The glittering that wasn't gold: territory & people of the Indonesian Maluku, a.k.a 'Spice Isles'.

Maluku was more or less a Muslim area when the first caucasian arrived, or at least a good chunk of the elite ruling classes were.

That first caucasian was a Roman Catholic.

Today, the majority of the Malukunese goes to Protestant churches.

Reciprocal disdain between equally militant adherents of the three religions have been a consistent Malukunese characteristic, seen through other ethnicities' eyes. Even as late as in 2004, it still never let the local cops get a nap, while the presence of international non-governmental organisations, foreign newsmongers, and migrant Javanese rightwingers complicated the matter.

The actual situation in Maluku isles hasn't been as horrible as it was portrayed by Time, Inc. -- but it is, however, a gangrenous conflict that can't get diluted by the typically Indonesian (or, more precisely, Javanese as always) response: prolific denial.

That architectural bit in the picture is the Malukunese traditional house named baileo, a not-so-spacious construction of woodplanks shying away from the ground on thin pillars. The female figure at the right is supposed to be a native dancer performing Maluku's best known 'handkerchief dance' lenso, an interactive spectacle in olden days, offering society debutantes a chance to initiate themselves in romance.

The bent-handled metalwork is the thing with which (besides, of course, rifles) Malukunese warriors fought the Portuguese and the Dutch in colonial times: parang sawalaku. Its blade is as heavy and as wide as an English broad sword, with a slightly longer wooden end without a handlebar. The length of the entire thing is similar to a falchion's.

In Java, a parang (it comes with a straight handle, there) is only considered as a part of armory as much as a scythe was for Ivanhoe; but in Maluku it got a place comparable to Javanese keris (the variety of curvy slim blades, as short as a baselard -- or Japanese katana (samurai sword --) in traditional manowarism -- i.e. existentially philosophical, yet practically deadly.

Kingdoms all around Indonesia have never known standardized looks of warriors -- like, for instance, Japanese and Chinese armory, or what was donned by everyone around when William the Conqueror was still just a restless Duke of Normandy.

Feudal Indonesia's ironmongers weren't busy smithing metal helmets and such; a quite sensible idleness in this, since the tropical climate surely would have wrangled its wearers to dehydration.

Malukunese, like the rest of Indonesians, went to battlefields in the lightest of all possible attire; the only noticeable addition to daily wearables were shields.

1511 Alfonso d'Albuquerque led an armada from Portugal to Malaka, to -- so he said -- trade.

Malaka marked the orbit of moneymaking in this area. It sat a blink away from the edges of both Java and Sumatera, and this Muslim bed of roses for mercantilism was founded by an Indonesian.

Follow-ups of the expedition finally sucked independence off Malaka, and led Portuguese galleons further and further until they found Maluku, the buzzing thousand of tiny landmasses irregularly cut by meandering salient water, where lived several Muslim kingdoms of producers (the word 'thousand' there wasn't a figure of speech).

This was the historic touch between Indonesians and Europeans that would end up in all the phantasmagoric salad of political and military vices.

The foreigners' search of glory and gold was also teamed-up with the wish to enlarge the Christendom, so Catholic missionaries combed the hinterland for converts as soon as the profane business of buying and selling spices started at the port.

Said or not said, the marriage of caucasian imperialism with religious aims totally alien to the natives helped to form the generally negative view of Christianity all over Indonesia, that would persist until today, and even under colonialism this obvious intermingling was one of the reasons why Christianity has never been popular in most Indonesian places.

1512 Roman Catholic priests Antonio Taveiro and Antonio da Cruz from Portugal had succeeded in bringing in some converts in East Timor. In the next 50 years thousands would have been converted, including one of the native chiefs.

By now East Timor wasn't yet colonized, but the priests assumed some worldly leadership, too (which didn't exclude political and military matters). Only in 1701 was the Church cut loose from state affairs.

1513 Demak Royal Navy of Java set forth to Malaka with a hope to yank it off the Portuguese hands. The expedition ended up in failure.

1521 The greatest of all kings of Demak, Sultan Trenggana, was coronated. Under his rule the sultanate had come to include East, Central, and West Java. Conversion to Islam went rapidly on.

An extraordinary figure, Sunan Kalijaga ('Sunan' means 'Great Teacher of Islam'), was responsible for the achievement, along with his colleagues of Javanese Muslim missionaries known as 'the Nine Leaders' (Wali Songo).

The colossal success of Islamicization was due to the Wali Songo's subtle trick of fathering the inception of 'Javanese Islam' (we'll encounter this thing at a closer range later).

These holymen proceeded cautiously without too much emphasis on Islam's characteristic iconoclast -- something that would certainly have infuriated believers of indigenous animism and Hinduist population if thrusted on them out of the blue.

Carefully purging Javanese cultural expressions from the dirtiest elements of paganism, the priests take these expressions over to the service of Islam.

So, via the same old traditional theater, folksongs, and assorted arts, the tenets of Islam started to get planted in the minds of the people. This method had saved Java from probable conversionist wars that continuously ravaged other places in this thousand years of 'multilevel marketing' of different religions..........

Far away in Maluku, there was some escalation in the routine skirmishes between Ternate and Tidore, two Muslim/Catholic kingdoms that consisted of a pair of tiny islands perpetually in hostile mood towards each other, with just a thin salty waterway between them.

Ternate was backed up by Portugal, while Spanish soldiers helped manning the Tidorese lines. They, of course, didn't take sides out of mere whim. Such a business wasn't beyond the common practice of capitalism of the day. Maluku was the 'El Dorado' of the Eastern Hemisphere, with its surplus of spices European kings and admirals seemed to get ever-ready to spill blood for; all real wars between Europeans around the archipelago was for nutmegs and mace and pepper and the like -- certainly surreal to our eyes today.

