When They Called Jakarta Batavia a Look at One of the Oldest Cities in Southeast AsiaPrepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International
There's a small open-air cafe on the corner of Taman Fatahillah in old Jakarta. It's a neat little cafe, with comfortable cane chairs and tables with checkered cloths. The cafe inside has high ceilings and revolving ceiling fans, and on the walls are old faded photographs of past days.
The square now called Taman Fatahillah was once the centre of old Jakarta, except they didn't call it Jakarta then. It was known as Batavia, and it was the most important Dutch possession in the Far East.
The cafe is a great place to sit and relax in the afternoon, when the downpour of heat is most intense and the town is half asleep. As you sit there and look out over the square, and providing you have spent the morning in the museums flanking the square, you can almost imagine Batavia when it came to life in the 1620s.
Only the year before, the Dutch ,under the leadership of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, stormed the town and reduced it to ashes. Coen saw the potential of Jakarta as a suitable headquarters and subsequently attacked and razed the town. He ordered the construction of a new town, to be walled and fortified, and modelled after Amsterdam. He called the new town Batavia.
Batavia was not the first settlement of importance at the mouth of the Ciliwung River. A port had been founded here in ancient, perhaps by the early Hindu, and later had during the 15th and 16th centuries Jayakarta, the name it went by, had developed into a major pepper port.
Under the Dutch East India Company, Batavia flourished and many of the buildings we see today in Taman Fatahillah square were built by them. Batavia grew rich throughout the 17th Century on an entrepot trade in spices that were found only in the East Indies--pepper, cloves and nutmegs. But Dutch prosperity was not to last forever.
After 1700, a series of disasters befell Batavia. Declining market prices, epidemics of malaria, cholera and typhoid, and an unfortunate massacre of the Batavia Chinese in 1740, combined with the frequent wars, cast a shadow of gloom over the city that had once fancied herself "Queen of the East."
At the beginning of the l9th Century, under the direction of Governor-General Willem Daendels, a follower of Napoleon, Batavia received a facelift that would completely alter her forever. Most of the original settlement—Old Batavia—was demolished, not for ascetic reasons but mostly to provide building materials for a new town to the south, around what is now modern Jarkarta.
Only the town square area survived. It has been restored and renamed Taman Fatahillah, and three of the surrounding colonial edifices have been converted into museums: the Jakarta History Museum, the Fine Arts Museum and the Wayang Museum.
Any tour of Old Batavia should begin at the Jakarta History Museum on the south side of the square. This was formerly the City Hall of Batavia, a solid structure completed in 1710 and used by successive governments right up through the 1960s. It now houses fascinating memorabilia from the colonial period, notably 18th century furnishings and portraits of Dutch governors, along with many prehistoric, classical and Portuguese period artifacts.
As you walk through the high-ceiling rooms with shuttered windows, across thick plank floors, you can get a feeling how the Dutch lived in opulence and splendor. There are great dining halls and receptions rooms, and on one wall hangs a 16th century map of the Dutch East Indies. Batavia is the hub; Sumatra is named, and Borneo; the Celebies is unknown and Singapore is called Aurea and indicates its uninhabited.
Dungeons beneath the building were used as holding cells where prisoners were made to stand waist-deep in sewage for weeks awaiting their trials. Executions and public tortures were once commonplace, performed daily in the main square as judges watched from the balcony above the main entrance. An execution axe hangs on a wall in of the museum rooms.
For those interested in the arts, the Wayang Museum on the western side of the square is most interesting. It contains many puppets and masks, some of them quite old. Every Sunday a puppet performance is staged n 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. It's well worth seeing.
The third building on the square is the Fine Arts Museum on the east side of Fatahillah. It is housed in the former Court Building which was completed in 1879. The museum has collections of painted sculptures by modern Indonesian artists, and an important exhibition porcelains. Some items date back to the14th Century.
There a cannon on the north side of Taman Fatahillah that faces down a street of busy shoppers. It has an interesting story to tell. Si Jago, as it is called, is regarded by many as a fertility symbol, perhaps because of the fist cast into the butt end of the cannon, whose thumb protrudes between its index and middle fingers (an obscene gesture in Indonesia).
You can see couples shyly approach the cannon with offerings. The wife then straddles the cannon's barrel, in the hope of thereby conceiving a child.
If you are interested in Old Dutch architecture, walk behind the Wayang Museum to view two Dutch houses dating from the 18th Century.
