'A schemer of the lowest sort' who undermined the Dutch cause, or 'a smart and diligent native' who was particularly useful for Dutch officials? They held extreme and incompatible opinions about Haji Ibrahim (ca. 1810 - ca. 1875), a jack-of-all-trades who, to the best of his abilities, tried to serve the various groups in power in Riau in the nineteenth century.On of his patrons was Hermann von de Wall, who had come to the heartland of the Malay world, where the language was still 'pure', to collect materials for his Malay-Dutch dictionary. Haji Ibrahim served him as one of his main informants. The letters he wrote to his patron form the centre of the present study: they are published with summaries of their content and introduced by chapters on Malay letterwriting and on the historical background of the published letters.Apart from a discussion in chapter 4 about his role in the political configuration in mid-nineteenth century Riau, where a Malay sultan, a Bugis viceroy and a Dutch
