senior scholar who understands the risks of forgetting. His footnotes are not academic decoration but acts of resistance against erasure. They signal that what is being told has been checked, cross referenced, and argued for. In a literary culture that often separates fiction from responsibility, this novel insists on their coexistence.

The Latin phrase quoted near the end, historia vero testis temporum, history is the witness of time, encapsulates the book’s ambition. This is not history as triumphal narrative, nor as nostalgic lament. It is history as testimony. Uncomfortable, contested, and necessary.

In the end, this novel asks difficult questions. Who owns land, and on what basis. Who gets to name a place, and whose names survive. What happens when the state claims authority over memory itself. These questions resonate far beyond Sanggau or West Kalimantan. They speak to a global condition in which migration, identity, and power continue to collide.

Written with clarity, restraint, and moral seriousness, Masri Sareb Putra’s novel stands as both a literary achievement and a historical intervention. It reminds us that before borders were drawn and policies enforced, there were people on rafts, rivers to cross, and fragile agreements about how to live together. Forgetting that, the book suggests, is the first step toward repeating the same violence under a different name.