The Dutch residences, fort, etc are on the south side of the river, about half a mile below the sultan’s.
Abdul Rahman had been drawn here by the rumor of diamonds and gold, and by its location close to the main trading routes running through the archipelago and north to China.
The name of the city translates roughly as ‘the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth’, a reference to the ghostly howl heard by early visitors to these shores.
Believing that this noise was the work of local spirits, Abdul Rahman used cannon fire to frighten them away before he landed.
By the year 1779 he was able to get himself recognized as Sultan of Pontianak by the Dutch East India Company and to make a treaty with them. By the early nineteenth century Pontianak had become the major entreport on the west coast.
Pontianak became the capital of the newly created Western Division of Borneo in 1849.
Pontianak Sultanate
