Wednesday 18 February 2009

Motorcycling to the Temples Of the Singosari Kingdom


Travelling around Malang, East Java

Originally published in The Jakarta Globe, 18/02/09
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/motorcycling-to-the-temples-of-the-singosari-kingdom/307771

Driving up to Malang from East Java’s steaming coastal plains is like coming up for air. The humidity and traffic fumes clear; expanses of rice pasture open beyond the road, and in the distance, forested hills rise into murky cloud.
People have been making this refreshing uphill journey since the colonial era, and with three days to spare I have decided to follow the well-trodden route by motorbike, stopping along the way to explore relics of East Java’s past.

My first stop is in the village of Prigen, not far from the little hill resort of Tretes. Rising through tapering tiers of cut basalt in a neat, moat-lined garden, is the 14th Century Candi Jawi temple.

Candi Jawi was built in honor of Kertanegara, the last king of the mighty Singosari kingdom that once ruled these parts. The temple, restored in the late 1930s, is imposing despite its modest size, but it is somewhat overshadowed by the nearby cone of Gunung Penaggunan, the outer bastion of East Java’s mountain core. Today the volcano is fading rapidly in the haze, and the higher peaks to the south are hidden in cloud.

The clouds follow me onwards uphill towards Malang. The town lies in a broad bowl between the vast Bromo-Tengger massif to the east, and the similarly huge Arjuna-Welirang volcano complex to the west. But today there is only heavy cloud to mark where these behemoths lurk. The mountains of Java have something in common with the ghosts said to dwell in the forests of Javanese folklore: you know they are there; you just can’t always see them.

I stop in the market town of Singosari, little more than a suburb of Malang these days, but once the cradle of the Singosari dynasty.
In the 12th Century East Java was divided between two powerful kingdoms – Kediri and Janggala. But in the following century these states were replaced by a single realm, centered here in Singosari.
Singosari was founded in 1222 by Ken Angrok, a rebellious commoner, claimed by legend to be the son of the Hindu god Siva. He rose from nowhere, murdering the king of Kediri and taking control of all East Java. The dynasty he founded ruled for most of the 13th Century, and fostered the development of the high Hindu-Buddhist culture of late classical Java.

Today there is still a fine reminder of this royal past in the back lanes of Singosari. Like Candi Jawi, the eponymous Candi Singosari is a monument to King Kertanegara who died in 1292, murdered in a palace uprising. The Singosari kingdom fell with him, but a prince, Raden Wijaya, fled to Madura, and from there set out on a campaign that, within two years, would lead to the founding of the greatest of all the Javanese kingdoms – Majapahit.

I wander around the temple, admiring the grimacing, bug-eyed shrine guardians above the doorways, and wondering what Hindu statues once stood in the vacant recesses and chambers. The place is quiet and I can hear the sound of crowing roosters and chattering children from amongst the red-tiled roofs beyond the temple garden.
I return to the road and continue into Malang as a hint of evening chill descends, and homemade kites tug upwards into the breeze above suburban rooftops.

***

In the cool of the next morning I clamber back onto my bike and head east. The mountains are still unseen ghosts today, and thick cloud is slipping down from the Tengger highlands.
In the village of Tumpang, 20 kilometers from Malang, stands Candi Jago. This temple was built in 1268 to commemorate Kertanegara’s predecessor, Vishnuvardhana.
It has never been restored (beyond having a large tree removed from its upper levels in the 19th Century), but it is perhaps the most interesting of all the temples of the Singosari dynasty. Candi Jago has five levels, each banded by decorated friezes. There is a world of interest in these ancient cartoon strips, and I pick my way slowly around the levels, followed by a gang of cheerful schoolchildren, demanding to have their photos taken.
I oblige, and then get back to the carvings. There are the usual fantastic creatures: pot-bellied dwarfs, demons and women with tails. But there are also glimpses of daily life in 13th Century Java. There are domestic pigs and roosters, and men reclining in the shade of simple pavilions. There are also village temples with multi-tiered thatched roofs, and long lines of women in sarongs, heads turned in conversation, offerings of fruit balanced on their heads. I feel a spark of excitement as I recognize the scene: it could be a temple ceremony in Bali today.

