If Jakarta's heat and chaos get too much, Bandung is the breather. Perched on a plateau more than 700 metres up, surrounded by volcanoes and tea plantations, this Sundanese city enjoys a cool climate that the Dutch adored and that today makes Bandung the favourite getaway for people from the capital. It's called the 'Paris of Java' for its elegant art deco architecture from the 1920s and 1930s, and also the 'city of flowers'; today it is also a creative, university and fashion capital, with a youthful energy you can feel in its cafés, shops and music.
Around the city, nature is pure geological fireworks. To the north, the Tangkuban Perahu volcano lets you peer into its steaming craters from the very rim, wrapped in the smell of sulphur and in the Sundanese legend of the 'overturned boat'. To the south, in the Ciwidey area, lies the unreal white crater of Kawah Putih, with its milky turquoise lake between ghostly slopes, plus tea plantations, mountain lakes and hot springs. It's a cool, green landscape that looks nothing like the tropical cliché of Indonesia.
This guide covers the best of Bandung with a practical eye: how to get there on the fast Whoosh train, which volcanoes and craters to visit and how, where to see the best art deco architecture, how to make the most of the famous clothing outlets and where to eat tasty Sundanese food. Bandung doesn't have one great single monument, but it offers something harder to find in Java: fresh air, mountains in view and a relaxed, pleasure-loving way to travel.
For centuries the Bandung region was the territory of the Sundanese people and their kingdoms, among them the Hindu kingdom of Sunda. The modern city was born in 1810, when the Dutch governor Herman Willem Daendels ordered the capital of the local regency to be moved there, next to the great road crossing Java (the Grote Postweg). Thanks to its cool climate and the wealth of the coffee plantations of the Preanger region, Bandung flourished as a hill station for the colonial elite and, in the early 20th century, filled with elegant art deco buildings that earned it the nickname 'Paris of Java'; the Dutch even planned to make it the new capital of the East Indies. During the war of independence, in 1946, its own residents set fire to the south of the city rather than hand it over intact to the Dutch, in the episode known as 'Bandung Lautan Api' (Bandung, sea of fire). And in 1955, Bandung entered world history by hosting the Asian-African Conference, the founding summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and cultural heart of Indonesia: home of Borobudur and the great Javanese empires, of the capital Jakarta and of a chain of volcanoes that defines the island.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there was a city, the Bandung plateau was the land of the Sundanese, Indonesia's second-largest ethnic group, with their own language, their own traditions and their own kingdom: the Hindu Sunda Kingdom, which ruled western Java for centuries. The region, cool and fertile, ringed by volcanoes and watered by the Citarum River, was home to farming communities long before the Europeans arrived. In fact, geological findings suggest that in the distant past the plateau itself was the bed of an ancient lake, 'Lake Bandung', which dried up and left behind a high plain.
Sundanese culture runs through Bandung's identity, and its most famous myth is tied to the very landscape around the city. The legend of Sangkuriang tells the tragic story of a young man who, without knowing it, falls in love with his own mother, Dayang Sumbi. When she discovers the truth, she sets him an impossible task to stop the wedding: build a great lake and a boat in a single night. Sangkuriang, helped by spirits, is about to pull it off, but Dayang Sumbi makes the dawn break early. Furious, the young man kicks the half-built boat, which lands upside down and becomes the Tangkuban Perahu volcano ('upturned boat'). So for the Sundanese, the mountain's outline tells a story.
This Sundanese foundation (its language, its music, such as the bamboo angklung, now on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list, and its food) is still alive in today's Bandung and sets it apart from central and eastern Java, where most people are Javanese.
Modern Bandung has an exact birth date: 25 September 1810. On that day the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, the forceful Marshal Herman Willem Daendels, ordered the local regent (bupati) to move the seat of the regency to a new site beside the great road he was building. That road, the Grote Postweg ('Great Post Road'), crossed the whole of Java from west to east for more than a thousand kilometres. It was built at a huge cost in the lives of Javanese forced labourers, and it ran right through what is now central Bandung. The city quite literally grew up along that road.