This time, it was irreconcilable. A 'referee' was called for. This problem-solver was - guess who - the Pope in Rome.

The Papal See got Spain and Portugal to agree upon the Saragossa Treaty: the Spanish conquistadores had to sail away to the Philippines and establish a dominion there, while Maluku was to be left to the Portuguese.

Of the four-parties' war, both Portugal and Spain won, both the local kings lost. The usual scenario no one get surprised about, those days.

1527 This year, Java was more or less completely Islamicized. The Duke of Banten [pron. 'ban-tayn'], then a vassal of Demak, on his own initiative took over the port of Sunda Kelapa (later on it would be the port of Dutch colonial capital Batavia, and finally of Indonesian capital Jakarta), thereby securing a vital point of trade in Muslim hands.

Demak itself had annexed the remaining Majapahit territory, and under its kings Islam came to get a greater part of the Javanese population, via systematic mission works.

Love, 110x100 cm oil on canvas painting by Gambiranom Suhardi.
Today's artists (even his contemporaries; he was born in 1928) loath this sort of style,
but I just want to show you what Javanese people were supposed to look like
before Islam landed in this island. Such luxurious dresses and business (love) brand
this couple as aristocrats of a Hinduist Javanese kingdom.

1530 The headstrong Islamic kingdom of Aceh [pron. 'ah-tjah'] was established, its first king was Sultan Ali Mughayat. Until today, this relatively small area at the edge of Sumatera retains its initial characteristics; nearly 100% of population is Muslim, and maintains its nonconformist self-sufficiency throughout history.

This would prove to be exceedingly hard to solve, as a problem, to the Republic of Indonesia in 21st century.

1534 This year, Roman Catholicism had gotten a more or less secure foothold in Halmahera, Ternate, and Ambon of the Maluku isles in Indonesia.

This was to the credit of a tireless saint, Fransiscus Xaverius, and the whole regiment of Portuguese missionaries who, with some surgical exactness, opened up the wilderness for the Gospel.

Xaverius made baptism sort of in vogue even among chieftains and lords. He was reported to have got a Tidorese Queen christened -- which revived some interest back home among the diehard wishers of the existence of the fabulous 'Prester John', a sweet bull about a Christian king of a rich land of the barbarians, popular during the hopeless Crusade.

But still most of the Ternatenese were Muslims. While Islam didn't smack of colonialism, Christianity surely did, heavily so; there was no way to elude the inevitable friction between the two.

After Portugal let go of Maluku, the Dutch evangelists were swarming the region in the name of Protestantism. Now not two but three different religions were on the similar mission at once in the area.

The Muslim kings of Ternate tried to check at least the newest invaders; the Dutch responded with a lot of arsenal.

Until the dawn of the 21st century the inter-religion conflict of Maluku would be constant, no matter how calm it looked like in certain periods of the republican life.

Meanwhile, although none suspected so yet, the seeds of a unified empire of Japan would be carefully and quickly (both are typically Japanese in that, thrown together, they don't make a self-contradictory statement) nurtured and realized.

This was the year my personal hero when I was young Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) was born.

1546 Banten declared itself an independent Islamic kingdom, no longer content with being a part of Demak's territory.

1568 Demak's center of governance, in this dusk of its life (not that it knew so at the time) was moved far into the interior of the island of Java, to Pajang ([pron. 'pah-junk'] a very small strip of land, now a part of Solo) by Hadiwijaya, son in-law of the late Sultan Trenggana. Hence the realm was called the Pajang sultanate.

But this li'l kingdom didn't survive for long. Less than twenty years later, after Hadiwijaya's death, his son couldn't keep control while the encroaching shoreline kingdoms had become too strong for it to resist. He handed down the throne, in an unprecedented move, to the son of his Grand Vazier.

This son, Sutawijaya, closed the history of Pajang and opened another, the new Mataram's. This will stay until today.

Sutawijaya cleared up acres of woods between today's Yogya and Solo, set up a palace there, exerted control of the surrounding area.

As king he assumed the title of Panembahan Senapati ('the General of Wisdom') and so founded the last Javanese empire in history.

Unlike the olden days Mataram, this new Mataram was Muslim. But the Mataramese Islam was smoothly synchretic..........

1570 The disillusioned Ternatenese Sultan Hairun suddenly waged war against Portugal in Maluku. With ammo in an alarming scarcity, and not having enough fingers to pull the triggers, the Portuguese asked for a ceasefire, followed by invitation to negotiate peace at their base, Fort Santo Paulo. Hairun came as expected -- and murdered there. This naked crime surely ignited the Malukunese's wrath. Hairun's son, the next king Baabullah, fought on and never wanted to hear of negotiations.

1575 Baabulah kept his vow; he defeated the Portuguese even as he had to pay that with his life. The survivors sailed away from Maluku, landed in East Timor. There the Portuguese would remain until 1976, and as a result Roman Catholicism became East Timorese major belief. Maluku, under the Dutch rule later on, adopted Protestantism as the majority's religion; so was the case with West Papua.

1579 Sir Francis Drake of England landed in Ternate, Maluku. He's the very first Britishperson ever seen in Indonesia.

This year was also the dawn of the 'Republic of Seven United Netherlands'. These states were incurably sickened under the constant discriminatory whacking and random hate-crimes that the deadly duet of Spain's Philip II and his English 'Bloody Mary' had taken to be their mission in life. The burning and torturing of Protestants kept going on as far as Spaniards were concerned, even after Mary's pathetic death, as England was back to sensible religious toleration and in the meantime was on the way to glory days under Elizabeth I.

