IV Tempo Dulu , and Hotel ______

Words and Photography by Kennie Ting

Fig 1 – Meditteranean colours abound along the Kali Mas. This one adorns a godown.

“ ‘What do you think of that?’ asked Rienkie’s mother, pointing at the painting. ‘A real Indies sky, don’t you think?’ And only a few people could reproduce an Indies sky, she went on to say. To do that you must have lived in the Indies for a long time. In fact, you really had to be born in the Indies.”

Robert Nieuwenhuys, Faded Portraits

The shadows are cast long in the morning. I walk alone along the Mas River, or Kali Mas, that leads from the old town towards the port. To my left are hundreds of godowns – colonial-era warehouses that used to store goods brought in from the far reaches of the Indies. They are all shuttered for the day, possibly for good. The river itself is sluggish and gray, despite its name meaning River of Gold. I had intended that morning to walk all the way to the mouth of this river, to catch the fabulous sight of pnisis boats – large wooden schooners – that for centuries have shuttled spices and

Ting 1 textiles between here and the island of Madura. Mid-way through my walk, I realised that the distance was simply too far to take in on foot and I turned around to head back where I came from. The very act of turning around afforded me a completely different view of the river and its city. As I approach the old town, the road bends to the left and ahead of me, I can see the river winding to the right, flanked by a dozens of these old godowns with red-tiled roofs and colourful shutters. It is a view reminiscent of Dutch cities like Amsterdam or Leiden, far-flung cities of the colonial regime ruling these parts from the 17th to the 20th centuries. So this is what it looked like then, I thought, Oud Soerabaja, second only to Batavia in wealth and fame.

Fig 2 – Glimpse into a perfumery in the Arab Quarter of Ampel.

The city was refreshingly quiet that weekend, due to the Festival of Eid – or Idul-fitri in local parlance – which marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The streets bore witness to a much reduced flow of cars and motorcycles – a far cry from the traffic gridlock that would normally plague these same thoroughfares any other day. Everywhere, doors were shut; everywhere, that is, except for the Arab Quarter of Ampel, in the Old Town. There, the streets were thronged with cars and becaks (cyclos) bearing families, dressed in brightly-coloured festive baju (clothes), out visiting. The stores in Ampel were all open for business. Run by the descendants of Yemeni Arabs that emigrated here in the 19th century,

Ting 2 these stores sell much the same goods and products they have done in the past two centuries: textiles, dates and those wondrously fragrant Arab perfumes and scents. Down by the fish market – Pasar Pabean – local ladies haggled over the remains of that morning’s catch, hoping to purchase the biggest and the freshest in preparation for the family feast that would inevitably take place that evening.

Fig 3 – A Chinese ash house – where one worships the dead.

Slipping into Chinatown, just south of Ampel, I encounter a completely different scene altogether: one of dereliction and neglect. Many of the city’s Chinese had moved out of the old Chinese quarters decades ago when the centre of economic activity shifted further south of the city. What remained was a ghostly landscape of two-storey shophouse buildings – the kind found all over port cities in the Malay Archipelago where there were sizeable Chinese communities – interspersed with an older vernacular influenced by the courtyard houses of southern China. Two stunning specimens of this style of architecture sat along Jln Kembang Jepun (a reference to the days when the Japanese plied these streets), just past the gates of Chinatown. These were ash houses, or houses dedicated to the worship of ancestral spirits. One of these was the preserve of the Han clan, the other the The clan. Most of the Chinese, having converted to Christianity along with their move south, had abandoned the traditional practice of ancestor worship, and so it was somewhat of a miracle that

Ting 3 these two houses remained in a good state of preservation. As I peered through the ornate gates surrounding them, I wondered if they were still inhabited by spirits, or if these same spirits, having lost their worshippers, had long since vanished into the ether.

Fig. 4 – The façade of an old colonial trading house, by the Mas River.

