Batavia: Heritage Lost
Historical buildings in Jakarta are becoming scarcer by the day, as unscrupulous developers tear them down one by one. Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs, a book by Scott Merrillees, presents the city in colonial times, with its intriguing concept of urban planning. Soon, though, we may have nothing left of those days.
January 23, 2001
It happened one day in 1815, across the canal in the area of Harmoni.
Raffles tossed a bundle of keys into the water. That was how he inaugurated the Harmonie Society, the oldest Dutch dancing hall in Asia, also home to the library of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. The key drop into the waterway symbolized the ever-open doors of Harmoni (as it was later called) to those wishing to relish the wealth of arts and sciences.
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