In the countryside beyond the temple there are apple orchards and villages of neat white bungalows. But the threat of rain has rolled further down from the hidden mountains, so I make my way back to town and take refuge in a relic of a much more recent stage of Malang’s history.

Malang came under Dutch control in the mid-18th Century, developing as an administrative centre and a refuge from the heat of the coast. There are relics of this era in the city’s cathedral, and in the fine colonial mansions that still stand on a few of the suburban avenues. But with the rain now pouring down I take shelter in another colonial throwback.
Toko Oen restaurant, not far from the bustling town centre, has scarcely changed since the 1930s – with slow-moving ceiling fans, equally slow-moving waiters, low chairs and homemade ice cream. It’s a charming place, but as I settle down to coffee and cakes, it strikes me that it seems to belong to a past every bit as distant as that of the Singosari temples.

***

The next morning I head back for Surabaya along the back roads. I ride to the hill resort of Batu, then turn south into a high landscape swollen with neat little vegetable plots.
The mountains that have been only a rumor for the last two days have emerged to prove their existence. Ahead of me the great peak of Welirang marks the western buttress of a ragged bank of mountains.
I cross a narrow pass then continue down into dense, green forest where leopards are still said to hunt. A little way below the pass are the Cangar hot springs. I take the opportunity for a relaxing soak in the thermally heated pools, surrounded by cool jungle – a fine place to ease the aches of three days on a motorbike.
Refreshed, I ride on downhill along a deserted road. Suddenly, I emerge on a narrow saddle of land, the forest pouring away on either side. The view across the ridges and valleys is spectacular, and rising in the distance is Gunung Penanggunan, the sentinel peak that I saw two days earlier at the start of my journey.I park my bike and sit down at the edge of the road, dangling my legs over the void. The forest below is deep and impenetrable, and I wonder idly for a moment about those leopards. The distant volcano is stark against the sky, its ribbed upper slopes free from cloud. I can make out the plains beyond it, and I can imagine the heat and congestion that I will face on my approach to Surabaya. I stretch out and decide that all that can wait for a little while longer.

© Tim Hannigan 2008

Monday 9 February 2009

Surabaya's Chinatown


The history and architecture of Surabaya's Chinese quarter

Originally published in The Jakarta Globe, 09/02/09

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/life-times/article/8988.html

The chaos of urban Indonesia withdraws respectfully at the threshold of the Boen Bio temple. Jalan Kapasan, an arrow-straight thoroughfare that cuts across the north of Surabaya, is a maelstrom of bikes, becaks and bemos, but as I step from the cracked pavement through a lion-flanked gateway beneath a heavy, double-tiered roof, all that seems to fall away. Inside there is an air of cool, quiet calm.

Surabaya, the capital of East Java Province and Indonesia’s second biggest city, is well known as a place of gargantuan shopping malls and chronic gridlock. But a couple of kilometers north of all that stressful modernity is a crumbling old quarter, thick with the history of what was once the most important port of the Dutch East Indies. The biggest, and most architecturally rich, part of the old city is its Chinatown.

This hot morning, I have chosen to start my tour through Chinese Surabaya here at Boen Bio, because it is not your average Chinese temple. The difference is obvious as soon as I enter. The familiar dark, smoky fog and imposing statues are absent. This place, with its shuttered Dutch windows and shining expanse of tiled floor, is simple, almost austere.

An elderly man with a wispy white beard and gray eyes shuffles from the shadows. His name is Bio Kong; he looks after this place. Bio Kong explains just what is so unusual about Boen Bio. Most Chinese temples offer a deep red brew of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and ancestor worship. But this place is a purely Confucian temple, the largest in Southeast Asia, Bio Kong proudly tells me. Here the usual painted scenery and deity statues are replaced by simple carved tablets. Rows of delicate china cups filled with offerings of green tea are lined along the altar.

