Human history in the archipelago is so old that it begins before our own species. In 1891, on the bank of the Solo River in central Java, the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois dug up the skull and femur of what he called 'Pithecanthropus erectus', the famous Java Man: a Homo erectus individual who lived between 700,000 and more than a million years ago. It was one of the first pieces of evidence of hominins outside Africa, and it turned Java into a sanctuary of palaeoanthropology, with sites such as Sangiran, now a World Heritage Site.
Modern settlement came in waves. Homo sapiens reached the islands tens of thousands of years ago. During the ice ages, much of the western archipelago was part of a continental shelf joined to Asia, known as Sunda. But the decisive event for today's Indonesia was the Austronesian expansion. Around 2000 BC, peoples from Taiwan and southern China began spreading across island Southeast Asia in outrigger canoes. They brought terraced rice farming, pottery, ikat weaving and an extraordinary mastery of navigation.
These Austronesians are the ancestors of the vast majority of today's Indonesians (Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Batak, Bugis and dozens of other peoples). They also left a language family that stretches from Madagascar to Easter Island. At the eastern end of the archipelago, in Papua, an older population of Melanesian origin survived instead, with completely different languages and cultures. Everything else was built on that double foundation: Malay-Austronesian in the west, Melanesian in the east.
From the first centuries AD, trade with India brought the archipelago not only goods but ideas: Hinduism, Buddhism, writing and the model of sacred kingship. This is how the first great states arose. On Sumatra, between the 7th and 13th centuries, the maritime empire of Srivijaya, centred on the Palembang area, controlled the Strait of Malacca and the route between India and China. It was such an important Buddhist centre that the Chinese pilgrim Yijing stopped there to study Sanskrit before continuing his journey.
In central Java, between the 8th and 10th centuries, the Mataram kingdom and the Sailendra dynasty flourished and left the most astonishing monuments in Southeast Asia. Around the year 825, Borobudur was completed. It is the largest Buddhist temple in the world: an artificial stone mountain with more than 500 Buddhas and 2,600 reliefs, designed as a mandala that pilgrims climb in a spiral towards enlightenment. A few kilometres away, a rival Hindu dynasty built the Prambanan complex around the 9th century. It is dedicated to Shiva, and its pointed towers reach for the sky. That a Buddhist and a Hindu temple rose almost side by side shows a remarkable religious coexistence.
The last great empire of this era was Majapahit, founded in eastern Java at the end of the 13th century. Under King Hayam Wuruk and his powerful prime minister Gajah Mada, it reached a golden age around the mid-14th century. According to the chroniclers, its influence extended over much of the archipelago. Majapahit became the founding myth of a united 'Indonesia' centuries before one existed: 20th-century nationalists would invoke it as proof that these islands had once formed a single world. Its decline, well into the 15th century, coincided with the arrival of a new force: Islam.
Islam did not reach the archipelago with armies but with merchants. From the 13th century, Muslim traders sailing the spice routes began converting the ports and their elites first. They were Arabs, Persians, and Indians from Gujarat and the south of India. Conversion was gradual, generally peaceful and often syncretic. The new faith blended with earlier Hindu, Buddhist and animist beliefs, creating a very distinctive religious life, especially on Java. The first Muslim gravestones on Sumatra date from the late 13th century.
A turning point came in 1511, when the Portuguese conquered Malacca, the great trading hub of the Malay Peninsula. Far from holding Islam back, the blow sped it up. Many Muslim merchants avoided Christian Malacca and built up other ports instead, and the European threat fuelled a religious fervour that strengthened the sultanates. On the north coast of Java, the Sultanate of Demak emerged as the first Javanese Muslim state, and around 1527 it finished off what was left of Majapahit. On Sumatra, the powerful Sultanate of Aceh grew. In the Moluccas, Ternate and Tidore rose, and on Sulawesi, Gowa and the Bugis states.
By the end of the 16th century, Islam had become the dominant religion on Java and Sumatra and was spreading through the rest of the archipelago. Only a few places stayed outside it: Bali, which kept its Hinduism, and the interior of some islands, which held on to ancestral cults. That Islamic base, woven over centuries of Hindu-Buddhist and Austronesian heritage, explains today's Indonesia. It is a Muslim-majority country, but its Islam is plural and shaped by everything that came before.