The Old Town is split into the European and Asian (Chinese and Arab) quarters by the Mas River, over which extends the Jembatan Merah, or Red Bridge. The Bridge is significant in the history of modern Indonesia. It was here that the Battle of Surabaya – the most important pro-independence struggle against Dutch and British re-occupying troops – was initiated in 19451, just weeks after Sukarno’s declaration of Indonesian Independence in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the Dutch colonial regime’s repudiation of this declaration. On 26th October, as a British Brigade Commander’s vehicle passed through the Jembatan Merah area, the vehicle was surrounded by Indonesian militia and in the ensuing skirmish, the Brigadier was hit and killed by a stray bullet. All out war ensued, with more than 6000 Indonesian resistance fighters losing their lives. They are commemorated by a

1 The British were allies of the Dutch during World War II and supported the latter’s reclaiming of their ex-colony. Later on they would turn around to support the fledgeling Indonesian nation’s bid for independence.

Ting 4 Heroes Monument in the city and by a public holiday – Heroes Day – on 10th November, the day the war ended.

Across the Red Bridge, the European Quarter begins in earnest, and stretches for a good eight kilometers to the suburb of Wonokromo, making Surabaya the city with one of the most extensive tracts of extant colonial architecture in . It wasn’t that the locals loved their old colonial masters: the Dutch were universally loathed for having treated the Javanese as nothing more than slaves, subjecting them to centuries of cash-cropping that kept them impoverished and dependent. The fact was that with independence having brought no reprieve to poverty and to the entrenched class system in Javanese culture, there simply was no resources nor the will to demolish these buildings, and so they remained, re-occupied by banks, government institutions, and wealthy Javanese families – the inheritors of the Dutch colonial land-owning class.

Fig. 5 – The façade of the House of Sampoerna, with the Chinese character for “King” atop its roof.

The most impressive instances of colonial architecture occur along Jalan Rajawwali, by the banks of the Mas River. Here sit the headquarters of old trading and merchant houses – the Dutch were after all, a nation of merchants, and there is a cleanness and no-nonsense functionality to the architecture here that distinguishes it

Ting 5 from the more ornate English, Spanish or French colonial tradition elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Many of the buildings here, however, have not aged well and are in dire need of restoration. A large expanse of colonial-era villas had also been cleared very recently to make way for a spanking new mall – the Jembatan Merah Plaza.

Nonetheless, one significant villa in the vicinity still stands and has been restored to its former glory. This is the House of Sampoerna, named after Indonesia’s biggest cigarette brand, and once a factory and private domicile of the Chinese magnate that founded the company. Chinese-Indonesian Liem Seeng Tee, whose family name would be Indo-ised to Sampoerna in the ‘60s, bought and restored this Dutch colonial mansion in the early 20th century, embellishing it with stained glass windows that brandish the Chinese character for his family name – 林 – alongside the Chinese character for “King” – 王 – demonstrating an unabashed self-consciousness of his own wealth, power and influence. The house is a free museum today, accompanied by a delightful restaurant, and offering free bus tours of the City. I opted, however, to take a long, leisurely walk down the broad, tree-lined motorways, south of the Red Bridge towards the downtown core of Tunjungan.

Fig. 6 – Dutch colonial-style bungalow in the Tunjungan area.

Ting 6 Along the way stood magnificent pieces of commercial colonial architecture, many of which were built in the 20s and 30s in an exuberant Art Deco style2. Secreted amongst these buildings, and the increasingly frequent modern high-rise malls and apartments, were the occasional colonial-era bungalow: squat and compact, single-storeyed red-tile-roofed affairs that often stood mutely behind shut gates. When I first arrived in Surabaya, my taxi had taken me past a major street (Jalan Raya Darmo) flanked on both sides by row after row of these bungalows; and I had marvelled at how so many of these relics from the not-so-distant past had been retained with little of the rancor and anxiety that characterised other post-colonial cities’ treatment of their built colonial heritage.

Fig. 7 – Dozens of pnisis slumbering along the old Kalimas port.

