The Mandailings in Peninsular Malaysia

The 'Rumah Besar'

As the founder of the Sumatran community in Papan, Raja Bilah had not only built a mosque for his people but also allocated a piece of land on an adjacent hillock called Changkat for a Muslim burial ground.

Next, he built the customary seat for the Raja, a bagas godang, (literally a big house/rumah besar) where his family would play out its role as the patron of the community. The Rumah Besar would be used for the conference of elders, for charity feasts given to Muslims, for weddings and other receptions.

Going by Raja Bilah's will, the Rumah Besar and its contents was a family endowment or private waqf. It is a tradition among the Mandailing chiefs, and men and women of standing to leave an ancestral home for the clan. It would serve to bring the children and descendants together during ceremonial occasions such as marriages and Muslim feasts.

The Rumah Besar was built on the hillock next to Raja Bilah's timber house, which is much older and still extant today. Before work commenced, supplications (du'a) were made. An auspicious day was chosen to start building, and a fistful of soil from the Mandailing homeland was scattered at the foundation of the mansion. Constructed mainly by Chinese craftsmen, the Mandailings chipped in in gotong-royong fashion, helping their chief put up the house. Elephants may have been used to raise the large timber beams.

The Rumah Besar was a double-storey house with a tiled roof, the lower floor of brick and the upper floor of chengal timber. It had a large hall downstairs and another one upstairs which could accommodate large gatherings of people.

Its interior shows that it is different from the mansions of the rich Malay aristocracy and Chinese miners of Kinta. It has a large hall with eight-sided columns and was used as a meeting hall for all the Mandailings in Perak, and from this evidence we know that it was functionally a sopo godang. The use of eight-sided columns symbolises a community hall.

A Penghulu's office was built into the buttress wall along the side of the hillock, and this was thereafter called "Balai Penghulu". Stucccoed over the gateway leading up the side of the hillock to the mansion was the date of completion - 1896.

The descendants of Raja Bilah have always called the council hall, Rumah Besar, but in more recent times it has come to be popularly known as "Istana Raja Bilah" (Raja Bilah's Palace) probably out of the mistaken notion that Raja Bilah was a Malay Raja and therefore his house would be an Istana.

The Architecture Department of University Technology Malaysia (UTM) made a measured drawing of the Rumah Besar in 1993. The Rumah Besar has been used as a location set for local as well as international movies, the most recent being Anna And The King in 1999.

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