For centuries, a handful of tiny islands in the eastern archipelago held a world monopoly on three products worth their weight in gold: cloves, nutmeg and mace. They grew only in the Moluccas, cloves on Ternate and Tidore and nutmeg on the minuscule Banda Islands. From there they travelled through a long chain of middlemen to the tables of Europe, where they sold for fortunes. Finding the source of those spices was one of the great drivers of the Age of Discovery. It is why Columbus was looking for the Indies and why Magellan sailed around the world.
The Portuguese arrived first. After taking Malacca in 1511, they reached the Moluccas and set up trading posts and forts to control the clove trade. They also brought missionaries (Francis Xavier preached in the eastern islands) and left a Catholic mark that still survives on Flores and Timor. But Portugal was a small kingdom and its hold was fragile. At the end of the 16th century, more aggressive competitors arrived: first the Dutch, then the English, ready to fight for the business at any cost.
In 1602, so they would not compete with one another and could wage war on the Portuguese and Spanish, Dutch merchants founded the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company. It was no ordinary company. The state granted it sovereign powers: it could declare war, sign treaties, mint coins and govern territories. In practice it was the first great multinational in history, and with it began the longest and harshest chapter of Indonesia's past.
The VOC built its power on a mix of trade and violence. Its key man was Jan Pieterszoon Coen. As governor-general, in 1619 he razed the Javanese city of Jayakarta and founded Batavia, today's Jakarta, on its ruins, as the capital of the Dutch trading empire in Asia. To secure the nutmeg monopoly, Coen led one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history in 1621: the conquest of the Banda Islands. Their population of about 15,000 was almost entirely massacred, enslaved or deported, and the land was divided among Dutch settlers. It is a documented fact, not a legend, and is often cited as one of the first colonial genocides of the modern era.
For almost two centuries, the VOC extended its control over Java and the Spice Islands through alliances, wars and treaties with the local sultanates, which it gradually reduced to vassals. But corruption, war and competition eventually ruined it. In 1799, bankrupt, the Company was dissolved and its possessions passed directly to the Dutch state. This is how the Dutch East Indies were born as a formal colony.
The 19th century was a time of systematic exploitation. From 1830 to 1870, the 'Cultuurstelsel', or Cultivation System, was in force. It forced Javanese peasants to set aside part of their land and labour to grow coffee, sugar and indigo for export, for the benefit of the Netherlands. It earned the Netherlands enormous profits, at one point funding a large share of the Dutch budget, and brought famine to the local population. Only at the end of the century, after criticism such as the novel 'Max Havelaar', did the Netherlands adopt the so-called 'Ethical Policy', which promised education and development. It came late and did little, but, ironically, its schools produced the first generation of Indonesian nationalists.
The idea of 'Indonesia' as one people and one nation covering the whole archipelago is surprisingly recent: it was born at the start of the 20th century. Before that there were Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabau and Balinese, but no 'Indonesians'. Three things made it possible to imagine that nation: Dutch administrative unification itself, the spread of Malay as a lingua franca, and the rise of a small educated elite. Budi Utomo, the first modern organisation, was founded in 1908. Sarekat Islam, the first mass movement, followed in 1912, and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in 1920.
The founding moment of national feeling was the Youth Congress of 1928. There, delegates from different islands proclaimed the 'Sumpah Pemuda', the Youth Pledge: one homeland, one people, one language, Indonesia. 'Indonesia Raya' was adopted as the anthem, and 'bahasa Indonesia', based on Malay, was established as the national language. Choosing a lingua franca instead of Javanese, the majority language, was key to uniting such different peoples without letting any one of them dominate.
In 1927, a young engineer named Sukarno founded the Indonesian National Party (PNI). He proved to be an exceptional speaker, able to fuse Islam, Marxism and nationalism into an electrifying message. The Dutch responded with repression. Sukarno and other leaders, such as Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, spent years in prison or in internal exile. On the eve of the Second World War, the movement was alive but contained. What suddenly set it free came from the north.
In March 1942, Imperial Japan invaded the Dutch East Indies. Within a few weeks it swept away a colonial army that collapsed with hardly any resistance. For many Indonesians, watching the powerful Dutch surrender and be interned in camps was a shock that shattered the myth of European superiority for good. At first, Japan presented itself as an Asian liberator ('Asia for the Asians') and banned Dutch colonial symbols.
The occupation, however, was harsh and exploitative. Japan needed the archipelago's oil, rubber and rice for its war effort, and it subjected the population to forced labour. Hundreds of thousands of 'romusha' were recruited for military projects, and tens or hundreds of thousands of them died in atrocious conditions. There were famines, and thousands of women were forced into sexual slavery as 'comfort women'. All in all, it was a brutal period.
