but after seeing the temple of Boro Boedor, and those at Brambanam, he
summed up the resemblances of the Buddhist and Brahmanic temples of Java
to those at Palenque and in Yucatan as consisting: in the same order of
gross idols; the pyramid form of temple, with staircases, like those of
Palenque and Yucatan; the small chapels or oratories, with subterranean
vaults beneath the idols; the same interior construction of temples; the
stepped arches; the details of ornamentation, terraces, and esplanades,
as in Mexico and Yucatan; and the localization of temples in religious
centers far from cities, forming places of pilgrimage, as at Palenque,
Chichen-Itza, and, in a later time, at Cozumel.[5]
XVIII
SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN
As the two native states of Middle Java, the _Vorstenlanden_, or “Lands
of the Princes,” were last to be brought under Dutch rule, Djokjakarta
and Soerakarta are the capitals and head centers of native supremacy,
where most of Javanese life remains unchanged. The Sultan of Djokja,
and the so-called emperor, or _susunhan_, of Solo, were last to yield
to over-sea usurpers, and, as tributary princes enjoying a “protected
and controlled independence,” accept an “advisory elder brother,” in
the person of a Dutch resident, to sit at their sovereign elbows and by
“suggestions” rule their territories for the greater good of the natives
and the Holland exchequer. All the region around Djokja and Solo is
classic ground, and the oldest Javanese myths and legends, the earliest
traditions of native life, have their locale hereabout. These people
are the Javanese, and show plainly their Hindu descent and their higher
civilization, which distinguish them from the Sundanese of West Java; yet
the Sundanese call themselves the “sons of the soil,” and the Javanese
“the stranger people.” The glories of the Hindu empire are declared
by the magnificent ruins so lately uncovered, but the splendor of the
Mohammedan empire barely survives in name in the strangely interesting
city of the susunhan set in the midst of the plain of Solo—a plain which
M. Désiré de Charnay described as “a paradise which nothing on earth can
equal, and neither pen, brush, nor photography can faithfully reproduce.”
At this Solo, second city of the island in size, one truly reaches the
heart of native Java—the Java of the Javanese—more nearly than elsewhere;
but Islam’s old empire is there narrowed down to a kraton, or palace
inclosure, a mile square, where the present susunhan, or object of
adoration, lives as a restrained pensioner of the Dutch government, the
mere shadow of those splendid potentates, his ancestors.
The old susunhans were descended from the Moormen or Arab pirates who
harried the coast for a century before they destroyed the splendid Hindu
capital of Majapahit, near the modern Soerabaya. They followed that act
of vandalism with the conquest of Pajajaran, the western empire, or
Sundanese end of the island; and religious conversion always went with
conquest by the followers of the prophet. There was perpetual domestic
war in the Mohammedan empire, which by no means held the unresisting
allegiance of the Javanese at any time, and the Hindu princes of Middle
Java were never really conquered by them or the Dutch. The Java war of
the last century between the Mohammedan emperor, the Dutch, and the
rebellious native prince, Manko Boeni, lasted for thirteen years; and
in this century the same sort of a revolt cost the Dutch as imperial
allies more than four millions of florins, and made the British rejoice
that their statesmen had wisely handed back such a troublesome and
expensive possession as Java proved to be. The great Mataram war of the
last century, however, established the family of the present susunhan on
the throne, after dividing his empire with a rebellious younger brother,
who then became Sultan of Djokjakarta, and a new capital was built on
the broad plain cut by the Bengawan or Solo River, which is the largest
river of the island. At the death of the susunhan, Pakoe Bewono II
(“Nail of the Universe”), in 1749, his will bequeathed his empire to the
Dutch East India Company, and at last gave Holland control of the whole
island. Certain lands were retained for the imperial family, and its
present head, merely nominal, figurehead susunhan that he is, receives an
annuity of one hundred thousand florins—a sum equal to the salary of the
governor-general of Netherlands India.
[Illustration: THE SUSUNHAN.]
