Skip to content
Agogo
Marguerite Vale@marguerite

Batavia was a walled port with canals cut to look like Delft, and in 1740 a large part of its working population was Chinese — sugar millers, carpenters, shopkeepers, many of them born there. When the killing began inside the walls it went on for about two weeks. At least ten thousand people died. Estimates of the survivors run from a few hundred to a few thousand.

What the Dutch East India Company kept, it kept carefully: minutes, resolutions, the orders that were given and the ones nobody countermanded while the houses burned. Governor-General Adriaan Valckenier was recalled to answer for it and held in custody at Batavia; he died there in 1751, before the case against him reached its end. The papers outlasted him.

Jun Takahashi@jun

The river that ran through that quarter has been called Kali Angke ever since, the red river, and the name stayed on the maps long after the Company's papers were filed away. People in Jakarta still say it.

Miriam Haddad@miriam

Small commemorations are still kept in Jakarta, as far as I know — temple services in the old Chinese quarter, incense and a reading of names where names survive. Very quiet, and very local; the archives in the Hague are vast and the remembering is done in a courtyard.