The situation had worn some Dutchmen edgy and this finally stung them to action. Led by William of Orange, Count of Nassau (1533-1584), Dutchpersons fought the so-called 'eighty years war'.

'Willem the Silent', as he was also known, went into national history with fanfare as 'Father of the Fatherland', and the Dutch national anthem 'Wilhelmus' was composed in his honor as founder of the nation in its current incarnation.

1588 Sultan Alaudin Riayat Syah ascended in Aceh, to rule until 1604. In his time the Dutch expedition led by Cornelis de Houtman came to Indonesia, initiating some increasingly 'serious' business with the locals that finally would amount to colonization.

1600 This year, when the English East India Company was founded (it was the first joint stock company on this planet).

Fleet of the infamous Dutch VOC & first colonial Governor-General Jan Pieterzoon Coen

1602 The Generale Verenigde Geoctroyeerde Oost Indische Compagnie (Company of Eastern Indian General Trade, VOC) was founded in the Netherlands by the initiative of Johann van Oldenbarneveldt. Its officers - partly militias, partly businessmen -- intensified their activities around the archipelago later known as 'the Netherlands' East Indies' - Indonesia.

It is inaccurate to say that all of Indonesia was its colony for 350 years, nevermind that this number has been imprinted on the minds of generations until today as the mark of national misery. A good chunk of Indonesia had never been colonized until 1910's. But the number is a more or less valid guesstimate if the years counted are any with some Dutchmen around. A noticeable number of Dutchmen had been working for Portuguese vessels when their own fleet still went nowhere.

1603 Sir James Lancaster established the first British trading post in Banten, West Java. This century was to be filled with random British presence (scattered in various spots like Jambi and Bengkulu in Sumatera, Makassar in Sulawesi, Ambon and Banda in Maluku).

Though to most Indonesians any caucasian 'guest' was as bad as another, the particular nation of Sir James' wasn't so utterly keen in making itself an Indonesian nightmare -- although it was perhaps only because we were not India.

1605 Daeng (= Chief) Manrabia of Goa, a maritime estate in Southern Sulawesi (an Indonesian island as big as North Dakota), was converted to Islam and took the name of Sultan Alaudin. From the beginning he was against the Dutch that started to press on trade concessions. From one generation to another, the Goanese sultans kept this policy and attitude of anti-colonialism intact.

1607 The greatest of all Acehnese kings, Sultan Iskandar Muda (the name is the exact Islamic synonym of 'Young Alexander'), ascended. During his reign until 1636, Aceh grew to be an important transit port that linked the West and the East in the busy trade of the time.

1613 Sultan Agung (he's never referred to by any name but this general title that means 'The Glorious Sultan'; his name when ascended was Hanyokrokusumo) had been, by now, known as the greatest Mataramese king of all times.

The sickeningly rusty and redundant phrase 'greatest king' is suspicious in every case -- what, actually, 'greatest kings' do?

In trying to make sense of the history of Indonesia, even until today, a chronic indigestion awaits if we don't have any idea what the Javanese politics is all about. We better start from the beginning..........

Greatest Muslim leaders of Indonesian kingdoms:
Sultan Agung of Mataram,
Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa of Banten &
Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta

1619 Prince Jayakarta, a minor duke of West Java, lost the war he waged against the fresh crowd of Dutch mariners seeking to land in his territory.

Over the ruins of Jayakarta's duchy, the first Governor-General of the 'East Indies', Jan Pieterzoon Coen, built a whole new city he named Batavia.

Seriously wanting in manpower to finish the job as quickly and perfectly as he hoped it to be, Chinese immigrants were recruited. This fortified place of moneymaking was to be the Indonesian capital Jakarta [pron. 'jah-car-tah'].

1628 Sultan Agung of Mataram, recognizing the mounting danger now that the Dutch has gotten its defensible homebase, decided to strike before too late, while they were still far enough (around 275 miles away) from his land. He led his soldiers westward himself, and they besieged Batavia twice in the same year.

This campaign to kick the Dutch out of Java failed, but it was remembered as a good try.

The Sultan's forces were never defeated by gunpowder and cutlasses; in both attempts they were forced to retreat by more natural causes such as shortage of food and rampage of diseases.

In both cases, too, the Dutch had come to the point of nearing surrender when, right under their disbelieving eyes, the enemy retreated for seemingly no reason whatever.

The only significant casualty of war was freedom.

With the last of the Sultan's men retreating, Mataram was to face the darkest clouds over it.

1645 Sultan Agung died. The Prince Regent of Mataram ascended, calling himself Amangkurat I (the first).

With the kind of personality and characteristics not dissimilar with pre-Revolution French kings, the new sultan immediately allied himself with the Dutch, reversing every policy his father painstakingly built up.

Amangkurat would be remembered as the cruelest Javanese king ever, encapsuled within a paranoia nearly matching that of the Roman Nero's.

In his time, thousands had died for whatever (slight or great, real or imagined) mistake committed against the king. Payback in blood didn't exclude royal princes and such of his own family.

His son, the Prince that would be King Amangkurat II, was no better, though some historians apologetically forwarded the idea that he started out as a sanely likeable young man, and would perhaps have stayed so, if not for his dear papa's intervention.

This is meant to refer to an incident when Amangkurat Junior was eighteen or nineteen, and eloped with the freshest mistress of his father's Minister of War. The king, pressed by the Minister, managed to drag the lovers back to town; but the Minister killed the woman when she was returned to him, upon which the Prince got a nervous breakdown from which he had never ever recovered since.