The present susunhan of Solo is not the son of the last emperor, but
a collateral descendant of the old emperors, who claims descent from
both Mohammedan and Hindu rulers, the monkey flag of Arjuna and the
double-bladed sword of the Arab conquerors alike his heirlooms and
insignia. His portraits show a gentle, refined face of the best Javanese
type, and he wears a European military coat, with the native sarong and
Arab fez, a court sword at the front of his belt, and a Solo kris at the
back. Despite his trappings and his sovereign title, he is as much a
puppet and a prisoner as any of the lesser princes, sultans, and regents
whom the Dutch, having deposed and pensioned, allow to masquerade in sham
authority. He maintains all the state and splendor of the old imperialism
within his kraton, which is confronted and overlooked by a Dutch fort,
whose guns, always trained upon the kraton, could sweep and level the
whole imperial establishment at a moment’s notice. The susunhan may have
ten thousand people living within his kraton walls; he may have nine
hundred and ninety-nine wives and one hundred and fifty carriages, as
reported; but he may not drive beyond his own gates without informing
the Dutch resident where he is going or has been, with his guard of
honor of Dutch soldiers, and he has hardly the liberty of a tourist
with a toelatings-kaart. He may amuse himself with a little body-guard
of Javanese soldiers; but there is a petty sultan of Solo, an ancient
vassal, whose military ambitions are encouraged by the Dutch to the
extent of allowing him to drill and command a private army of a thousand
men that the Dutch believe would never by any chance take arms against
them, as allies of the susunhan’s fancy guard. Wherever they have allowed
any empty show of sovereignty to a native ruler, the Dutch have taken
care to equip a military rival, with the lasting grudge of an inherited
family feud, and establish him in the same town. But little diplomacy
is required to keep such jealousies alive and aflame, and the Dutch are
always an apparent check, and pacific mediators between such rivals as
the susunhan and the sultan at Solo, and the sultan and Prince Pakoe Alam
at Djokja.
The young susunhan maintains his empty honors with great dignity
and serenity, observing all the European forms and etiquette at his
entertainments, and delighting Solo’s august society with frequent court
balls and fêtes. Town gossip dilates on his marble-floored ball-room, the
fantastic devices in electric lights employed in illuminating the palace
and its maze of gardens on such occasions, and on the blaze of heirloom
jewels worn by the imperial ladies and princesses at such functions. The
susunhan sometimes grants audiences to distinguished strangers, and one
French visitor has told of some magnificent Japanese bronzes and Chinese
porcelains in the kraton, which were gifts from the Dutch in the early
time when the Japanese and Javanese trade were both Holland monopolies.
No prostrations or Oriental salaams are required of European visitors at
court, although the old susunhans obliged even the crown prince and prime
minister to assume the dodok, and sidle about like any cup-bearer in his
presence. The princes and petty chiefs were so precisely graded in rank
in those days that, while the highest might kiss the sovereign’s hand,
and those of a lower rank the imperial knee, there were those of lesser
pretensions who adoringly kissed the instep, and, last of all, those who
might only presume to kiss the sole, of the susunhan’s foot. The susunhan
is always accompanied on his walks in the palace grounds, and on drives
abroad, by a bearer with a gold pajong, or state umbrella, spreading from
a jeweled golden staff. The array of pajongs carried behind the members
of his family and court officials present all the colors of the rainbow,
and all the variegations a fancy umbrella is capable of showing—each
striped, banded, bordered, and vandyked in a different way, that would
puzzle the brain of any but a Solo courtier, to whom they speak as
plainly as a door-plate.
Solo has the same broad streets and magnificent shade-trees as the other
towns of Java, and some of the streets have deep ditches or moats on
either side of the drive, with separate little bridges crossing to each
house-front, which give those thoroughfares a certain feudal quaintness
and character of their own. At the late afternoon hour of our arrival
we only stopped for a moment to deposit the luggage at the enormously
porticoed Hotel Sleier, and then drove on through and about the imperial
city. The streets were full of other carriages,—enormous barouches,
“milords,” and family carryalls, drawn by big Walers,—with which we
finally drew up in line around the park, where a military band was
playing. We had seen bewildering lines of palace and fort and barrack
walls, marching troops, and soldiers lounging about off duty, until it
was easy to see that Solo was a vast garrison, more camp than court.
Later, when we had returned to the hotel portico, to swing at ease in
great broad-armed rocking-chairs,—exactly the Shaker piazza-chairs of
American summer life,—there was still sound of military music off beyond
the dense waringen shade, and the fanfare of bugles to right and to left.