The temple was built in 1906 to serve Hokkien immigrants from Fujian, replacing an earlier building nearby. The floor tiles, Bio Kong tells me, were imported from Holland. He says that his own father came to Surabaya in the early years of the 20th century, and that Hokkien is his first language.
“But not many people here speak Hokkien these days,” he says sadly. And not many people come to Boen Bio. Confucianism, more a system of philosophy than a religion, came under suspicion in Indonesia in the past and many followers drifted away to join other faiths. But around 40 worshipers still come to the temple each Sunday. Bio Kong motions to a stack of folding chairs in a corner that will be arranged in rows for the sermon. A ceremony here, it seems, has a good deal in common with a Christian church service.

I leave Bio Kong carefully brushing the dust from between candles and teacups, and step back out into the rising heat of the morning. A hundred meters west of Boen Bio, a great red Chinese gateway spans the street, with a white guard lion at each corner and a pair of dragons writhing along the top. This marks the start of Jalan Kembang Jepun. The name means “Street of the Japanese Flowers,” a coy reference to the days when this road was lined with brothels staffed by pale beauties from Japan. It is still the center of Chinatown, but today it is lined with hardware shops and bakeries, and the Japanese flowers have all gone. So I make a right turn, dodging between rattling becaks, and walk north along an alleyway of dusty sunlight and dark workshops.

The smell of incense hits me before I see the Kong Co Kong Tik Cun Ong. This 18th century temple, hemmed in by decaying shophouses, is the largest in the old city, with a plethora of altars heavy with gilded Buddhas. Huge red candles, taller than a grown man, stand in flickering columns and fearsome guardian deities watch the doorways. Offerings of fruit stand in the patches of soft light and joss sticks leach steady coils of fragrant smoke. Strips of Chinese script hang from the walls and the ceilings are black with centuries of candle grease.
The temple is quiet this morning, with just one old woman praying in the smoky darkness. Many of Surabaya’s ethnic Chinese population have long since abandoned this quarter and its temples for the suburbs and Christianity. But as I head along a shady alley beyond the temple I glance through an open doorway and catch a glimpse of a family shrine marked with red and gold, indicating old traditions are still kept here.

Picking my way through ever narrower lanes I hear the sound of hammering and come across a workshop where stonemasons are etching gravestones with Chinese lettering.
Until 1994, the public display of Chinese writing was banned in Indonesia, part of a raft of anti-Chinese regulations from the early years of Suharto’s New Order — the same rules that saw the congregation of Boen Bio dwindle, and that by 1968 alone had seen some 160,000 Surabaya Chinese bow to official pressure to change their original Chinese name to something more “Indonesian.” These laws have been dropped now though, and signs in Mandarin mark these workshops.
I stop to speak to one of the stonemasons, working on an elaborate headstone. He is Javanese, he tells me, and cannot read Chinese. He shows me the scrap of paper from which he is copying the characters. I ask if he ever makes a mistake and he grins: “Never!”

I return to the western end of Jalan Kembang Jepun, marked by another dragon-capped gateway. Just beyond the gateway is the Kalimas River, the crooked spine of the city, sluggish and brown, here in its final reaches.
The river is spanned by Jembatan Merah, the Red Bridge. This bridge — clogged with traffic today — is a key location in Surabaya folklore as the claimed site of the mythical battle between a shark and a crocodile, a sura and a buaya, that gave the city its name. It was here too, in October 1945, that the British Brig. Mallaby was assassinated, opening the ferocious Battle of Surabaya and ensuring that the area became a key place in the story of Indonesia’s independence.
The bridge also marks one of the key divisions of the old city — the boundary between Chinatown and the Dutch colonial district.

The oldest records of a settlement at the mouth of the Kalimas River actually come from the chronicles of wandering Chinese seafarers in the 13th century, and there were Chinese trading communities in the vicinity from the city’s earliest years. Until Surabaya came under Dutch control in the 17th century the main Chinese settlement was along the coast at Gresik. But as Surabaya grew, more Chinese traders arrived, settling on the east bank of the Kalimas, across the water from the Dutch. Official hostility during the New Order years had long-established precedents.
During the colonial era Chinese were considered “foreign Orientals,” a step up the legal and social ladder from mere “natives.” But allegations of clannishness and financial acumen made the colonial authorities nervous. In Surabaya and other cities the Chinese were confined to specific quarters, banned from owning property elsewhere. Until 1918 Surabaya’s Chinese were not allowed to live or work outside the network of teeming alleyways east of the Red Bridge. This restrictive policy actually helped create Surabaya’s distinctive Chinatown.

