Why it looks like this

North Sumatra's plantation boom — Deli tobacco, then rubber and palm oil — turned the village of Medan into a colonial company city: European trading houses around the Esplanade and Kesawan street, Chinese shophouse rows, and quarters for the many communities the plantations drew in.

The Sultanate of Deli built alongside: the Maimun Palace (1888) and the Great Mosque mark its axis. Modern Medan, Indonesia's largest city outside Java, spreads from that layered core toward the port of Belawan.