Batik. Inger McCabe Elliott
Direct trade between China and Java virtually ceased after the beginning of the sixteenth century. The long-reigning Qing Dynasty (1644-1894) in fact forbade Chinese trade and overseas settlement. Yet, by 1700, Java had about ten thousand Chinese residents; within another hundred years there were one hundred thousand Chinese, many of them married to Javanese.
And even in those early times, the people now referred to as "overseas Chinese" exerted an influence beyond their numbers. The Chinese were mostly urban dwellers, settling in such large centers as Batavia (now Jakarta), Semarang, Surabaya, and Cirebon. A seventeenth-century observer wrote: "The Chinese drive here a considerable traffick being more industrious . . . mainly they are in merchandising and are great artists of thriftiness." They became entrepreneurs and middlemen, and their orders were big enough to cause batik making to become something of an industry, with factories spotted along the Java coast.
How the King of Tuban received the Dutch men.
Explorers from the West
Javanese history from about 1400 to 1600 was tumultuous and is still not well understood. By the sixteenth century, power in Europe had shifted from countries with armies to those with navies, and a struggle began among the European nations for control of Asia's riches. Portugal came to dominate a vast trade route, extending from Goa on the west coast of India to Malacca, thence to the Spice Islands, to Macao, and northward to Japan. The critical port of Malacca was in Portuguese hands. As Portuguese traders increasingly pushed the Javanese out of the spice trade, the reaction was predictable: local Javanese rulers bitterly contested the spreading Portuguese power. The ruler of Demak, for example, built up Banten in an effort to create a new trade route through the Sunda Strait to the south of Sumatra. Several coastal cities joined together to launch repeated and massive attacks against the Portuguese, resulting in the exhaustion of the cities' manpower and resources.
And from the kingdom of Mataram in central Java came more bad news for the north coast. With the northern cities already decimated, Mataram's ruler, Sultan Agung, decided that the time was ripe to strike. Japara, Gresik, Cirebon, Tuban, Madura, and Surabaya all fell. The devastation was frightful.
The environs of Surabaya were completely laid waste, so that famine and loss of life forced the city to capitulate. Forty thousand Madurese were carried off prisoner to Java . . . . Countless inhabitants of the coastal centers took refuge on other shores.
The coast of northern Java was never to recover from such wanton destruction.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to Java. They proved to be good organizers. Rather than relying on dozens of individual free lances to capture the spice trade, in 1602 the Dutch put together the Dutch East India Trading Company, known by its initials, VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). The VOC included a military force; more important, it was a monopoly operating in a single large geographic area. The VOC was the foundation of the Dutch commercial empire that was to last for nearly two hundred fifty years.
The VOC established a commercial settlement in Java. The Dutch settlers called it Batavia and built steep-roofed houses and dug canals that reminded them of home. Batavia flourished. Within fifty years it had become a center for trans-shipment of goods from the entire world. Wrote Adam Smith, the laissez-faire economist:
What the Cape of Good Hope is between Europe and every part of the East-Indies, Batavia is between the principal countries in the East-Indies. It lies upon the most frequented road from Hindustan to China and Japan . . . . Batavia is able to surmount the additional disadvantage, of perhaps the most unwholesome climate in the world.
Holland was now firmly established in Asia. Not only was Batavia thriving, the Dutch had also destroyed Banten in western Java, seized Malacca from the Portuguese, and were aggressively expanding their power. In return for Dutch protection, the sultans of the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta were forced to give the Dutch a strip of land on the north coast. They also granted the VOC permission to sell cotton cloth there, competing with Java's own home-grown cotton. By 1755 VOC control was established throughout Java, except in the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta. And just as surely as Dutch influence would change all aspects of Javanese life, so would the establishment of the VOC affect north-coast batik,
At the end of the eighteenth century, several events were to seal the fate of the VOC and very nearly doom the prospects for later Dutch rule. The spice trade became less lucrative. Money was now to be made in produce shipped directly from Java: coffee, tea, and palm oil among other items. What virtually bankrupted the VOC, however, were savage doses of dysentery and malaria—along with piracy and corruption. Finally, the Napoleonic wars changed the fate of Java as well as Europe. Coincidentally, they also led to the first authoritative chronicling of batik.
The children's hospital of Batavia was actually an orphanage. built of brick with lodgings for servants and maintained by voluntary contributions.
Johan Nieuhoff was one of numerous brave, and sometimes foolhardy, seventeenth-century explorer.
BATIK AS COSTUME
Until well into the twentieth century, batik was. used almost exclusively for clothing and for ceremonial occasions. In a rank-conscious society, class distinctions were made by the type of cloth worn and its pattern. In a tropical, humid climate such as Java, batik was ideal. As a costume, it was ingenious because batik demanded no zippers, buttons, or pins.
A sarong, usually sewn together at the ends, is only two yards long (180 cm.). A sarong has a "body," or badan, and a "head," or kepala. The badan is about three-quarters the length of the sarong. The kepala is a wide perpendicular band, usually in the middle or at the end of the sarong. Sometimes the kepala has two rows of equilateral triangles running down each side with the points of the triangles facing each other, much like a backgammon board; this design is called a tumpal.
The dodot, made by sewing two lengths of batik together, is a prerogative of royalty; dodots are usually worn only by the sultan, a bride or groom, or dancers at the courts, and are usually of unsurpassed quality. The dodot is worn draped and folded as an overskirt, sometimes with a train of fabric hanging at one side. Silk trousers are often worn underneath, with the pattern of the trousers showing in front.
Sarong is a Malay word, but the idea of draping a cloth as a skirt probably originated in India. A young nineteenth-century girl from western Java wears a typical sarong with tumpal at its head.
A kain panjang or "long cloth"—often simply called kain—is an ankle-length batik about forty inches wide (107 cm.) and about two and a half to three yards long (about 250 cm.). The entire surface is decorated, often with borders at the shorter ends. Worn by both men and women, a kain is usually considered more formal than a sarong. When worn by women, it is usually wrapped left over right, sometimes with narrow pleats in the front; men usually wear a kain with broader front pleats, wrapping it loosely right over left.
A pagi-sore or "morning-evening" batik is the Javanese version of reversible clothing. A little longer than a kain, the pagi-sore is divided diagonally, each half with a distinctive design and color. It is a simple matter to arrange the same cloth for two strikingly different effects.
The selendang (or slendang) is a long narrow cloth used exclusively by women as a carryall or a shawl. Draped over the shoulder, it can hold a baby, the day's marketing, or anything else that needs carrying. Selendangs often have striped borders at each end suggesting an imitation fringe; they are sometimes