This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Padri War opened in 1803 as a religious civil war among the Minangkabau people of central Sumatra and closed in 1837 as an anti-colonial war against the Dutch. Its first phase pitted Padri clerics, inspired by the Wahhabi reform movement they encountered in Arabia, against the traditionalist adat chiefs and matrilineal customary authorities of Minangkabau society, seeking to purify local practice of customs they judged un-Islamic, cockfighting, gambling, tobacco and betel use, and the matrilineal inheritance system itself. When the outmatched adat chiefs appealed to the Dutch East India Company for help in 1821, the conflict widened into a war against Dutch intervention.
From 1832 the Padri resistance was led by Tuanku Imam Bonjol, whose fortified base at Bonjol held out for years before Dutch forces captured it in August 1837 after a prolonged siege. Imam Bonjol himself was seized under a truce shortly after and exiled, first to Cianjur in Java and later to Ambon and Manado, where he died in 1864. Dutch colonial rule was extended over the Minangkabau highlands as a direct result of the war.