1648 Declaration again from the Netherlands. This time the Dutchpersons decided that they were now independent from Spain. After such a slow, labyrinthine and generally unclear process to arrive at that, naturally this announcement made no difference whatever overseas where Dutch merchants and militia were busy making fortunes.

1651 Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa (the Javanese word 'Ageng' is politically synonymous with 'Agung', but denoting more of size rather than magnitude) became Banten's greatest king and brought it up against the Dutch.

Sadly, his own son, Prince Regent Haji, resented the father's anti-colonialist politics. In the height of the domestic dispute -- in which both father and son summoned soldiers to their sides -- the Prince appealed for the Dutch's help. The help desperately solicited was generously granted. Then the Dutch put him on the throne.

1652 The first of the wars between the Netherlands and England, a mere 'preface' to the wasted years from now until the far end of the century.

No perceptible effect upon the colonies, but each of the Anglo-Dutch wars left their masters poorer than before. Once in a while some exchange of cannonballs seemed necessary whenever some Dutch and English colonial voyagers accidentally met.

The fate of the Netherlands itself kept on flowing along its usual course since prehistory.

In 1672 Holland's condition was so devastating that the Dutch referred to it as 'The Disaster Year'; economy slumped, anxiety mounted, casualties piled up.

At the end of these wars, when England stopped shooting at it, the Netherlands was invaded by France, Cologne and Münster.

1654 The most famous of all sultans that ever reigned in Goa (Makassar), a Southern Sulawesinese kingdom of mariners, Sultan Hasanuddin, took to the throne.

Those days, fame wasn't so easily achieved; most subjects of any kingdom in Indonesia never even heard of other kingdoms' kings even if one of these kings' palace was just a glance away across the street, so to speak.

Hasanuddin was different.

His men were seafarers, his royal armed forces were backboned by Admirals rather than Generals of cavalry; in times of peace they still took to the sea and dropped anchor in whichever friendly area they found.

Long before Hasanuddin ascended, the naval warriors of Makassar had already been legendary. Their adventures were told far and away as awe-inspiring epics, much like the British Royal Navy (or alternately Spanish pirates) were legendary to their contemporary Europe.

Some of the Makassarese were soldiers of fortune in other kingdoms, like the famous group that lent their service to the Yogyanese sultanate.

In this business, usually the Makassarese formed an elite force within the client's army. They were given an area to stay at their own way -- since the Javanese custom is lightyears away from their cultural traits. In Yogya, the sub-district of Bugisan used to be their HQ; the name came from exactly that fact.

Hasanuddin, the long-haired, heavily-moustached Muslim king who, people said, feared no one but God, spent his entire life fighting the Dutch as did the kings before him.

His son Mappasomba continued the constant resistance after Hasanuddin's death.

1669 Makassar fell after the super-long struggle. It wasn't a clean victory for the Dutch, nor it was a honorable defeat for the Indonesians, for in it the ugly monster of fratricide (as far as seen through a nationalist point of view) presented itself in the nude.

Finding themselves exhausted in the endless war, suddenly the Dutch got a native army to their relief.

These soldiers' commander was Prince Palaka, ruler of Bone, neighbor and rival of Goa.

Palaka had been eyeing Goa for long, dreaming of a united kingdom of the two under his control. Although Goa so far was always busy killing Dutchmen, Palaka still couldn't find his chance -- until he decided to assist (and extract assistance from) the Dutch.

After the war, he was made king of both realms. Not a really spiffy job, this, as he soon found out what he was demanded to give to the former ally.

Meanwhile, Britain, China, Portugal and Denmark were forced to get out of business in Makassar by the Dutch victors. VOC began its monopoly around the area. It has managed to destroy so much of the Malukunese Muslim kingdoms earlier -- some historians said it was the bloodiest campaign it ever raised, and historians don't swear, so that was literally gory.

1682 The kingdom of Banten, West Java, lost its freedom for good; getting under the Dutch rule.

This was kind of sudden -- only a year ago the Sultan, Abdul Fatah, sent his Ambassadors to London, where they actually met King Charles II who personally handed a letter to the Sultan. All seemed sort of well then. But when the next Ambassadors got back home this year (after seeing Shakespeare's The Tempest at a theater), they found a new king had been waiting for them. The same ugly old story was unrolled in their absence: Prince Abdul Kahar had seized the throne from his dad, assisted by the Dutch, with the usual payback.

In the times of the VOC, native kingdoms generally retained their cultural status and to some degree the political one; the thing being surrendered to the Dutch was especially and in some cases solely sovereignty over trade and economy.

Only when the administration of the colony was taken over by the Dutch government an active colonization faithful to theory was to be had; in which Java, for example, was governed (previously only administered) by a tentacle of the Netherlander government; territorially it was rearranged accordingly into units of governance that did not necessarily conform to the native map.

1684 The British East Indian Company (EIC) erected the Marlborough Fort in Bengkulu, South Sumatera, from where it hoped to drive the Dutch out of its strict monopoly in spice trade.

1697 German naturalist Georg Everard Rumpf (better known simply as 'Rumphius') launched Het Amboinsch Kruid-boek (The Ambonese Herbal Book), to be followed in 1705 by D'Amboinsche Rariteitenkamer (The Ambonese Treasure of Curios), which was magically told of in Maria Dermôut's beautifully eerie novel De tienduizend dingen (The Ten Thousand Things, 1955).

