Lake Toba lies in a crater some nine hundred metres up, ringed by rice terraces and villages under their own chiefs; Samosir in the middle is the demographic core of the Batak country and is effectively unreachable without boats and local consent.
Porsea at the outflow is the only natural road to the eastern sea, but the Asahan below it falls through rapids that nothing floats through, so more produce goes west to Barus than east.
Who he is
- Title
- Heads of the lineages (marga) of Toba
- Since
- not known
- Born
- not known
- Family
- not known
- Confidence
- low
No source names the holder for any date near 1 January 1200.
Overlord
None named.
What it holds
- Their villages, rice terraces and forest groves, and the right to sell the forest's goods
How things stand that morning
Not recorded. No king, no capital, no writing; villages under their lineage heads, tied by marriage and feud.
Wealth
Camphor, benzoin and gold passed to coastal buyers at the foot of the range; rice and iron for themselves.
Where the sources disagree
Evidence: Thin: nothing is written here in 1200; the picture is the campaign board's and later ethnography read back. Hirth and Rockhill read 'Pa-t'a' (a dependency of San-fo-ts'i in the Zhufan zhi) as the Batak country; we could not recheck that reading.
"The campaign board" is OMNIA's working map. These notes record where its earlier claims were checked against the sources.
On the map: Core only.
Sources and studies
- OMNIA board note (a lead only, checked against the sources above)
- F. Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua: his work on the Chinese and Arab trade (1911), table of contents and chapter titles seen; text not reachable
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.