•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

Jakarta is celebrating its 483rd anniversary and a number of celebrations have been lined up, from the Jakarta Great Sale to numerous cultural festivals.

It is not all fun and revelry, however. The Wisata Masup Jakarta group, organized by publication company Masup Jakarta, is choosing to remember a tragic moment in history by organizing a walking tour in Kota Tua, Central Jakarta, to remember the Chineesche Troebelen in the 1740s.

According to JJ Rizal, a historian from the University of Indonesia who is one of the tour guides, the term Chineesche Troebelen is often translated as Chinese Riot.

“Troebelen means riot, a term which was popularized by the colonial government to soften the event because riot means something that came from the people and not the government,” Rizal said. “In this case, the colonials put the blame on the Chinese people, who dominated Batavia at the time.”

Rizal further explains that the Chinese community here prefers to use the term massacre to refer to the butchering of thousands of ethnic Chinese by the Dutch colonial government in Batavia.

The four-hour tour is called Wisata Masup Jakarta, which literally means a Tour of Coming Into Jakarta. The tour’s itinerary is based on books, novels and other historical documents with the aim of encouraging people to be more familiar with the story.

For this particular tour, the route is based on the history books “De Chineezen te Batavia en de Troubelen van 1740” (“Chinese in Batavia and the Riot in 1740) by Johannes Theodorus Vermulen and “Kapiten Tionghoa di Betawi Dalem Tahon 1740” (“A Chinese Captain in Betawi in 1740”) by B. Hoetink.

Participants receive the books before the tour. Rizal and Suma Mihardja, a lawyer by profession, are the guides who explain what the dark events in 1740.

During the tour, the guides referred to the Chinese as the “Tionghoa people.” The tour starts at the Jakarta History museum — previously the city hall or stadhuis of the colonial government — making its way to the Kali Besar area (the Great River), about five minutes away on foot. Kali Besar, where most of the Chinese elite lived at the time and was the scene of the carnage.

Suma said that in 1740, the Chinese in Batavia comprised more than a third of its population at the time.

“The colonial government worried that [the Chinese] may harm the existence of Europeans in Batavia,” Suma said.

During its heyday in the 1740s, Kali Besar was the exclusive port where foreign ships entered Batavia. Today, however, Kali Besar is dirty and abandoned.

“Traffic at this river used to be very busy,” Suma said of the 4-meter wide body of water. The east bank of the river was once home to European and Chinese businesses. The elite of both group lived on the far shore of the waterway.

The tour group walked across the river, right past an old, rotting drawbridge that is no longer functional. Built in the 17th century, the bridge is called Jembatan Kota Inten.

After a few stops around the Kali Besar area, the group headed over to Toko Merah (Red Store), a reference popularized by the Betawi. Toko Merah used to be where Gustaaf Miller Baron van Imhoff, the general governor for the Dutch East Indies (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) from 1743-50, used to live. It was built in 1730, 10 years before the Chinese Riot.

The front part of the red-bricked, two-story building located on Jalan Kali Besar Barat has several tall windows, with some of the glass broken.

“Some windows still have its original glass, but some of the glass has been replaced. You can usually tell the original ones because they look thicker and dirtier,” Suma said.

Although Toko Merah is recognized as a cultural heritage building, the city government does not seem to have put much effort into maintaining it. On the exterior, the red-brick architecture is marred by ratty cables. “Those cables ruin the beauty of the building,” Suma said. “There should be a better plan to install the cables.”

And as if to illustrate the disrepair, one of the visitors during the tour nearly slipped when he was in one of the rooms on the second floor because the tiles were unstable.

The rooms at Toko Merah still have their original wallpaper and the stairs are covered with dusty carpet. The building has changed hands seven times.

After functioning as the governor’s residence, it was made into a navy academy and a hotel. It was last used as a store and office of a major Dutch company.

The tour group went on to the Pintu Kecil (Small Door) area, where the streets are narrow and congested and where the blue-collar Chinese workers once resided, before proceeding to a busy street right across an old dwelling known as Souw House.

The home belonged to Sour Siauw Tjong, one of the richest men in Batavia at the time. He was known for his generosity, donating his lands and building schools for the locals.

“His family still lives in the house and there is still a stable at the back,” Suma said. “What you see right now is only a part of the original building. Some have been destroyed and rebuilt.”

For the last stop, the tour proceeded to the State High School No. 19, which was previously known as Pa Hwa. There, tour goers were given refreshments such as bier-pletok and typical Chinese snacks, such as roti baso (meatball bread), kue mangkok (cupcake) and kue pisang (banana cake).

“Bier pletok is the Betawi Muslim’s version of beer,” Rizal said. “During the Dutch occupation, local people saw the Dutch soldiers drink alcohol and get drunk, but Betawi Muslims were not allowed to drink alcohol so they created their own beer called bier pletok, made from spices such as secang and ginger.”

The school building was where Tionghoa Hwe Koan, the first modern organization in Batavia, first came into existence. Tionghoa Hwe Koan, which initially focused on education, eventually evolved into a political organization.

Because of the strong stigma against the Chinese during the New Order era in 1968, the government changed the school’s name into Sekolah Pancaran Hidup, then to SMUN 19 in 1970.

Suma ended the tour by reminding participants that the Chinese Riot was not the only tragic event at the time, as there was also an economic crisis going on and crime in Batavia was high.

“There was a jealousy among the people in Batavia that the Chinese took all their jobs,” Suma said.

He added that during the riots, it was suspected that about 10,000 ethnic Chinese were killed. The Chinese immediately fled Batavia, with most of them going to Central Java.

“As the result, Batavia suffered the loss of the working-class Chinese for the next 20 years,” Suma said.

“The government eventually realized the quality of work that the Chinese did, which was considered as better than the Javanese and Sundanese.”

The tour is sure to open the eyes of those unfamiliar with this point in Jakarta’s past.

“When it comes to history, it depends on perspective, on who sees what,” Suma said.