Blind in later years of his life, Rumphius was Beethoveny in senses -- in this case visual. He dictated detailed accounts of shades of colors of the botanical specimens he had gathered around Maluku -- his residence until his death -- with remarkable accuracy.

His books weren't passable as leisure reading materials, but the gigantic bulk of notes on Malukunese plants and underwater creatures were masterpieces of their own kind. Some historians nailed him as the one responsible for the first spark of non-financial interest the colonial regime showed towards Indonesia.

In this Rumphius was backed up by the Governor-General Johannes Camphuis (1634-1695), who had no mentionable record of political or economic success in office but was known as a devoted 'scientific' man -- meaning that he was prone to get enchanted by some dirty details of vegetative nature.

Camphuis saved Rumphius' manuscripts from being committed to oblivion; he had them copied in Batavia when they were on the way to the Netherlands. Therefore the manuscripts still saw print when the ship that carried them was plundered and destroyed by pirates.

Among Camphuis' laudable actions as Governor-General, as was told by Nicolaus de Graaf in his series of travel books published since 1701, here is one that could upset sensibility of our times.

There was a European woman in Batavia who, upon some homemaking error by an Indonesian servant, punished the latter by letting her to be eaten alive by ants.

The mistress with this creative evil mind was then arrested, and Camphuis had her nose and ears cut in public; a sentence that spoke of his legendary abhorrence of domestic crimes against slaves and servants in colonial Dutch homes -- a warning to the rest of slave-abusers in the language they knew well.

I guess I forgot to mention slavery although it was alive in colonial Indonesia.

But, disgustingly subhuman this practice is always, the slaves didn't constitute the lowest level of existence there; the free populace was.

I'm not kidding.

There were two kinds of slaves, one was a few sighs away from being okay, while to the other even a sigh was a luxury..........

1.) Tan Eng Goan, 2). Tan Cheng Bo, 3). Kwik Kian Gie, 4). Agnes Monica, 5). Agus Suwage

Instead of being referred to as 'Chinese', Indonesian Chinese prefer to be called 'Tionghoa'. In this sample of prominent Tionghoans of their own times and in their own fields here is Major Tan Eng Goan of Batavia in full formal dress of his clan (1837). Then the most famous Tionghoan actor in the first few decades of last century, Tan Cheng Bo, in what was supposed to be some Shakespearean costume (1930's).

Indonesian history consistently overlooked the parts played by individual Tionghoans in struggles for independence since colonial times; only after 2002 a little effort to unearth Tionghoan literature and biographies slowly started. In 2003, Ca Bau Kan, the first Indonesian movie that starred by Tionghoans and the first that featured Tionghoans' roles in Indonesian war of independence was made an instant box-office, even got critical attention in the Cannes Festival.

The re-writing of the official Indonesian history that promised a 'new perspective' is still unfinished today. Tan Cheng Bo's Dardanella theater was one of the persistently forgotten pieces of history. Since before Indonesia existed as an independent nation, mobile theater bunches (they played dramas, performed acrobats, presented singers and dancers in some kind of variety shows) had already been demonstrating what it's like to be Indonesian. All ethnicities were represented there, including Tionghoans and Eurasians.

The third pic is of Kwik Kian Gie, politician of Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Struggle Party since a long time ago when Megawati was Suharto's heavily-oppressed nemesis, and her Minister when she was President (2002). Kwik is an example of professional homo politicus that is a rare species in Indonesia regardless of race and ethnicity, because Suharto's regime never let anyone to learn of the game in a true sense.

The fourth pic shows Agnes Monica, the most popular Tionghoan actress between 2003-2004, who got up from being a popular kid singer to teenage idol via TV series she starred in, Pernikahan Dini ('Too Young To Be Married'). Tionghoan kids inundated Indonesian TV screens around 2000, when out of the blue there was a boom of junior singers. A lot of them were perfectly devoid of talent, but it was not a roadblock to visibility (and unlistenability), since the recording and airtime were probably financed by their own dads. Monica accidentally belonged to the better class than those, when she was a kid.

The fifth picture is a snapshot of Agus Suwage, one phenomenal star in fine arts after 2000; another wonder of the world as far as art-illiterates like me are concerned: by obsessive self-preoccupation (he seems to have been painting virtually nothing but his own face and body) in twisted realism he has snatched critical acclaim and obese bank accounts at once -- personifying the new down-to-earth ideal of Indonesian artists of this century.

His noted female counterpart is Ay Tjoe Christine, an unusually good-looking painter, a fairly recent addition to the Indonesian list of artists, who in her splashing debut got one prestigious national award in 2002. Ay Tjoe arrests attention mainly because of her innovative transfer of printing techniques to canvases using oil paint, and for her visualizing style that somehow evokes ancient Confucian sketches in their sublimest form (although they all remind me of John van Buuren's illustrations of children's books.

Most of the best and biggest Indonesian art galleries and collectors are Tionghoans, but the number of Tionghoan artists is probably less than 5% of the total couple of hundred or so of the ever-heard-of. (there's never been a census, and it would wreck nerves to try to do one).

1740 This was one of the goriest years in colonial history. Around ten thousand Chinese people were massacred in Batavia, following a day of riot that was said to be induced by some Chinese illegal immigrants resisting deportation.

Chinese-Indonesians (the Tionghoans) have always been victims of the worst kinds of mobocratic violence in Indonesia regardless of the issue -- the latest plethora of which sticks to the collective memory of 1998.

And as far as the Indonesian national history was concerned, nothing whatsoever happened, that related to Tionghoans.

For 800 years they'd been sensationally ignored by domestic historians and only very cautiously hinted at by friendly foreign researchers rummaging through Indonesian history.

