JAKARTA

Jakarta the Vast National Capital and the “Mother City” of the Republic of Indonesia is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan places in the world. It has also for centuries been a very important and strategic Southeast Asian port city where some of the first encounters between the East and the West took place during the early16th century when the first of Asia-bound ships from Portugal sailed here in search of spices and other riches. Those pioneering Portuguese were followed nearly century later by Dutch, English and other early Asia explorers and ever since those times Jakarta has been the most important harbor city on the south side of the busy strait of Malacca. It has also always been a very cosmopolitan place, dating back to as early as the fifth century when its original port town, Sunda Kelapa, was frequented by traders form China, Japan, India, Vietnam and other parts of Asia.

Sunda Kelapa – which over the years evolved into Jayakarta, Batavia and now Jakarta – was a teeming entrepot where Indian Hindus, Chinese Buddhist and Arabic Muslims met to trade goods, stories and even genes. As Adolf Heuken one of this book’s authors, has previously written about the city’s Old Batavia period: “Languages of all kinds mixed in the harbor, in the offices, churches. Mosques and kleng-tengs (Chinese temples): Calvinist services in French were held in the first Stadhuis (City Hall).Indians prayed at their mosque in the Pekojan district n Arabic; Chinese worshipped their gods in the klengteng Lu Ban Gong in the Hakka dialect and in the Chen-shi-zi-miao in the Hokkien dialect. The Arabs followed their sayids in the Anawir Mosque and the Germans sang their hymns in the Lutheran Church. Portuguese was for a long time the most widely spoken language in Dutch Batavia and Balinese was used in the kanpung (villages) and strongly influenced the Betawi dialect, which still shows a strong influence of Balinese grammar…”

This colorful mix of people, languages and cultures continues even today because most of Greater Jakarta’s huge population is a mixtureof millions of people from throughout the Indonesian archipelago (and from others parts of Asia) who begin immigrating here following Independence (merdeka) in 1945. They have all chosen Jakarta as the place to seek new challenges, enjoy social independence and find greater prosperity.