Throughout the colonized world, colonial administrators sought to articulate their policies in the idiom of indigenous traditions and institutions. This process of manipulating tradition to serve the interests of the state was designed to gain legitimacy among the colonized and to enable small numbers of colonizers to augment and project their limited power more effectively. As Dutch colonial rule spread through Sumatra in the nineteenth century, administrators encountered a complex system of institutions, customs, and laws known as adat. This article elucidates the processes and consequences of this encounter in Lampung, a region at the southern tip of Sumatra that was finally brought under colonial rule in 1856 after nearly a half-century of intermittent campaigns.