But it had one decisive consequence. To mobilise the population, the Japanese freed and promoted the nationalist leaders, above all Sukarno and Hatta. They gave them a platform and organised Indonesian militias with military training. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it left behind a power vacuum on the islands. There was a generation of nationalists with prestige and weapons, and a population that would no longer accept the return of the Dutch. Independence was within reach.
On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender, Sukarno read out a proclamation of just two sentences to a small group in the garden of his house in Jakarta: Indonesia was declaring its independence. The next day he was named president, with Hatta as vice-president. But the Dutch had no intention of giving up their richest colony, and they came back with troops, determined to restore their rule. So began the Indonesian National Revolution, four years of war and diplomacy from 1945 to 1949.
It was a bloody conflict. There were battles such as Surabaya in November 1945, two major Dutch offensives euphemistically called 'police actions', executions and thousands of deaths. In the end, Indonesian resistance prevailed, together with strong international pressure, above all from the United States, which threatened to cut post-war aid to the Netherlands. In December 1949, in The Hague, the Netherlands formally recognised Indonesian sovereignty. West Papua, still in dispute, remained in Dutch hands for the time being.
Sukarno governed as founding father and charismatic figurehead, but the young republic was ungovernable. There were dozens of parties, regional rebellions, and tensions between political Islam, the army and the growing PKI. Frustrated with parliamentary democracy, in 1959 Sukarno imposed 'Guided Democracy', a personalist regime in which he arbitrated between the competing forces. In foreign policy he turned towards non-alignment, hosting the historic Bandung Conference in 1955, and then towards ever more radical and anti-Western positions. By 1965 the economy was in ruins, and the PKI had become the largest communist party outside the Soviet bloc and China. Its tension with the army was a bomb about to go off.
In the early hours of 1 October 1965, a group of left-wing officers kidnapped and murdered six generals of the high command in a confused coup that failed within hours. General Suharto took control of the army, blamed the Communist Party for the attempt and launched a campaign to wipe it out. What followed was one of the largest mass killings of the 20th century. From late 1965 to mid-1966, the army and civilian militias, often religious groups armed and encouraged by the military, killed real or suspected communists, trade unionists, peasants and intellectuals. They also killed a large part of the ethnic Chinese minority, above all on Java, Bali and Sumatra.
The figures are disputed, and the dispute itself is political. The estimates most widely accepted by historians range from 500,000 to one million dead; some are lower and others higher. As the historian Robert Cribb points out, an exact figure is almost impossible to establish. There were few independent observers, and the regime that ordered and oversaw the killings ruled for three more decades. The highest estimates also tend to go with a harsher condemnation of the New Order, and the lowest with a more forgiving view. Hundreds of thousands more people were imprisoned without trial for years. It is a national trauma that Indonesia only began to examine in the 21st century.
On that foundation of blood, Suharto pushed Sukarno aside and formally took the presidency in 1968. This began the 'Orde Baru' (New Order), which would last 32 years. It was an authoritarian, anti-communist and pro-Western regime, propped up by the army and by systemic corruption that enriched his family and inner circle. It did, however, bring decades of economic growth, food self-sufficiency and falling poverty. It also brought more violence. In 1969, West Papua was annexed through the so-called 'Act of Free Choice'. In that plebiscite, just over a thousand representatives chosen by the army itself voted unanimously to join Indonesia, a procedure widely questioned as fraudulent. In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, and an estimated hundreds of thousands died from war and famine.
The New Order collapsed all at once. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 sank the currency, sent prices soaring and ruined millions. On top of the economic hardship came mass student protests, riots in Jakarta and brutal violence against the Chinese-Indonesian community. On 21 May 1998, cornered and abandoned by his allies, Suharto resigned after 32 years in power. 'Reformasi', the era of democratic reform, had begun.
The transition went deep. It brought free elections, press freedom and decentralisation. The army lost its guaranteed political role, and constitutional reforms introduced direct presidential elections. East Timor voted for independence in 1999, amid a wave of violence by pro-Indonesian militias, and became fully separate in 2002. In Aceh, a long separatist insurgency came to an end after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, which killed more than 160,000 people in that province alone. A peace agreement in 2005 gave the region broad autonomy.
