House detail, Pasar Baru, Jakarta
Population
How many people live in Jakarta? (And who counts them?). That number varies depending on what you mean by ‘Jakarta’. Is it Jakarta or Daerah Khusus Ibukota or Jabodetebek? Is it the number within metropolitan Jakarta or greater metropolitan Jakarta? Is it nine million or thirteen million or twenty-three million people?
Prior to 1619, how many people lived in Jayakarta? Perhaps, maybe one or two thousand people.
When the Dutch anchored their ships in Jakarta Bay at the mouth of the Ciliwung River how many scruffy lice bitten Dutchmen were there? Not many.
Here are some interesting notes gleaned from Abeyasekere’s Jakarta: A History, with some additions.
Batavia – Jakarta 1673 to 2004
Year Population
1673 27,000 (including 13,278 or 49% slaves and 2,024 or 7%
Netherlanders, 2,747 or 10% Chinese)
1730 20,000 (walled town) 15,000 (suburbs)
1779 12,131 (old town) 160,986 (scattered to the mountains)
1815 49,000
1850 70,000
1900 116,000
1930 435,000
1945 844,000 (20,000 or 2.3% of this population were ‘beggars’)
1948 1,050,000 (in 1948, the first 1 million people)
1952 1,782,000 (in 1953, 75% of Jakartans were born outside of
Jakarta)
1965 3,813,000
1976 5,700,000
1980 6,500,000
1989 9,000,000
2004 13,000,000 (2004 population exceeds that of 1900 by 112 times)
2008? 19 to 23 million people in greater Jakarta. Does anyone know? And is it possible to count everyone? Making Jakarta the seventh, eighth, or ninth, largest city on the planet. There are new arrivals daily.
It took 329 years, from 1619, when Dutch slaves built Fort Batavia, to 1948, before the city’s population reached one million
In the period from 1900 to 2004, the city’s population grew by 112 times to reach a population of thirteen million and more. This is one-third the time it took the city to reach its first one million residents. This is also where Batavia, essentially a Dutch colonial city, disappears to become Jakarta, the ‘mother city’ of Indonesia.
During the 1950s things really started to roar.
The rapid rise in population was such that, as Abeyasekere writes,
“The majority of new immigrants shared existing housing… …The state of affairs is described by the poet Ayip Rosidi, who arrived in Jakarta as a boy in 1951. Coming from Jatiwangi in West Java, he was appalled at the place where his uncle took him to live in. It was an alley in Galur sub-district, east of the Senen Market. The area was only a few years old, very muddy and full of huts with grass-thatched roof. Rosidi lived for several years in one of these huts backing onto a river lined with privies.
Houses were built in an unbroken row; his row measured 33 feet by 23 feet, and contained 57 inhabitants. The boy shared a bed with two other men in a small room inhabited by five people.
He later wrote: ‘It was entirely beyond anything I had imagined before actually coming to Djarkarta, and I felt nauseated. I had never, never thought I could live in such squalor. Yet little by little… I grew familiar with Djakarta housing, knowing that it was sometimes possible to live in a row of shacks, as we did, only after some stroke of good luck’ “.
That is 57 people in an area measuring 33 feet by 23 feet or 759 square feet. Shared among 57 people this would allow each person a space of 3.5 feet by 4.5 feet. If you calculate the space needed for cooking, sleeping, or other household items this space is further reduced.
Later, Abeyasekere quotes Rosidi in his attempt to come to terms with urban life,
“…I felt that I’d been placed in a sickening cage, that I’d lost my roots, that I stood right in the middle of an international city’s whirling confusion, a city that opened itself to every current and never flinched away, a bustling activity without direction or purpose, a city of lies and tricks“.
In 1951, there were only 47 trucks and 600 handcarts available to collect rubbish. Of the trucks which were available about one in six was out of action and in need of repair.
For the entire city there were only 60 men and 4 trucks employed to empty privies. In 1954, in a city of nearly two million people, there were only 84 public restrooms, none of which had water.
If you wanted to ring up City Hall to complain there were only 8,204 telephone connections. The joke was that it was quicker to walk across town to deliver a message than use the telephone (if you could find one).