Solo’s hotel, with its comforts, offered more material inducements for
us to make a long stay, than any hotel we had yet encountered in Java;
and the clear-headed, courteous landlady was a hostess in the most
kindly sense. The usual colonial table d’hôte assembled at nine o’clock
in the vast inner hall or pavilion, looking on a garden; and in this
small world, where every one knows every one, his habitat and all his
affairs, the new-comers were given a silent, earnest attention that would
have checked any appetites save those engendered by our archæological
afternoon at Brambanam. When beefsteak was served with a sauce of
pineapple mashed with potato, and the succeeding beet salad was followed
by fried fish, and that by a sweet pudding flooded with a mixture of
melted chocolate and freshly ground cocoanut, we were oblivious to all
stares and whispers and open comments in Dutch, which these colonials
take it for granted no alien understands or can even have clue to through
its likeness to German. While we rocked on the great white portico we
could see and hear that Solo’s lizards were as gruesome and plentiful
as those of other towns. While tiny fragilities flashed across white
columns and walls, and arrested themselves as instantaneous traceries and
ornaments, a legion of toads came up from the garden, and hopped over the
floor in a silence that made us realize how much pleasanter companions
were the croaking and bemoaning geckos, who keep their ugliness out of
sight.
[Illustration: THE DODOK.]
At sunrise we set out in the company of an American temporarily in
exile at Solo, and drove past the resident’s great garden of palms and
statues and flower-beds, into the outer courts of the emperor’s and
the sultan’s palaces, watching in the latter the guard-mount and drill
of a fine picked body of his troops. The palace of one of the younger
princes of the imperial house was accessible through kind favor, as the
owner is pleased to let uitlanders enjoy the many foreign features of
these pleasure-grounds. This foreign garden did not, however, make us
really homesick by any appealing similarity to the grounds of citizens
or presidents on the American side of the globe; for the progressive
prince has arranged his demesne quite after the style of the gardens of
the cafés chantants of the lower Élysée in Paris—colored-glass globes
and all, marble-rimmed flower-beds, and a cascade to be turned on at
will and let flow down over a marble staircase set with colored electric
bulbs. Colored globes and bulbs hang in festoons and arches about the
bizarre garden, simulate fruits and flowers on the trees and bushes,
glow in dark pools and fountain basins, and play every old fantastic
trick of al-fresco cafés in Europe. A good collection of rare beasts
and birds is disposed in cages in the grounds, and there are countless
kiosks and pavilions inviting one to rest. In one such summer-house, with
stained-glass walls, the attendants showed photographs of the prince, his
father and family, the solemn old faces and the costumes of these elders
almost the only purely Javanese things to be seen in this fantastic
garden, since even the recha, gray old images from Boro Boedor and
Brambanam, have been brightened with red, white, and blue paint and made
to look cheerful and decorative—have been restored, improved, brought
down to modern times, and made to accord better with their café-chantant
surroundings.
Quite unexpectedly, we saw the princely personage himself receive his
early cup of coffee—attracted first to the ceremony by noticing a man
carrying a gold salver and cup, and followed by an umbrella-bearer
and two other attendants, enter an angle of the court in whose shady
arcade we were for the moment resting. Suddenly all four men dropped to
their heels in the dodok, and, crouching, sidled and hopped along for
a hundred feet to the steps of a pavilion. The cup-bearer insinuated
himself up those four steps, still squatting on his heels, and at the
same time balancing his burden on his two extended hands, and proffered
the gold salver to a shadowy figure half reclining in a long chair. We
stood motionless, unseen in our dark arcade, and watched this precious
bit of court comedy through, and saw the cup-bearer retire backward down
the steps, across the court, to the spot where he might rise from his
ignoble attitude and walk like a human being again. While exacting this
much of the old etiquette, this prince of European education and tastes
has the finest ball-room in Solo—a vast white-marble-floored _pringitan_,
or open-sided audience-hall, which is lighted with hundreds of electric
lights, and on whose shining surface great cotillions are danced, and
rich favors distributed to companies blazing with diamonds.