The walk that morning from north of the Red Bridge back to my hotel – the legendary Hotel Majapahit at Jln Tunjungan – took me almost three hours to complete: testament to the size of the colonial core of the city. I wasn’t satisfied, however, with all that I had seen and photographed, having not been able to reach the ancient port of Kali Mas on foot, as I had thought I’d be able to. The next morning, I would take a taxi to the port, almost missing it due to my driver’s inability to speak

2 These are presented in the first photo gallery accompanying this chapter

Ting 7 English and a marked anxiety and carelessness in his driving as a result. Along the banks of the Mas River were docked more than twenty splendid ships painted an array of bright colours, sitting idle over the Eid weekend, after which they would once more, make the weekly journey to Madura island and further out to Ambon in the Moluccas.

Strolling along these fabled schooners, I felt rush over me that elusive sense of tempo dulu – an Indonesian term that captures a sense of melancholic nostalgia for a time long past; a nostalgia characterising many Dutch repatriates’ reminiscences and written accounts of their time in the . While I could under no circumstances ever comprehend what the Dutch and the Indonesians experienced during three centuries of uneasy co-existence, here at least, I thought was proof of a majestic past that transcends these differences, and was still, very much palpably alive today.

Paradise on Earth

Fig. 8 – The art deco façade of the Hotel Majapahit, on Jalan Tunjungan.

If it weren’t for the Hotel Majapahit, I would have had trouble remembering that Surabaya even existed, so entirely overshadowed has the city been by the

Ting 8 Indonesian capital , and by other tourist hotspots like Bali, Lombok and Jogjakarta. Hotel Majapahit is a bit of an anomaly in Grand Hotel terms, not just because it’s one of the only hotels built by the Sarkies Brothers that was not on British colonial soil, but because it actually played a very significant role in a post- colonial independence movement. It was here, in 1945, that a young Javanese resistance fighter, incensed by the raising of the Dutch flag over the Hotel at the end of the war, tore off the lower blue segment of the offending flag to create what would become the red and white pennant of the Republic of Indonesia - a stirring account of a turbulent history, which one would find hard to imagine today in the tranquil and genteel ambience of the hotel grounds.

Fig. 9 – Commemorative plaque that reads “The first stone of this building was laid by Eugene Lucas Sarkies on 1st June, 1910.

The Hotel Oranje, as it was originally known, is the youngest of the grand hotels of Southeast Asia undersigned by the Sarkies Brothers, ironically by the oldest of the expatriate Sarkies brothers – Lucas Martin3. It was built in 1910 in the Persian style that also characterises the other remaining Sarkies hotels in the region. A

3 There were five Sarkies brothers in total. The first never left their hometown of Isfahan, Persia. The other four – Lucas Martin, Arshak, Aviet and Tigran, would each go on to establish their own grand hotels across Southeast Asia.

Ting 9 plaque, in Dutch, that commemorates the erection of the hotel, still exists, just past the art deco lobby that was erected in 1936 after the hotel was significantly expanded. The plaque commemorates the laying of the first stone for the hotel by Eugene Lucas Sarkies, Lucas Martin’s seven-year old son. Unlike its sister hotels in Malaya and Burma, the Majapahit has gone by multiple names since its inception, variously being the Yamato Hotel during the Japanese Occupation, the Merdeka Hotel in the first year of Indonesian independence, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the 1990s and early 2000s. Interestingly, it is also the only one of the four hotels that continued to be managed by the Sarkies Brothers till the late 1960s. Appropriately for the time, the hotel was known as the Lucas Martin Sarkies, or L.M.S Hotel.

Fig. 10 – Lush tropical gardens framed by white colonnaded walkways.

My room was an executive suite on the second floor of the North Wing, at the furthest-most end of the property. To get to the suite, one has to take a pleasant and circuitous walk along bright, airy colonnaded walkways framing tropical gardens with bubbling fountains. A proliferation of stained glass frames and windows en route provided bursts of colour along the otherwise pristine white walls. Delicately placed here and there beneath the sprawling trees with their bird’s nest ferns were small wooden benches inviting one to sit down to read or to admire the view. Beyond the hotel walls was one of the biggest and noisiest cities in Southeast Asia, but inside

Ting 10 these walls, one couldn’t hear or sense a thing. The ancient Persians had a word for these enclosed sanctuaries – pairidaeza – from which the English word “Paradise” originates. Inside the hotel, I felt like I was indeed floating along in a kind of Paradise-on-earth straight out of the Arabian Nights: a secret, enclosed space inspiring secret, intimate, enclosed feelings.

