Night Stroll around Jakarta's Old Town

Jakarta's Old City, a famous tourist area well-known for its historical heritage. The old city itself was once a center for Dutch East India Company and was the center of trade in Asia during the Dutch colonial period. On this post, I would like to share my experience of exploring the Old Town at night with the Jakarta Good Guide / JGG (https://jakartagoodguide.wordpress.com)

The tour started with a little introduction about the area around Jakarta Kota Railway Station by our tour guide, Farid. We stopped across the Bank Mandiri Museum, a Classical Art Deco-style architecture building was once owned by a Dutch's trading company which later developed into a company in the banking sector. From the front of this white-colonial building, I stand with the feeling inside two different eras at the same time, I could see a sturdy old building in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city streets filled with various transportation in the modern era.

At the Fatahillah Square, we could see various colonial-style buildings that are silent witnesses of Jakarta's history. Fatahillah building itself was originally a city hall that was built during the Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen. During the Dutch colonial period, the building which is now a museum used to have a variety of functions, such as a court, a place for civil marriage records, a place where people settled in cells to wait for a trial, to a transit place for some of Indonesia's heroes before being exiled by the colonial government. In front of the building, there is a large open space named Fatahillah square. This area used to be a place for death penalty execution being held. Nowadays, it is functioning as a courtyard where tourists can enjoy the beauty of Jakarta's historical area.

Moving away from the museum area in the Old City, we continued our walking tour to Syahbandar Tower as our final stop. Along the way, we passed the Kota Intan Bridge, a bascule bridge inherited from the Dutch. It has a red color and constructed using iron and wood. The bridge which was once a place for water transportation passing through during the colonial-era now has been converted into a monument of historical objects for tourists.

Not far from there, we walked through the VOC Shipyard, a building that had once functioned as a dock for the Dutch trade union ships. From across the building, we can see a high tower, which used to be a location of Jakarta's zero points during the Dutch period, the Syahbandar Tower. Formerly, this tower functioned as a monitoring tower for ships and a place for collecting taxes on goods that unloaded at Sunda Kelapa Harbor. Nowadays, the tower is being preserved as a part of the Jakarta Provincial Government's Cultural Heritage.