What made Bandung prosper was coffee. The cool mountains of the Preanger (Priangan) region around the city turned out to be ideal for growing coffee, which the Dutch imposed on Sundanese farmers through the so-called 'Preanger system' and later the 'Cultivation System' (Cultuurstelsel). The area's coffee became so famous that in many countries 'a cup of Java' came to mean a cup of coffee. That farming wealth drew planters, merchants and officials, and laid the groundwork for the city's rise.
Throughout the 19th century, Bandung grew into the administrative and commercial centre of a prosperous region. Its big draw was its mild climate, a relief from the stifling heat of the lowlands and of the capital, Batavia. It was about to become something far more ambitious.
Bandung's heyday came in the early decades of the 20th century. The railway arrived in 1884 and linked it to Batavia and the rest of Java, and the city became the fashionable getaway for the colonial elite: a cool, elegant and sophisticated place where wealthy planters, officials and well-off Europeans came to stay for a while, do business and have fun. Bandung filled up with luxury hotels, cafés, fashion shops, theatres and clubs, and earned the nickname 'Parijs van Java', the 'Paris of Java'.
This was when the city took on its architectural signature. In the 1920s and 1930s, Dutch and Indonesian architects built one of the richest collections of tropical art deco architecture anywhere in Bandung: the imposing Gedung Sate (1920), the spectacular Villa Isola, the Savoy Homann and Preanger hotels, the Technical College (now the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, ITB, where Sukarno would study), plus dozens of villas, cinemas and shops. The style blended the clean geometric lines of art deco with local decorative touches and was adapted to the tropical climate.
Colonial ambition peaked when the Dutch seriously planned to make Bandung the new capital of the East Indies, moving the ministries and the army there from Batavia. Some government buildings were actually built for that purpose. The plan was never fully carried out, held back first by the 1930s Depression and then by the war, but it left the city an exceptional urban and architectural legacy that you can still walk around today.
The Second World War changed Bandung's fate. In March 1942 the Japanese army occupied Java, and it was near Bandung, at Kalijati, that the Dutch forces signed their surrender, abruptly ending more than three centuries of Dutch colonial rule. The Japanese occupation lasted until 1945 and was harsh, but by wrecking European prestige and mobilising Indonesian youth, it fired up nationalism.
After Indonesia declared independence on 17 August 1945, the Dutch tried to regain control, and Bandung became one of the battlegrounds of the revolutionary war. The best-remembered episode came on 24 March 1946. Faced with an Allied ultimatum demanding that Indonesian fighters leave the south of the city, and determined not to hand Bandung over intact to the enemy, residents and militia members deliberately set fire to the southern part of the city before abandoning it. That night Bandung burned. The episode went down in history as 'Bandung Lautan Api' ('Bandung, Sea of Fire'), a symbol of sacrifice and determination in the fight for independence, and it lives on in the patriotic song 'Halo, Halo Bandung'.
The war of independence ended in 1949 with the recognition of Indonesian sovereignty. Rebuilt, Bandung became part of the young republic as one of its main cities and as the capital of West Java province.
In April 1955, for a few days, Bandung was the centre of the world. The Gedung Merdeka building hosted the Asian-African Conference, known everywhere as the Bandung Conference, which brought together delegates from 29 countries in Asia and Africa, many of them newly free from colonial rule. It was called by Indonesia and its president Sukarno, together with Nehru's India, Zhou Enlai's China, Nasser's Egypt and other 'Third World' leaders. The summit proclaimed the principles of peaceful coexistence, decolonisation, anti-racism and non-alignment with either of the two Cold War blocs. That 'Bandung spirit' later gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement. It was the moment when young Indonesia, and this city with it, took a leading role in world history.
In the decades that followed, Bandung kept growing and established itself as a major university city: the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and other institutions made it a hub for education, engineering and creativity. That young, educated base fed a lively design, fashion, music and food scene in the 21st century that turned Bandung into one of the country's creative capitals. In 2015 it joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the design category.
Today Bandung has several sides: its Sundanese heritage, the art deco legacy of the 'Paris of Java', the historical weight of the 1955 Conference and a modern energy of cafés, outlets and universities. Surrounded by volcanoes and blessed with a cool climate, it is still the favourite getaway for people from Jakarta and one of the cities with the most personality in Java.