Today Indonesia is the world's third most populous democracy, a rising economy and a regional power. It has had peaceful transfers of power and very different presidents, from Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to Joko Widodo, the first to come from outside the old elite. Huge challenges remain. There is corruption, and there is tension between a rising political Islam and the country's pluralist tradition. Inequality divides Java from the outer islands, and grievances in Papua remain unresolved. But the basic fact is still astonishing: 17,000 islands, hundreds of peoples and languages, the largest Muslim population on the planet and a young democracy. All of it rests on that old motto carved in stone centuries ago: unity in diversity.
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In a Muslim-majority country, Bali is the great exception: around 90 % of its inhabitants practise Hinduism. The reason is historical. When Islam spread across Java during the 15th century and the Majapahit empire collapsed, much of its elite — nobles, priests, artists, poets — crossed the strait and took refuge in Bali, bringing with them their religion, literature, music and caste system. The island thus became the living conservatory of the Hindu-Javanese civilisation that was disappearing from the rest of the archipelago.
What developed in Bali is not exactly the Hinduism of India, but a form of its own, 'Agama Hindu Dharma', blended with local ancestral and animist cults. The island filled up with thousands of temples — family temples, village temples, rice-field temples — each with its own calendar of ceremonies, offerings of flowers and rice, dances and processions. That all-pervading religious life, more than the beaches, is what makes Bali unique and what earned it its fame as the 'island of the gods'.
Bali resisted colonial rule longer than almost any other part of the archipelago; its kingdoms remained independent well into the 20th century. When the conquest came, it was tragic. In 1906, the Dutch launched a military expedition against the kingdom of Badung, in what is now Denpasar. Rather than surrender, the raja, his court and his followers — about a thousand people, according to the accounts, dressed in white and wearing their finest jewellery — marched out to face the troops in a 'puputan', a ritual fight to the death. Facing Dutch rifles, they threw themselves at the bullets or killed themselves with their own krises, in a massacre carried out in plain sight.
Two years later, in 1908, the scene was repeated in the kingdom of Klungkung, the most prestigious on the island, with another puputan that ended Balinese independence. Images of those killings caused outrage even in Europe and embarrassed the Dutch government, which from then on tried to rule Bali with a paternalistic discourse of 'preserving' its culture. The puputan became etched in Balinese memory as a symbol of dignity and resistance against conquest.
In the hills of the island's interior, among rice fields and ravines, Ubud has been the artistic heart of Bali for a century. It was the seat of a dynasty of patron princes and, in the 1930s, the place where Western artists and anthropologists settled, such as the German painter Walter Spies and the Dutchman Rudolf Bonnet, who worked with local artists and helped spread around the world the image of Bali as an aesthetic paradise. Much of the island's international fame dates from that time.
That foreign gaze, fascinated and somewhat idealised, helped fix the myth of the 'last paradise', but it also energised a local school of painting, carving and dance that is still very much alive. Today Ubud combines galleries, workshops, temples, the famous monkey forest and dance performances — kecak, legong, barong — with a wellness and spirituality industry geared towards tourism. It is the cultural counterpoint to the beaches of the south.
Bali's most iconic landscape — rice terraces stepping down the hillsides like emerald stairs — is not just beautiful: it is the expression of a philosophy. Since the 9th century, Balinese farmers have organised irrigation through the 'subak', a cooperative system of canals, weirs and water temples run democratically by farming communities. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site as an example of water management guided by 'Tri Hita Karana', the Balinese principle of harmony between people, nature and the divine.
Each stage of cultivation comes with its ceremonies, and the water temples coordinate who irrigates and when, bringing religion, ecology and agriculture together in a single system. This web of rituals shapes the whole life of the island: the daily offerings (canang sari) on every doorstep, the great temple festivals (odalan), and Nyepi, the Day of Silence, when the entire island comes to a standstill. In Bali, culture, religion and landscape are one and the same.
Mass tourism transformed Bali in just a few decades. From a destination for bohemian travellers it went on to receive millions of visitors a year, with the south of the island — Kuta, Seminyak, Canggu, Nusa Dua — turned into an unbroken stretch of hotels, beach clubs and villas. Tourism is now the island's economic engine, but it also creates tensions: pressure on water and land, traffic, property speculation and the risk that the very culture that draws visitors becomes a commodity.
Bali lived its most tragic recent moment on 12 October 2002, when terrorist bombings at nightclubs in Kuta killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists, in the worst attack in Indonesia's history. A second bombing struck the island in 2005. The attacks temporarily sank tourism and forced Indonesia to confront jihadism. The island recovered, and today it is still negotiating the difficult balance between opening up to the world and preserving the 'Agama Hindu Dharma' that makes it unique.