XIX
THE LAND OF KRIS AND SARONG
The stir of camp and court, the state and pomp and pageantry of three
such grandees as emperor, sultan, and resident in the one city, made
such street-scenes in Solo as tempted the kodaker to constant play while
the sun was high. Bands and marching troops were always to be seen in
the street, and the native officials of so many different kinds made
pictures of bewildering variety. The resident, returning from an official
call, dashed past in a coach and four, with pajong-bearers hanging
perilously on behind, and a mounted escort clattering after. Members
of the imperial household staff were distinguished by stiff sugar-loaf
caps or fezzes of white leather; and such privileged ones stalked along
slowly, magnificently, each with a kris at the back of his belt, and
always followed by one or two lesser minions. Those of superior rank went
accompanied by a pajong-bearer balancing the great flat umbrella of rank
above the distinguished one’s head; and the precision with which the
grandee kept his head within the halo of shadow, or the bearer managed
to keep such a true angle on the sun, were something admirable, and only
to be accomplished by generations of the two classes practising their
respective feats. The emperor’s mounted troops were objects of greater
interest, these dragoons wearing huge lacquered vizors or crownless caps
over their turbaned heads, the regulation jackets, sarongs, and heavy
krises, and bestriding fiery little Timor ponies. The native stirrup is a
single upright bar of iron, which a rider holds between the great toe and
its neighbor; and these troopers seemed to derive as much support from
this firm toe-grip as booted riders do from resting the whole ball of the
foot on our stirrups.
There is a labyrinthine passer at Solo, where open sheds and rustic
booths have grown upon one another around several open court spaces,
which are dotted with the huge mushrooms of palm-leaf umbrellas, and
whose picturesqueness one cannot nearly exhaust in a single morning’s
round. The pepper- and fruit- and flower-markets are, of course, the
regions of greatest attraction and richest feasts of color. The horn
of plenty overflowed royally there, and the masses of bananas and
pineapples, durians, nankos, mangosteens, jamboas, salaks, dukus, and
rambutans seemed richer in color than we had ever seen before; and the
brass-, the basket-, the bird-, the spice-, and the gum-markets had
greater attractions too. The buyers were as interesting as the venders,
and a frequent figure in these market groups that tempted the kodaker to
many an instantaneous shot, regardless of the light,—better any muddy
impression of that than none at all,—was the Dutch housewife on her
morning rounds. I braved sunstroke and apoplexy in the hot sunshine, and
trailed my saronged subjects down crowded aisles to open spots, to fix on
film the image of these sockless matrons in their very informal morning
dress. I lurked in booths and sat for endless minutes in opposite shops,
with focus set and button at touch, to get a good study of Dutch ankles,
when certain typical Solo _hausfraus_ should return to and mount their
carriage steps—only to have some loiterer’s back obscure the whole range
of the lens at the critical second.
[Illustration: JAVA, BALI, AND MADURA KRISES.
From Sir Stamford Raffles’s “History of Java.”]
We found pawnshops galore in this city full of courtiers and hangers-on
of greatness, and such array of krises and curious weapons that there was
embarrassment of choice. We left the superior shops of dealers in arms,
where new blades, fresh from Sheffield or German works, were pressed
upon us, and betook ourselves to the junk-shops and pawnshops, where
aggregations of discarded finery and martial trappings were spread out.
Books, silver, crystal, cutlery, jeweled decorations, medals, epaulets,
swords, and krises in every stage of rust and dilapidation were found for
sale.
The kris is distinctively the Malay weapon, and is a key to much of
Malay custom and lore; and if the Japanese sword was “the soul of the
Samurai,” as much may be said for the kris of the Javanese warrior. The
cutler or forger of kris-blades ranked first of all artisans. There
are more than one hundred varieties of the kris known, the distinctive
Javanese types of kris differing from those of the Malay Peninsula and
the other islands, and forty varieties of kris being used in Java and its
immediate dependencies. The kris used in Bali differs from that of Madura
or Lombok, and that of Solo from that used in West or Sundanese Java.