The Chinese
Chinese presence in Java dates from as early as the ninth century. Trade in spices and Chinese luxury goods was long established before the arrival of Europeans.
Before the Portuguese and the Dutch started mucking things up the Chinese were present in the town of Jayakarta where they grew sugar cane and distilled arak. The de Haan map of Jayakarta shows ‘Chinese Houses’ along the left bank of the Ciliwung River between the ‘defense line’ north of Kyai Aria’s District and Fort Batavia. Neither in or out of one camp or another but always potentially in the line of fire of either.
Abeyasekere quotes Coen as saying that “…there is no people who serve is better that the Chinese, and so easy to get as the Chinese“. She writes, “So keen was he [Coen] to build up their numbers quickly in Batavia that in 1622 he sent ships to kidnap people on the coast” … and “The Europeans were heavily dependent on Chinese labor and on merchandise from East Asia brought in by Chinese junks. In 1625, the Chinese fleet trading in Batavia had a total tonnage at least as large as that of the whole VOC return fleet” … and concluding that “so dominant was the role of the Chinese, in fact, that a recent historian has argued that from 1619 to 1740 Batavia was, economically speaking ‘basically a Chinese colonial town under Dutch protection’.
Abeyasekere: “The rapid influx of Chinese contributed to the opening up of the country around Batavia, and it was this development which caused anxiety to the Company, since outside the walls it was much harder to keep the Chinese under surveillance”.
It was these Chinese, as Abeyasekere points out, which developed Batavia’s sugar estates and its only original export of raw sugar and arak.
“From 2,747 Chinese within the town in 1674 the registers show a jump to 4,389 in 1739; in the environs (a nebulous term denoting the hinterland as far south as the mountains) 7,550 Chinese were counted in 1719 and 10,574 in 1739 (likely to be an understatement)”.
To control this rapid rise of immigration the Dutch concocted escalating regulations. They tried to place a quota on how many Chinese could be brought in by junk. This was evaded by the Chinese simply through landing people along the coast away from Batavia. Finally, in response to a glut of sugar on the global market which threw many Chinese coolies out of work the Dutch proposed to move them to their company outposts in Ceylon, “which rumour had it amongst the distressed Chinese, was just a ruse for dumping them at sea”.
The year 1740 marks a bloody turning point in the Dutch and Chinese relationship. The economic down turn in the sugar markets eventually led to a peasant revolt on the outskirts of Batavia. Abeyasekere writes, “Carrying home-made weapons and flying banners inscribed ‘To assist the poor, the destitute, and the oppressed’ and ‘Follow the righteous of old times’, the Chinese coolies marched on the city, where hundreds of their compatriots lived behind the walls. Although the latter had little or no contact with the Chinese outside, rumors spread that they were planning to assist the rebels. When the ill-armed Chinese force attacked the town on 8 October, the fact that they were easily repulsed did not save the Chinese inside”.
And so it began. Europeans and Indonesians “attacked, burned, and plundered” six to seven thousand Chinese homes and massacred perhaps as many as one thousand Chinese while the government stood by and did nothing. Five hundred Chinese were arrested and held at the Town Hall only to eventually be led out and executed one by one. “For a week the town blazed with fire and the canals ran red with blood.” While order was eventually restored the peasant rebellion would continue to 1743.
The events would set the pattern for later incidents in Jakarta’s history such as the anti-Chinese protests of the 1960s, the Soeharto purge of the Communist Party in 1965, and the ethnic riots in 1997. Still, the root of anti-Chinese violence lies with the Dutch who created and enforced the highly stratified society of colonial Batavia which is something the Indonesia elites of Jakarta have taken advantage of, have promoted, and have yet to address and resolve.
Abeyasekere concludes that, “Jealousy of Chinese commercial success simmered among many other citizens, who took advantage of a break down in law and order to attack the Chinese and loot their property. Little protection of the Chinese has been offered by Jakarta’s governments, who have often seemed prepared to allow the Chinese to be treated as scapegoats for the inadequacy of their own administration”.
Indeed.
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