With barely 7 % of Indonesia's territory, Java is home to more than half of its population: some 150 million people make it one of the most densely populated islands on the planet. That density is nothing new: the extremely fertile volcanic soil has allowed intensive rice cultivation on terraces since ancient times, supporting large, hierarchical societies. That is why Java was, again and again, the centre of power in the archipelago.
Here the kingdom of Mataram and the Sailendra dynasty flourished, raising Borobudur and Prambanan in the 9th century; here, in the east of the island, the Majapahit empire had its heart; here the Islamic sultanates of the north coast took hold and, later, the Dutch colonial capital. Javanese culture — refined, hierarchical, with its 'wayang' shadow theatre, its gamelan and its courtly etiquette — set the tone for the whole country. It is no coincidence that the great leaders of modern Indonesia, from Sukarno to Suharto and Joko Widodo, were Javanese.
In central Java, Yogyakarta is the last living stronghold of Javanese royalty. It is the only province in Indonesia officially governed by a monarchy: its sultan, the Hamengkubuwono, is also its hereditary governor, a privilege the city earned for its role in the struggle for independence, when it served as the capital of the republic at war between 1946 and 1948. At the heart of the city, the Kraton, the sultan's palace, is still a living ceremonial centre.
Yogyakarta — Yogya or Jogja to everyone — is also Java's cultural capital: the birthplace of the finest batik, of the art of the keris (the wavy dagger with a sacred soul), of court dance and of gamelan. Gateway to Borobudur and Prambanan, and home to one of the largest concentrations of universities in the country, it combines the solemnity of the court with the youthful energy of a student city. Few places sum up better what it means to be Javanese.
Indonesia's capital was born as a small spice port called Sunda Kelapa, later Jayakarta. In 1619, Jan Pieterszoon Coen razed it and founded Batavia on its ruins, the capital of the Dutch East Indies for more than three centuries. The Dutch built it in their own image, with canals, walls and brick houses — the 'Queen of the East' — although the tropical climate and malaria epidemics also turned it into a graveyard for settlers. The old quarter, Kota Tua, still preserves that colonial past.
After independence, Batavia took back its Indonesian name, Jakarta, and grew unchecked into a megacity of more than ten million people — over thirty million in its metropolitan area — with all the country's contrasts: skyscrapers and kampung (working-class neighbourhoods), monumental traffic jams, chronic flooding and ground that is sinking because of groundwater over-extraction. The problem is so serious that Indonesia decided to move its capital to a new city, Nusantara, on Borneo. Even so, Jakarta will remain the country's economic heart and its main gateway.
Java is an island of fire. It sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and has dozens of active volcanoes that both fertilise it and threaten it. In the east rises Mount Bromo, inside a vast 'sea of sand', the setting for famous sunrises and home to the Tengger people, descendants of Majapahit refugees who kept their Hindu faith and every year throw offerings into the crater during the Yadnya Kasada ceremony. Further east, the Ijen volcano is famous for its blue fire at night — burning sulphuric gases — and for the miners who carry loads of sulphur by hand up from the bottom of the crater.
Java's volcanoes have also written tragic, global chapters. In 1883, the eruption of Krakatoa, in the strait between Java and Sumatra, was one of the greatest disasters on record: it destroyed the island, triggered tsunamis that killed more than 36.000 people and threw so much ash into the atmosphere that it cooled the climate of the entire planet for years. And in 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora, a little further east, had been even bigger, causing the 'year without a summer' of 1816 in the northern hemisphere. Living on Java has always meant living on land that gives and takes away.
In the highlands of western Java, in Sundanese country, Bandung enjoys a mild climate that made it a summer retreat for the Dutch in colonial times. They called it the 'Paris of Java' for its art deco architecture, and much of the colony's elite and technical institutions settled there. It was at its institute of technology that the young Sukarno studied.
Bandung entered world history in April 1955, when it hosted the Asian-African Conference, the first major gathering of Asian and African countries that had recently been decolonised or were on the road to independence. Twenty-nine nations representing more than half of humanity met there, with figures such as Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser and Zhou Enlai, to condemn colonialism and assert a third way between the two Cold War blocs. The 'Bandung spirit' was the seed of the Non-Aligned Movement and one of the high points of Indonesia's international standing.
Nusa Tenggara — the 'southeastern islands', formerly the Lesser Sunda Islands — is a long chain stretching east from Bali: Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba, Timor and dozens of smaller islands right up to the edge of Australia. It is Indonesia's driest and poorest region, with a climate shaped by the Australian dry season, savanna landscapes and a geography of volcanoes and islands separated by deep straits.