These differences imply many curiously fine distinctions of long-standing
importance in etiquette and tradition; yet the kris is a comparatively
modern weapon—modern as such things go in Asia. No kris is carved on Boro
Boedor or Brambanam walls, and its use cannot be traced further back
than the thirteenth century, despite the legends of mythical Panji, who,
it is claimed, devised the deadly crooked blade and brought it with him
from India. When it was introduced from the peninsula it was instantly
adopted, and all people wearing the kris were counted by that badge as
subjects of Java. The kris is worn by all Javanese above the peasant
class and over fourteen years of age, and is a badge of rank and station
which the wearer never puts aside in his waking hours. Great princes wear
two and even four krises at a time, and women of rank are allowed to
display it as a badge. It is always thrust through the back of the girdle
or belt, a little to the left, and at an angle, that the right hand may
easily grasp the hilt; and its presence there, ready for instant use,
has proved a great restraint to the manners of a spirited, hot-blooded
people, and lent their intercourse that same exaggerated formality,
mutual deference, and high decorum that equally distinguished the old
two-sworded men of Japan. The kris is the warrior’s last refuge, as the
Javanese will run amuck, like other Malays, when anger, shame, or grief
has carried him past all bounds, and, stabbing at every one in the way,
friend or enemy alike, is ready then to take his own life.
The Javanese are still the best metal-workers in the archipelago, and
long displayed wonderful skill in tempering steel, in welding steel
and iron together, and in giving the wavy blade fine veinings and
damascenings. Those beautiful veinings, grained and knotted in wood,
and other curious patternings of the blade, were obtained by soaking
the blades, welded of many strips of hard and soft metal, in lime-juice
and arsenic until the surface iron was eaten out. A wound from such a
weapon is, of course, as deadly as if the kris were dipped in poison for
that purpose solely; and from this arises the common belief that all
kris-blades are soaked in toxic preparations. With the more general use
of firearms, and the arming of the troops with European rifles, the kris
remains chiefly a personal adornment, an article of luxury, and a badge
of rank.
Solo has always been considered a later Toledo for its blades, and in
the search for a really good, typical Solo kris I certainly looked
over enough weapons to arm the sultan’s guard. The most of them were
disappointingly plain as to sheath and hilt, the boat-shaped wooden
hilts having only enough carving on the under part to give the hand a
firm grasp. We could not find a single Madura kris, with the curious
totemic carvings on the handle; and all the finely ornamental krises,
with gold, silver, or ivory handles inlaid with jewels, have long since
gone to museums and private collections. One may now and then chance upon
finely veined blades with mangosteen handles in plain, unpromising wood,
and brass Sundanese sheaths; but after seeing the treasures of krises
in the Batavia museum, one is little satisfied with such utilities,
mere every-day serviceable weapons. Increasing tourist travel will
soon encourage the manufacture of ornamental krises, and in numbers to
meet the certain fixed demand, so that later tourists will have better
souvenirs than can be had now.
There is one whole street of sarong-shops in Solo, each little shop
or open booth glowing with cloths of brilliant colors, and each shop
standing in feudal dignity behind a tiny moat, with a mite of a
foot-bridge quite its own. Solo sarongs presented many designs quite new
to us, and the sarong-painters there employ a rich, dull, dark red and a
soft, deep green in the long diamonds and pointed panels of solid color,
relieved with borders of intricate groundwork, that tempt one to buy by
the dozen. There were many sarongs, painted with four and five colors in
fine, elaborate designs, that rose to ten and twenty United States gold
dollars in value; but one’s natural instincts protested against paying
such prices for a couple of yards of cotton cloth, mere figured calico,
forsooth, despite its artistic and individual merits. Our landlady at the
Sleier had inducted us into much of the sarong’s mysteries, qualities,
and details of desirability, and we had the museum’s rare specimens in
mind; but we were distracted in choice, and the thing I desired, just any
little scrap as an example of the _prang rusa_, or deer-fight, pattern,
which only the imperial ones may wear, was not to be had anywhere in
Solo. We looked in upon many groups of little women tracing out fine,
feathery, first-outline designs in brown dye with their tiny funnel
arrangements that are the paint-brushes of their craft; and we found one
great cement-floored fabrik of sarongs, a regular factory or wholesale
establishment, with many Chinese and native workmen. There whole
sections of the sarong pattern were stamped at a stroke by lean Chinese,
who used the same kind of tin stamping-blocks as are used in stamping
embroidery patterns in Western lands. We knew there was such a factory
for block-printed sarongs on Tenabang Hill in Batavia, but it was a
shock, a disillusionment, to come upon such an establishment of virtually
ready-made, “hand-me-down” sarongs in Solo.