It's a very long story..........

The Javanese kingdoms that last until today.

The picture above is supposed to offer a glance at the last empire of Java, Mataram, after being squeezed and sliced into the anomalous colonial 'land of the kings' (see that map).

At the left is the Kingdom of Yogyakarta under the Hamengkubuwono sultans and the Pakualam dukes.

At the right is the Kingdom of Surakarta (Solo) under the Pakubuwono kings and autonomous Mangkunegoro princes.

Springing from one and the same aristocracy, the two territories only differ (but greatly) in personality of their rulers and governmental styles as related to the people and the Dutch.

The specimental picture of a Solonese aristocrat above also represents one of Yogya's, and the picture of the Yogyanese man could fairly serve as that of a Solonese, although details of their formal dresses are very different if observed by the initiated (how the men wear their headgears alone is a lot different between the two kingdoms, even as the headgears in question look similar to foreign eyes).

The Javanese architectural genre of joglo houses (whose main halls and antechambers comprise of some high-vaulted ceiling supported by slim cubic pillars shading vast open spaces without walls) is, without marked difference, characteristic of both realms. The joglo at the right is typical of dwellings of ordinary mortals, made of Kalimantanese wood or local bricks, while the one at the left is the Yogyanese Palace's Golden Hall (Bangsal Kencana), which follows the same architectural basics except that it is done in tough (and headachingly expensive) Javanese teak and marble, mercilessly carved to perfection, and meticulously gilded at the right spots.

Javanese kings hold audience in that sort of hall since the day they got to the throne. Actually Javanese kings don't have thrones as Europeans and Chinese take them to mean -- i.e. a more or less immovable extravagantly decorated massive chair for each. But chairlessness isn't practiced as in Japan either. Kings, queens, great councillors (or grand vaziers), and guests whose status is equal to them sit on what could be just any best chairs around, while everybody below those ranks must sit on the floor.

Similar furniturial arrangement and court etiquette is applied in every level of aristocracy (so a Duke sits on a chair while his Regents sit on the floor in a duchy audience, then a Regent sits on a chair while his advisors sit on the floor in regency meeting, and so on, down to the arrangement of personal living rooms at home). Alternately, several sorts of chairs are set for those in an audience, differentiated by height of legs and whether or not they are furnished with backs (stools in this case serve as signifiers of lesser political ranks). But, in all scenes and in all levels, servants and regular soldiers can get no higher seat than the floor, including in noblepersons' houses.

We can't afford to dismiss a seemingly trivial fuss like that from studies of history; it characterizes a 'theater state' as Javanese kingdoms (and for that matter also Indonesian republic) have been known as. A breach of such an arrangement had brought grim consequences in the past, and in many cases led to wars.

1746 Prince Mangkubumi (the name means, literally, 'on whose lap the world rests'), Duke of today's Yogyakarta, for some personal reasons and a political grudge (he lost patience with the king of Mataram over the latter's cooperative tendency regarding the Dutch, and thought him unfit to rule, plus he was also in the line of heirs to the throne) waged war against the king who, naturally, was backed up by the Dutch. This civil war raged for nine years.

1755 The war ended when the Dutch decided to relent to Mangkubumi's conditions for peace. Mataram was cut in two. The last king of Mataram, Sunan Pakubuwono II (the name means 'axis of the universe'), became sovereign only over Surakarta (Solo), namely half of his previous domain. Mangkubumi got himself free from tributary chains -- his former lord was now a mere colleague on equal footing.

Mangkubumi's share of territory was to be the kingdom of Yogyakarta, which he ruled as Sultan Hamengkubuwono ('guardian of the universe') I. The two kingdoms would be, of course, in no warm relationship after this, and the ensuing cold war would be kept almost intact until Indonesia's independence.

Therefore no joint-venture would spring out of the palaces.

That's why the Dutch agreed to Mangkubumi's demands anyway.

Glances at the spotlighted natives in colonial times: the dancer & the Prince.

The pic above shows Indonesian professional dancer Dewi Dja of the famous Dardanella theater, one of the first divas of this Republic. Here she was instructing Hollywood's Claudette Colbert in the making of 20th-century Fox' Three Came Home [left].

At the right is family portrait of Prince Mangkunegoro VII (the seventh). He's the one leaning on the sword, in his usual military uniform, since he was also a Colonel of the Royal Dutch Colonial Forces. The woman at his right, in light-colored kebaya, is his wife Princess Timur (if Mangkunegoro were a king, she would be queen, that's why her chair is taller). The man in academic toga at the left is the Prince's son in-law, and the woman in dark kebaya, seating on the shorter stool, is Mangkunegoro's eldest daughter from a concubine. This pic was taken in 1925.

1757 Immensely dissatisfied with the way Mataram was going (meaning, that he was left out of the bargaining process), Lord Said of Solo [pron. 'sah-eed'] declared war against the sultan of Yogya, the king of Solo, and the Dutch of both areas, all at once.

According to contemporary records, his motives were for the greater part 'nationalist'; he got utterly disappointed to see his father in-law Sultan Hamengkubuwono I of Yogya getting strayed from his former anti-Dutch policy and betrayed his own initial target of a 'Java United' (i.e. some nostalgic aspiration for sovereignty as in Sultan Agung's heyday).

Yet it was just as true that Said, quite loudly anti-colonialist, got prosaic aims as well.

The war that went on for nearly two years ended with a further cut upon the Solonese kingdom. Almost half of it became Mas Said's estate, himself getting the highest rank possible nearing a king's, enabling him to build a dynasty and assume kingly habits and royal trappings, without being a king.

