Ombilin coal mine
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How it came to be
The Ombilin Coal Mining Heritage of Sawahlunto is the system for mining, processing and shipping coal that the Netherlands East Indies government built in the mountains of western Sumatra between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dutch geologists surveyed the coal in the 1860s, and in 1868 the engineer Willem Hendrik de Greve found the deposits. Remote terrain and deep seams meant that a way to move the coal had to come first.
Between 1887 and 1891 a 155-kilometre railway was laid from the valley to the coast, with a rack section, bridges and tunnels, and in 1888 the port of Emmahaven, now Teluk Bayur, was built to ship the coal. Open-pit mining began in 1892, once the line was finished.
The workforce combined local Minangkabau labourers, contract workers from Java and Chinese workers recruited through Singapore and Penang, and convicts from prisons in Java, Bali and Makassar known as orang rantai, the chained people. The company town of Sawahlunto housed more than 7,000 people. The Indonesian government took control in 1945, and the last coal train reached the port in 1999. The site was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2019.
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