Semarang paid a sultan's debt by becoming a VOC port
Semarang, capital of Indonesia's Central Java, spans about 374 square kilometers with 1.65 million people in 2020—ninth among Indonesian cities—and remains a major regional port praised as Southeast Asia's cleanest tourist destination. Ninth-century Bergota roots precede a 1547 Islamic school founding under Demak patronage.
The town began as a fishing village, known in the ninth century as Bergota. Late in the fifteenth century the Demak Sultanate sent the Islamic scholar Ki Ageng Pandan Arang to open a school there, and on 2 May 1547 Sultan Hadiwijaya of Pajang named him the first bupati, which is taken as the city's administrative birth. The Mataram ruler Amangkurat II pledged the port to the Dutch East India Company in 1678 to cover debts, and on 5 October 1705 Pakubuwono I confirmed it as a Company town in return for cancelling Mataram's obligations.
Early colonial Semarang was tiny and segregated: a devout Muslim quarter called Kauman, a Chinese district, and a five-sided Dutch fort with a single southern gate and five watchtowers. Only the European quarter counted as the city proper; everything else was treated as outlying villages. The costly Java War starved it of funds, and most surrounding land stayed under rice, with trade clustered along the river and a market where communities met.
Growth came with infrastructure. British troops under Colonel Gillespie marched through in 1811, and Governor-General Janssens surrendered Java at nearby Tuntang that September. Semarang became seat of a residency in 1817, and the Great Mail Road of 1847 and later state railways made it the outlet for the region's crops, sparking a boom in the 1870s. Crowded kampongs reached up to 1,000 people per hectare, and cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria kept death rates high into the twentieth century.
Thomas Karsten's revised plan produced the hillside district of Candi Baru, less ethnically divided though still sharply split by class. By the 1920s the city had doubled in size, and before Japan invaded in 1942 it was already Central Java's capital. A creole language, Javindo, grew from its large Eurasian community.
Source: Semarang