He took the name of Prince Mangkunegoro ('holder of the state') I.

This was cruelly ironic to the Yogyanese Sultan. He maintained that it was because of Mangkunegoro's uprising then he had no choice but to reconcile with the Solonese Pakubuwono II and in effect also with the Dutch garrisons in both kingdoms. No matter what Mangkunegoro thought of him, actually he wasn't about to retreat from his former position as a menace to colonialism. But nothing could be done now that it was over -- especially while Mangkunegoro himself was well on the way of revising his own anti-colonialism.

The next princes of the same pedigree would apply their own further 'correction' to the initially anti-colonialist creed, until one day it would stand upside-down.

At any rate Mangkunegoro I would still retain his own image as a flamboyant Dutch-fighting prince even though it was plain to see that nobody else enabled him to get the duchy, made it easy for him not just to maintain the new dynastic power but also to increase its influence, but the Dutch.

Even the lethal Daendels, Governor-General until 1815 who insulted everybody in his spare-time and sent thousands of Javanese men to die in forced-labor, increased the subsidy for Mangkunegoro's guards twice its former sum..........

1789 General George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America.

In Europe, things would never be the same again as this year marked the eruption of the French Revolution.

Both events infiltrated a good part of Indonesian nationalists' conscience; later the emerging leaders of the country like Sukarno, Sjahrir, and so on would find the American and the French revolutions stimulating their own patriotism, despite the very different characteristics of the three -- it wouldn't be 'settlers' or mestizos that liberated Indonesia, but its own 'Indians'; Indonesian republicans wouldn't guillotine kings and queens, but got some of them firmly by its side and the rest of them peacefully and irreversibly subordinated.

1795 King William of the Netherlands fled to England. There he handed over his kingdom's colonial affairs to the Brits. That's why the British military got very busy in and out of their own lands; they cannon-balled the Dutch strongholds in Indonesia (like in Padang, West Sumatera; and all over their favorite isles Maluku).

Having gotten rid of William, the Netherlands declared itself 'democratic' as Napoleon Bonaparte's France got increasingly warlusty within and outside its original boundaries. Seemed like the seeds of French Revolution found the best bed under the sea level.

The Netherland was practically a vassal state of France until 1810.

Luckily, most Indonesians never even knew this.

It would have been beyond unbearable to have been colonized by some conquered colonists.

And the Hollanders were too frequently in this funny position -- getting in and out of subordination to, at least, Spain, French and Germany in some alarming regularity.

The so-called 'Batavian Republic' would live a life shorter than the time needed to explain what this was all about.

1799 The VOC, beyond any repair, was declared bankrupt. Cancerous corruption had been rendering it virtually lifeless enough to warrant the last departure of soul uneventful. Later vulgarists would say that the acronym of its name stood better for Vergaan Onder Corruptie (Fallen Under Corruption) -- and this wasn't too unreasonable.

From the beginning, the only motive shared by thousands of the colonial Dutchmen was how to get rich as quickly as possible, which was fine to the Crown, only in this case the 'getting rich' part was meant to be applied to themselves individually, and not at all for the benefit of the VOC or the Netherlands.

The mark of worldly success was social titles such as 'sugar lord' in Central Java, 'tea squire' in West Java, or 'big boss' (of tobacco) in Northern Sumatera, if one wasn't in the government.

So the common mode of operation was 'each to his own loot' -- robbing the Netherlands, their own Trade Union, and Indonesians, all at once...........

1801 British forces, assisted by the Tidorese under Sultan Nuku's command, attacked and captured the Dutch fort in Ternate.

For this victory, the chief of British affairs around Maluku, Robert Townsend Farquhar, was instantly fired.

1805 The Netherlands declared itself a kingdom again, no longer a republic -- not that it mattered to anyone in the colony.

It was done for the French anyway -- Napoleon Bonaparte put his brother Louis (written as 'Lodewijk' if Dutchified) on the throne as the king of the Netherlands in 1806.

As I said, Louis or no Louis, there was no important effect on the colonies.

But, as the VOC no longer existed and yet to consider its colonies as also inexistent was out of the question, administration of them were taken over by the Government.

1809 Napoleon Bonaparte's Marshall Herman Willem Daendels took over Java. This republican Dutch Governor-General would have infamy tailing his name as far as Indonesians are concerned.

Javanese aristocrats, whose culture disallowed expressions of unbecoming emotions (hatred is among these), found it increasingly hard not to take offence at every move made by 'that cheesy boar' substantially enmeshed in golden medals and epaulettes.

Single-handedly Daendels had managed to insult every native Javanese in his own brand of democratic venom regardless of social ranks, although monarcy was his pet victim.

This went so far that his officers were, to their own mortification, ordered to assume all the native aristocratic trappings -- resulting in ridiculous spectacles such as some apparently ill-at-ease caucasians in heatstroke-inducing regalia being tailed everywhere by literally platoons of little servants who stoically bore the ordeal of manning giant gilded umbrellas over their masters' towering figures, who couldn't even walk in natural steps because they got to go behind another score of paraphernalia-bearing servants, that these tortured masters couldn't dismiss because their presence must get preceded by the appearance of these elaborate signals of (Javanese) power.

Daendels would be especially remembered for the most horrific insult he had hurled, this time his target was nothing less than humanity itself.

He was the one whose order for forced-labor to open 'the French road' across Java (from Anyer in the West to Banyuwangi in the East, comparable to one across the New York State from edge to edge) claimed as many casualties as a war -- the thousands of unpaid, underfed, diseased, overworked Central Javanese males who were marched to the job never came back.