A short walk from Taman Fatahillah Square is the old port of Sunda Kelapa. It is still very much in use today. For the photographer it can be the highlight of a visit to old Batavia. The earlier in the morning you can get there the better.
Sunda Kelapa is the name of the original Hindu spice-trading post which was conquered and converted to Islam more than four and a half centuries ago. The romance of the days of sailing ships is seen here in the form of traditional wooden Macassar schooners, some fifty metres long, that continue to play a vital role in the commerce of modern-day Indonesia. Each day dozens of these schooners with their high jutting bowsprits arrive laden with sawn timber from Kalimantan (Borneo) and is off-loaded along the two km long wharf, a wharf that has been in continuous use since 1817. A visit to the port can be an unforgettable experience.
The area around Sunda Kelapa is rich in history. Directly across the river stands a l9th-Century Dutch lookout tower constructed upon the site of the original customs house of Jayakarta. This is where traders once gave gifts and tribute to the native ruler in return for the privilege of trading here. For a little extra change you can get an attendant to open the tower which offers a panoramic view of the city and the coast. Nearby is an old wooden drawbridge that straddles an unused canal, but which recalls the days when Batavia was a Dutch town laced with waterways as was common in Amsterdam.
Across the canal with the drawbridge and to the left stands a solid redbrick townhouse that was built around 1730 by the then soon-to-be Governor General Van Imhoff. The design and particularly the fine Chinese-style woodwork are typical of old Batavian residences.
Three doors to the left stand the only other house from the same period, now the offices of the Chartered Bank.
Behind the tower stands a long, two-storey structure dating back to the Dutch East Indian Company times. It is now the Museum Bahari. Originally a warehouse, it was erected by the Dutch in 1652 and used for many years to store coffee, tea and Indian cloth. Inside on display are traditional sailing craft from all corners of the Indonesian archipelago, as well as some old maps of Batavia. Down a narrow lane and around a corner behind the museum lies the fish market (Pasar Ikan), beyond numerous stalls selling nautical gear.
For something different, take a walk through these back alleys. Some call it Chinatown but there are no sings with Chinese characters.
The alleys are narrow and dark; the stone walkways are damp and congested. Here, where you will hardly see a foreigner, you will find fortune tellers and casket makers, and you can buy candles, skinned frogs on sticks ready to cook, watches that not only tell time but the phases of the moon, herbs and Chinese medicine and sun glasses. If you want kids' toys, leather belts or glassware, along with piles of coconuts, they are there too. The only thing I advise is not to walk the alleyways after dark.
Those who want to give Jakarta the time will discover it is an amazing city which has much to offer the traveller. It is, certainly, capital to the world's fifth most populous nation and home to seven million Indonesians. And yet, in spite of its glass and concrete skyscrapers and beautiful monuments in and around the city centre, it is made up almost entirely of small one- and two-storey structures.
Dutch architecture is seen not only in old Batavia but also along many of the tree-lined boulevards. Many were splendid residence of the colonial period, styled after their counterparts in Europe. By the turn of the century, Batavia's homes, hotels and clubs were in no way inferior to those of Europe.
The Japanese occupation put an end to old Batavia. The town was renamed Jakarta and dramatically transformed—from a tidy Dutch colonial town of 200,000 to an Indonesian city of more than 1 million. Following independence, hundreds of thousands more Indonesians flooded in from the countryside and the outer islands, and Jakarta quickly outstripped all other Indonesian cities in size and importance to become what scholars term a "primate" city: the unrivalled political, cultural and economic centre of the new nation.
Next week we will take a cruise on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok. December is an exciting month of all kinds of river activities in Thailand, and I will bring a few of these to mind.
Questions & Answers
Q. Dear Mr. Stephens. My husband and I had planned to spend the Christmas holidays in Europe but considering the political situation there we decided on Asia. My husband was a young Marine in China and after reading your articles he would like to go back there. But isn’t China cold now. What do you suggest? Jill Johnson, NYC.
A. Dear Jill. Now you put me on a spot, taking sides. But let me suggest. First, yes, China will be cold but that shouldn’t stop travel there. Just dress warmly. You might want to consider Russia. THAI flies there from Bangkok now, and winter in Moscow on a sleigh ride can be exciting. Then on your return to Thailand travel down to sunny Phuket and thaw out. With THAi flights that is possible. —HS
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)
Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited | 