Fig. 11 – The little verandah in front of the Executive Suite.

Each of the executive suites in the North Wing is fronted by their very own little verandah, equipped with an ornate light fixture, two chairs and a coffee table. I could just imagine long-staying guests in the 19th century decorating this area with potted plants and sitting outside for hours at night smoking cigars and having bottles of cool red wine. Inside the room, the sleeping area is sectioned off from the living area by a carved wooden frame inlaid with glass panels. At the far end of the room is the bathing area, decorated – like the Eastern and Oriental Hotel in – with art deco fittings and black and white floor tiles reminiscent of a 1920s New York or Shanghai hotel room. The interior of the room was rather dark, even with the saloon- style half-window flaps opened fully – a leftover feature from colonial days, perhaps, when the only means of keeping out the heat, was to keep out the sunlight. It occurred to me that a major refurbishment undertaken by the Mandarin Oriental group in the early ‘90s had probably left intact much of the original layout of the guest

Ting 11 rooms, which also meant that this hotel was probably very much unchanged since the 1930s.

Hidden Forces

Fig. 12 – The dark, colonial interior of the Executive Suite.

Being Southeast Asian, I am mildly superstitious and not above believing in the existence of the supernatural; and so I took no chances when it came to ensuring that my stay in the hotel remained spirit-free, as it were. , as any self-respecting Southeast Asian would know, is steeped in mysticism and awash with spirits. There is an unspoken respect for forces beyond one’s understanding, and I wasn’t about to question popular beliefs on the matter. That weekend of Eid, the hotel was almost entirely deserted. No one else appeared to be staying on the second floor of the North Wing, where I was; and I later found out that there was likely only two other suites occupied in the entire wing. Whatwith with the empty corridors, dimly lit hallways, and the dark interior of my room, it was all I could do at night not to dash out of the room to the relatively more populated and better-lit hotel lobby bar. My anxiety was worsened by the fact that I had chosen, for holiday reading that weekend, the excellent (but inappropriate) novel The Hidden Force, by Dutch-Indonesian novelist

Ting 12 Louis Couperus, which describes a Dutch colonial family disintegrating under the influence of the supernatural.

Fig 13 – Stained glass art deco windows everywhere.

The hotel bar – a stunning art deco affair – had been closed for the duration of Ramadan and was not due to reopen till after I left. And so in the evenings, I had to console myself with a beer and so-called canapés in the newly introduced Executive Lounge of the hotel, which, given my full-price accommodation in Executive Suite, I was entitled to use for complimentary coffee and tea at any time of the day, and for my own private breakfast in the mornings. Clambering up the stairs to the second floor on the first evening, I was greeted, with a good deal of relief, by the concierge – a garrulous young lady, who proved to be a tad over-eager to engage in conversation. The Executive Lounge was sumptuously decorated but completely deserted – a situation that was to be the norm that weekend. The overhead lights were turned up to their most brightest, and two televisions blared Korean pop music videos (on the one), and Hollywood movies (on the other). It was the antithesis of gezellig – the Dutch word for cosiness and intimacy. I thought to immediately bid a hasty retreat, but having already shown up, I felt obliged to stay on for a little bit.

Ting 13 Fig. 14 – The sumptuous but deserted Executive Lounge.

Five minutes into a can of Bintang Beer, a plateful of so-called canapés, and a page of notes in my notebook, I was interrupted by the concierge, who, starved of any human conversation all day, joined me at the table and proceeded to ask me questions. Where was I from? Why was I in Surabaya? Why did I choose this hotel? She seemed genuinely perplexed at my being on my own in a city that wasn’t quite so well known as a tourist destination, and by my choosing to stay at such a very old and very odd hotel. While I responded to her questions, a sudden loud scampering sound occurred immediately above our heads, as though a dozen monkeys had just dashed across the roof of the hotel. My eyes met the Concierge’s and she looked worried. But we continued talking, for the moment.