One of science's most famous invisible borders runs through here: the Wallace Line, drawn by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the 19th century. West of that line the wildlife is Asian — tigers, monkeys, elephants —; to the east it becomes Australian — marsupials, cockatoos, birds of paradise — because the deep straits never closed, not even during the ice ages. Wallace, who travelled throughout the archipelago, conceived here, at the same time as Darwin, the theory of evolution by natural selection. Nusa Tenggara is, quite literally, a land of borders: between Asia and Australia, between Islam and Christianity, between the continental and the insular.
Lombok, Bali's neighbouring island, is often sold as 'Bali thirty years ago', but it has an identity of its own. Its majority people, the Sasak, are Muslim, although for centuries they lived under the influence and later the rule of Hindu Balinese kingdoms, which left temples and a visible cultural mark on the west of the island. That mix gave rise to distinctive religious forms, such as the old 'Wetu Telu', a syncretic Islam with animist and Hindu elements that still survives in some communities.
In 1894, Lombok was the scene of a bloody Dutch intervention that ended Balinese rule and brought the island under colonial control. Above Lombok rises Rinjani, Indonesia's second-highest volcano (3.726 metres), sacred to Sasak and Balinese alike, with a high-altitude lake in its caldera. Less populated and less touristy than Bali, with unspoilt beaches and good surf, Lombok is also the gateway to the Gili Islands, three car-free islets famous for their crystal-clear waters.
Between Sumbawa and Flores, the islands of Komodo and Rinca are home to one of the most extraordinary animals on the planet: the Komodo dragon, the largest living lizard in the world, which can exceed three metres in length and 70 kilos in weight. It is a formidable predator, with serrated teeth and saliva loaded with bacteria and venom that brings down prey as large as deer and buffalo. It survives only on this handful of islands, an isolated pocket that served as a refuge for this relic of the megafauna.
The dragons were known to local fishermen, but Western science only 'discovered' them in 1910. In 1980 Komodo National Park was created to protect them; today it is a World Heritage Site and one of Indonesia's biggest natural attractions. With only a few thousand individuals left, the dragon is a vulnerable species, and its habitat is a fragile ecosystem of dry islands, savannas and coral reefs that rank among the richest in the world.
Flores owes its name to the Portuguese — 'Cabo das Flores' — and it owes them its unusual character too: it is one of the few Catholic-majority regions in Indonesia. Portuguese and later Dutch missionaries evangelised the island, and today its villages blend Catholicism with ancient megalithic and animist traditions. Its volcanic landscape culminates in Kelimutu, a volcano with three crater lakes that change colour — turquoise, green, black, reddish — depending on the chemistry of their waters, and which local tradition links to the fate of souls.
But Flores gave the world an even more astonishing find. In 2003, in the cave of Liang Bua, the remains of an unknown human species were discovered: Homo floresiensis, nicknamed 'the hobbit' because it stood barely a metre tall. It lived on the island until about 50.000 years ago and sparked a huge scientific debate about human evolution. That a dwarf human species survived in isolation on this island, alongside dwarf elephants and giant rats, illustrates the phenomenon of 'insular dwarfism' and made Flores a key site for palaeoanthropology.
Nusa Tenggara sums up, on a small scale, Indonesia's diversity and inequalities. It is one of the poorest regions in the country, with less infrastructure, recurring droughts and an economy based on subsistence farming, livestock and, increasingly, tourism. It is also one of the most diverse: within a few hundred kilometres live Muslims on Lombok and Sumbawa, Catholics on Flores and in West Timor, Protestants on Sumba and communities that keep ancestral religions, speaking dozens of different languages.
That diversity lives alongside the memory of East Timor's separation: the eastern half of the island of Timor was a Portuguese colony, was invaded by Indonesia in 1975 and won its independence in 2002 after a referendum and appalling violence. Today the border between Nusa Tenggara and the young country of Timor-Leste is a reminder that this arc of islands has always been a zone of contact and of limits. Emerging tourism — Komodo, Flores, Sumba — brings opportunities, but the challenge is making sure it benefits communities that were long left on the margins of Java and Bali's development.
Sulawesi, formerly Celebes, has an unmistakable outline: four long mountainous peninsulas spreading out like the arms of a star, separated by deep gulfs. That broken geography isolated its peoples and produced an extraordinary cultural diversity. The south was dominated by two great seafaring peoples, the Bugis and the Makassarese, who in the 16th and 17th centuries built powerful sultanates, above all Gowa, with its capital at Makassar, a great trading hub open to merchants from all over the world.