1810 The man who would be Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was ordered to sail away to Malaka with the mission to plan British invasion of Java. Sending open letters to non-Javanese monarchs nearby, such as the king of Buleleng (Bali) and the king of Madura island, plus the more or less British-friendly shoreline Javanese kings, like the sultans of Cirebon (West Java), but not to those that had been 'too Dutch' like the Mataramese deeper inland, Raffles elicited support for his campaign.

At least those kings I've just mentioned replied favorably.

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and his History of Java.
The Javanese man portrayed on the flyleaf of Raffles' book is Sir Ronodipuro,
who went to England with him in 1816 after the island was given back to the Dutch.

1811 Java was handed over to the British under Thomas Stamford Raffles when Europe finally got decisively sick of hearing about Bonaparte.

It wasn't so loud as to be called a war, the invasion; in less than two months the British had conquered all of Java.

Raffles would maintain relations with the native rulers who had been amiable prior to the invasion, and with some others like Sultan Syarif Kasim of Pontianak (West Kalimantan), and Sultan Abdul Rahman of the Riau isles (near Sumatera), to the joy of the British Museum (later when he dragged his Indonesian royal letters and ancient manuscripts back to London and published his book The History of Java in 1817).

Raffles' first words to Indonesians after the invasion were characteristic. He told the natives that from now on they would be dealing with Britain. And he challenged them to compare what life was like under the Dutch and under the Brits. He said it would be proven that the latter was incomparably better. Then he told them to get back to work.

As chief administrator of the colony, Raffles was rather well-liked here, at least Indonesians would remember him without rancor and even in occasional thankful note around a century later, although this Englishman had his own blots of un-virtue.

A few nativepersons actually lamented his departure when Java was handed back to the Dutch five years later, because the British way was, as Raffles had confidently predicted, felt as a great deal more endurable compared to the Dutch colonialism.

Sure, Raffles was closer to Singapore because he had found it, but not until after he helped unearthing Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple on this planet, in Central Java. His first wife was buried in Jakarta, too; that made him something of a 'permanent resident' in some romantic minds.

And as Raffles went away, gone, too, our chance to make sense of the English language. A century later this would still be regretted, at least by my grandmother. (Indonesians have been famous as the third-worst Asians in matters related to the English language. Today they seem like aspiring to be on top of the list currently led by the Japanese).

Anyway, this year, when Raffles started to work, he found that the Dutch colonial community he must govern consisted of some semi-barbarian landowners whose ultimate form of enlightenment, peak of arts, and scientific achievement was a newspaper -- which to a whole lot of them even remained mysterious behind the fog of illiteracy.....

1816 The Brits gave Java back to the Dutch, whose first action was to cancel projects started by Raffles, that were detrimental to their tightfisted policy.

Although times had changed, and the previous view of the natives in colonies as some strange exotic subhuman population had been altered into the characteristic 'noble savage' attribute, this was in the realm of the abstract, not of real life.

Education was promptly reversed to the way it used to be -- namely, none.

The return of the Dutch brought grim consequences to the Javanese kings, who were treated the worst by Daendels and got their trials to hatch mutinies -- when Raffles was still around -- put down.

The Sultan of Yogya, Hamengkubuwono II, was to suffer retaliation for his part in a plot of rebellion, said to be planned since 1812. He was forced to abdicate and exiled, his treasury confiscated, and a small chunk of his territory was taken away, to be given to Prince Notokusumo who would be Duke Pakualam I.

The Dutch intended to make Pakualaman a 'kingdom within kingdom' truly in the Solonese Mangkunegaran fashion, but this particular Yogyanese Duke wasn't as ambitious as the Solonese was, although from now on the head of the Pakualam clan would automatically be the Sultan's Grand Councillor, and in the events of vacancy of the throne (when the Sultan has died but his heir is underage) the Duke would rule as Regent until the new sultan ascends, a convention that has been observed until today. The relation between Pakualams and Sultans of Yogya, then, would be very different from the one between the Pakubuwonos (Solonese kings) and Mangkunegoros; while the Solonese would keep trying to 'kill' each other until 1950, the Yogyanese always work together in the name of one realm. This solidity ushered the kingdom smoothly into republican times, while history left Solo behind. In 2004, while the Sultan is Governor of Yogya, the Pakualam is his Deputy, as usual. The palaces in Solo are by now nothing but museums of wrong steps in the past.

1819 One of the 'best' Governor-Generals for the colony, Godart Alexander Gerard Philip, Baron van der Capellen, was sent to Java to start his term in office.

It was a bad choice for the Dutch. Van der Capellen was just as Rafflesian as Raffles had been, and the issue of miseducation was brought back to the realm, as well as forced labor that repulsed him.

He even lowered taxes and abolished the loony habit of dispatching 'ghost boats' to terrorize Maluku in 1824 when, driven to the frayed ends of misery, a rural insurrection erupted, led by Captain Pattimura (real name was Thomas Matulesi)...........

1825 While his Sultan thought it unwise to openly resist the encumbering Dutch, Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta [pron. 'jog-jah-car-tah'], on some personal pretext (that the Dutch had cut through his duchy to build a road without even bothered to tell him that they would do that) declared war.

One of the most famous of Indonesian heroes, the pious Prince in his all-white Arabian turban and dramatic flowing robes, soft-spoken Islamic creeds, pronounced anti-colonialist principle, tested concern about general welfare, and indifference towards the usual luxuries, personified goodness in the eyes of the people. This was to be the first 'popular' resistance against colonialism in Java...........

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