How do you find the executive lounge? She continued. I replied candidly but politely that it was simply too bright in here to be cosy, and that the televisions were turned on too loud. She apologised but explained that she had the lights turned on fully because she was largely here on her own in the evenings, and it was simply too creepy with the lights so dim. Just then, the scampering noises started up again above our heads. I looked at her nervously and replied that she had every right to keep the lights and the television on. As I was heading down for dinner, I also promised that I

Ting 14 would return that evening to keep her company, just so she didn’t feel too frightened on her own.

Fig. 15 – Booth seat at the Sarkies Restaurant.

Dinner that evening was at the Sarkies Restaurant on the second floor of the hotel’s West Wing. The Restaurant served elegant Cantonese cuisine, though from the décor – which was antique, turn-of-the-century European, it seemed likely that it had only been a Chinese restaurant very recently. I was seated at one in a row of very quaint and very beautiful booths, along a wall of period clocks that had stopped telling the time. It being a holiday weekend, the restaurant was also largely deserted, which afforded it a stark, period ambience that was atmospheric, but did little to assuage my anxiety. I ordered a range of decadent Chinese dishes – roast pigeon, grilled sea whelk, stir-fried ginseng shoots and the like – all the while taking in the atmosphere in the restaurant. It was far too silent in there, I thought, and I couldn’t help thinking that a live string quartet or jazz band would have done lots to liven the place somewhat. Each time I looked up from my food, I seemed to see, at the corner of my eye, a restaurant full with the ghostly presences of European revellers in their starched shirts and evening gowns, raising toasts, clinking glasses and chatting on about the latest fashions in Batavia. It was eerie, but illuminating.

Ting 15 The Morning After

Fig 16 – Pecel salad.

The morning I left, I caused a slight ruckus in the establishment when I opted for the standard buffet breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant, instead of a private breakfast in the Executive Lounge. The maitre’ d at the restaurant insisted, initially, that a “special” breakfast had been prepared for me – “special” meaning “European-style,” with eggs, toast, bacon, grilled tomatoes and such. I explained, however, that what I really wanted to try were local dishes, and that, being Singaporean, I could hardly be expected to forego a large buffet for a smaller one! At the buffet table, I threw together a pecel – a Javanese boiled vegetable salad consisting of bean sprouts, green beans, cabbage, local spinach and an edible flower called the Turi (Sesbania Grandiflora), which, I found out later on, was used liberally in many dishes in Java. The entire ensemble was drenched with a spicy peanut sauce, garnished with deep fried coconut shavings, and accompanied with a crispy rice-based keripik, or savory biscuit. It was the first time I had ever eaten such a thing, and the staff explained that the core ingredients of the salad varied across Java, and that this version of the pecel was native to Surabaja.

Ting 16 After breakfast, I took the opportunity to rest my weary legs at the hotel’s massive 25-meter swimming pool, where I pondered the term tempo dulu, against a rustic backdrop of crowing roosters and orange-tipped hornets dipping gently into the edge of the water. The past, I thought, was still very much alive in this hotel: of all the grand hotels I had visited thus far on my journey, it was the most conducive to nostalgia and navel-gazing. I understood from Reception that the hotel wasn’t usually so deserted, and that I had been very lucky it wasn’t more populated by noisy Indonesian families and their children. I took that – and a relative lack of supernatural disturbances during my stay – to mean that the hidden forces had looked kindly upon my intrusion into their demesne; or that perhaps at the very least, they too had taken time off to celebrate this national holiday of Idul-fitri.

Fig. 17 – The entrance to the grand ballroom.

With the time that remained, I brewed myself a pot of tea, and sat myself down in my little verandah to read the rest of my book about hidden forces. How unnerving it must be, I thought, to live with such constant, immediate sensitivity to the past and its presence. But also, how wonderfully magical!

* * * * *

Ting 17 Essential Reading

Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force. London: Quartet Books.

Tim Hannigan, Articles on Old Surabaya. Available at: http://tahannigan.blogspot.sg/2011/04/wandering-into-past-in-old-surabaya.html

Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company. London: Penguin Classics.

Robert Niewenhuys (E. Breton de Nijs), Faded Portraits. HK: Periplus Editions.

Ting 18

Fig. 18 – Stairwell leading up to the second floor, in the East Wing.

Ting 19