That openness clashed with the Dutch VOC, which wanted a monopoly on spices. After a hard war, in 1667 the Sultanate of Gowa was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Bongaya, which handed the Dutch control of trade and drove out their competitors. Even so, Makassar remained a crossroads of eastern Indonesia. Today Sulawesi offers some of the sharpest contrasts in the country: Muslims on the southern coasts, Christians in the north and the highlands, and one of the most unusual cultures in the archipelago inland.
In the mountains of inland Sulawesi live the Toraja, famous the world over for their relationship with death. Their traditional houses, the 'tongkonan', have soaring roofs shaped like boats or buffalo horns and are much more than homes: they are symbols of lineage, memory and status, handed down from generation to generation. Isolated in their valleys, the Toraja kept their ancestral beliefs until the arrival of Christianity in the 20th century, which layered itself over them without erasing them.
Their best-known feature is their funeral rites, the 'Rambu Solo'. When someone dies, they are not buried straight away: the body is kept in the house for months or even years, treated as a sick person who is still given food, while the family gathers the resources for a grand funeral. The ceremony, held in the dry season, includes dances, ritual fights and the sacrifice of buffalo and pigs, whose number measures the prestige of the deceased. Afterwards, the bodies are placed in tombs carved into cliffs, watched over by the 'tau-tau', wooden effigies bearing the likeness of the dead. It is one of the most fascinating cultures in Southeast Asia.
Few peoples in Indonesia have as great a maritime history as the Bugis of southern Sulawesi. For centuries they were the great navigators and traders of the archipelago, sailing the seas in their 'pinisi', magnificent two-masted wooden schooners that are still built by hand on the beaches of Sulawesi using techniques passed down from parents to children, now recognised by UNESCO. With those ships, the Bugis wove trade networks that reached Australia — they gathered sea cucumber on its coasts long before the Europeans — and founded settlements all over Indonesia and Malaysia.
Their reputation as bold and sometimes fearsome sailors even left a mark on the English language: it is thought that the 'bogeyman', the figure used to scare children, may come from 'Bugis'. Warriors, traders and migrants, the Bugis spread across the archipelago carrying their language, their Islam and their culture, and they are still one of the most enterprising and mobile peoples in Indonesia. Their saga is a reminder that, in a country of islands, the sea was never a border but a road.
At the heart of eastern Indonesia lie the Moluccas (Maluku), the legendary 'spice islands' that changed the course of the world. For centuries, only here did cloves grow — in the sultanates of Ternate and Tidore — and nutmeg, found exclusively on the tiny Banda Islands. That natural monopoly made them the most coveted destination on the planet and the ultimate reason behind the age of discovery: the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English fought to the death to control them.
The most brutal episode was the Dutch conquest of the Bandas in 1621, when Jan Pieterszoon Coen, to secure the nutmeg monopoly, killed, enslaved or deported almost the entire native population — some 15,000 Bandanese — and divided the land among settlers. It is one of the first documented colonial genocides. Curiously, under the Treaty of Breda of 1667 the Dutch ceded to England a faraway island called Manhattan in exchange for securing tiny Run, in the Bandas: such was the value of nutmeg. Today Maluku is a remote region, partly Christian, that went through a serious sectarian conflict between Christians and Muslims in 1999-2002, and whose spices are no longer worth fortunes, but whose past changed the history of the world.
At the far eastern end of the country, the western half of the island of New Guinea forms Indonesian Papua, a world apart. Its inhabitants are Melanesian, related to the people of Papua New Guinea rather than to the rest of Indonesia; they speak hundreds of different languages and keep some of the most diverse cultures on the planet, from the highland peoples to those of the coasts and rivers. It was the last region to join Indonesia: it remained under Dutch control in 1949 and was only incorporated in 1969, through the 'Act of Free Choice', a plebiscite in which just over a thousand representatives chosen by the army voted for annexation, a procedure denounced as fraudulent that still fuels an independence movement and unresolved tensions.
Against that difficult history, Papua holds one of the world's greatest natural treasures. The Raja Ampat archipelago, off the head of the island, is considered the global epicentre of marine biodiversity: its waters are home to more species of coral and fish than anywhere else on Earth, in a maze of limestone islets covered in jungle. A mecca for diving and an ecological sanctuary, Raja Ampat embodies the other side of this region: remote, fragile, extraordinary, and still negotiating its place within the Indonesian nation.