I pick my way south from the Red Bridge, sweating in the heat. This area was the real heart of the old Chinese trading quarter, and there are many fine buildings with heavy columns and sagging rooflines. There are Chinese clan-houses as old as Surabaya itself here, and peering through dark doorways I see piles of rough sacks and red candles flickering in the gloom. Twenty years ago there were tentative plans to restore this part of the city — perhaps with the sanitized tourist markets of Singapore’s Chinatown in mind. But the idea was forgotten in the economic collapse of the late 1990s, and today arched windows and delicate balconies are crumbling under a century of grime. The names of the alleyways here hint at a past when goods were unloaded straight from the river — Rubber Street, Tea Street, Sugar Street and Chocolate Street.

On the corner of Chocolate Street stands another temple — the Hok An Kiong. Smoke wafts from incense braziers outside, and a pair of ferocious looking warrior statues flank the imposing red doorway. In the inner chamber elderly women in loose cotton blouses bustle around the altar, lighting great bunches of joss sticks, bowing and kneeling.
An old man named Budi offers me a place to sit and a much-needed glass of water. This temple, he tells me, is the oldest in Surabaya, dating from the early 18th century. Like the names of the surrounding streets, the Hok An Kiong has its roots in ocean-going trade: the temple is dedicated to the guardian goddess of seafarers.
After chatting with Budi and catching my breath in the shady interior of the temple I hop into a waiting becak and rattle through the last of the narrow streets to Pasar Atom. This decidedly unglamorous warren of hole-in-the-wall shops is at the bottom of Surabaya’s shopping mall hierarchy. It is a favorite haunt of lower-middle-class Chinese Indonesians, and its top floor food court has some of the best Chinese food in the city. It also marks the southern boundary of the historic Chinatown. But there is one more place I want to see before my tour of Surabaya’s Chinese history is over.

From Pasar Atom I head south by motorbike, pausing on Jalan Jagalan, a little secondary Chinatown with its temple and traditional apothecaries. Rising above the rooftops in a quiet suburb nearby I see my final destination.
The architecture is unmistakably Chinese — three tiers of green tiles and red buttresses rising into a hot sky. It is a new building — not unusual; there are other modern Chinese temples in Surabaya. But it is only when you get close enough to see the object at the very top of the pagoda roof that you realize what this place actually is. The triple-arched outline of shining brass at the crown of the building reminds me for a moment of the dragons on the gates of Chinatown. But it is not a dragon; it is the Name of God — in Arabic. This is a mosque.
The Mesjid Cheng Hoo was built in 2002 by the Chinese Muslim Association of Indonesia as a radical expression of a fact once almost taboo: that there have long been Chinese Muslims in the archipelago.
Chinese connections with Indonesia predate the coming of Islam — at least as far back as the 7th century Sriwijaya Empire — and the earliest references to many Indonesian cities come from Chinese archives. Later, some Chinese settlers married into local Muslim aristocracies. And Chinese travelers may actually have played a significant role in bringing Islam to Indonesia. The Cheng Ho Mosque is named after the famous Chinese Muslim admiral who sailed through the archipelago in the 15th century. There is even a theory — a controversial one — that Sunan Ampel, one of the legendary early emissaries of Islam in Java, and unofficial patron saint of Surabaya’s Muslims, was actually from China.

The courtyard is completely deserted in the midday heat. Clouds are beginning to gather to the west of the city.I pause in the shade of the mosque, relishing the ghost of a cooling breeze that passes through its open archways. Everything about the design of the place reminds me of the temples I have visited earlier in the morning — the colors, the columns and the bowed rooflines. But the circular windows are filled with intricate Arabic tracery. I decide that this is the perfect place to end my journey through the architecture of Surabaya’s Chinese past — with a reminder that the Chinese connection in the history of this city, and this country, extends far beyond the confines of Chinatown.

© Tim Hannigan 2008