Sumatra, the sixth-largest island in the world, was for centuries one of the richest and most strategic regions of the archipelago. The sea route between India and China ran along its eastern coast through the Strait of Malacca, and its mountains yielded gold — the ancients called it Suvarnadvipa, the 'island of gold' — along with pepper, camphor and other coveted goods. On that trade, between the 7th and 13th centuries, rose the great Buddhist empire of Srivijaya, with its capital around Palembang, which dominated the seas of Southeast Asia.
Later, the north coast of Sumatra was one of the first gateways for Islam into the archipelago: the first Muslim sultanates appeared there as early as the 13th century. The island remained a patchwork of peoples and states: the Minangkabau of the highlands, with their unusual matrilineal society in which inheritance passes down the female line; the Batak of the interior; the Acehnese of the far north. That diversity and wealth made Sumatra a contested prize and one of the last regions to fall under Dutch control.
In the north of Sumatra lies Lake Toba, the largest volcanic lake in the world: about 100 kilometres long and 30 wide, with the island of Samosir — the size of Singapore — in the middle. Its beauty hides an apocalyptic origin. Around 74,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano produced one of the most colossal eruptions of the last few million years, blasting out thousands of cubic kilometres of material and covering much of southern Asia in ash.
According to a much-debated hypothesis, the 'Toba catastrophe' triggered a global volcanic winter and a cooling that may have drastically reduced the human population of the time, pushing it to the brink of extinction — a famous genetic 'bottleneck'. The theory is disputed, and many researchers today play down its impact on humans, but the scale of the eruption is not in doubt: the lake we admire today fills the enormous caldera that cataclysm left behind. Living in Sumatra means, once again, living on a land of fire.
Around Lake Toba and on its island of Samosir live the Batak, one of the most distinctive ethnic groups in Sumatra. For centuries, protected by the mountains of the interior, the Batak kept a culture of their own, with boat-shaped houses with curved roofs, their clan system (marga), their scripts and an ancestral religion. Their reputation as fearsome warriors and the stories of old cannibalistic rituals — real in certain judicial and wartime contexts, but greatly exaggerated by colonial accounts — kept Europeans away from their territory until the 19th century.
From the 1860s, Protestant missionaries, above all the German Ludwig Ingwer Nommensen, evangelised the Batak with remarkable success, and today most are Christian, a trait that sets them apart in Muslim Sumatra. At the same time they kept much of their culture: the music, the dances, the clan structure and a strong attachment to the land of their ancestors. Samosir, in the middle of the lake, is still the cultural heart of the Batak and a peaceful destination between mountains and water.
At the far northwestern tip of Sumatra, Aceh has a very strong character. It was one of the first places in Southeast Asia to embrace Islam and became a powerful sultanate in the 16th and 17th centuries, so devout and so connected to the Arab world that it earned the name 'Serambi Mekkah', the porch or antechamber of Mecca. Its resistance to the Dutch was legendary: the Aceh War, which began in 1873, dragged on for decades and was the longest and bloodiest of the colonial conquest of Indonesia.
That drive for independence continued after 1945. For decades, the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) waged a separatist war against the Indonesian state. The conflict ended in an unexpected and tragic way: on 26 December 2004, an undersea earthquake off Sumatra unleashed the Indian Ocean tsunami, which struck Aceh with waves up to 30 metres high and killed more than 160,000 people in this province alone, the hardest hit of all. The disaster, with its flood of international aid, created the conditions for a peace agreement in 2005 that gave Aceh broad autonomy, including the application of Islamic law (sharia), unique in Indonesia.
Sumatra holds some of the last great tropical forests on the planet and an extraordinary biodiversity: it is the only place in the world where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans live side by side in the wild, all of them critically endangered. Its rainforests, together with Borneo's, form one of Asia's green lungs, with national parks listed as World Heritage Sites such as Gunung Leuser, a refuge for the Sumatran orangutan.
That natural heritage is under enormous pressure. The expansion of oil palm and paper pulp plantations, illegal logging and huge forest fires have swallowed much of the rainforest in recent decades, with deforestation as the backdrop to strong economic growth based on natural resources: oil, gas, coal, rubber and coffee, as well as palm oil. The balance between development and conservation is one of the great dilemmas of today's Sumatra, and an issue whose consequences reach far beyond Indonesia.
Hardly anything that happened to Indonesia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
