Ambon

Ambon's recorded history begins with cloves. The island grew them, and the Portuguese, pushed out of Ternate, built a fort on the bay in 1575 around which a settlement formed. The Dutch East India Company took it in 1605, renamed the fort Victoria, and made Ambon the seat of its government for the Moluccas; the Company's first three governors-general were based here between 1610 and 1619. Company rule here meant the clove monopoly, enforced by annual hongi fleets that destroyed trees grown outside the permitted islands, and by the violence that accompanied it: in 1623 Dutch officials tortured and executed English traders at Ambon, an episode that poisoned relations between the two countries for decades.

Ambonese Christians, converted under Portuguese and then Dutch influence, came to occupy a particular place in the colony as soldiers, clerks and teachers. The revolt led by Thomas Matulessy, known as Pattimura, broke out on neighbouring Saparua in 1817 and was crushed within months. In the Second World War the city was bombed and then occupied by Japanese forces in early 1942; Allied prisoners died in large numbers on the island, and the war cemetery on the city's edge dates from that time. In 1950, after Indonesian independence, Ambonese soldiers who had served the Dutch proclaimed a Republic of South Maluku; the movement was defeated and thousands of families later settled in the Netherlands.

Between 1999 and 2002 conflict between Christian and Muslim communities in Maluku killed thousands and displaced many more before a peace agreement was reached, and the rebuilding of the city belongs to the years since. A magnitude 6.5 earthquake in September 2019 killed dozens across Maluku and drove tens of thousands from their homes. UNESCO named Ambon a City of Music in 2019.

Ambon's reputation in Indonesia is musical. The city has produced singers and bands out of proportion to its size, and the tradition runs through church choirs, school competitions, guitars on verandas and ensembles of tifa drums and totobuang gongs. Hymn singing in four parts is ordinary here, and a national audience knows Ambonese voices from television talent shows as much as from records.

Custom binds villages as much as religion divides them. Pela gandong, a system of alliances sworn between villages, obliges partners to help one another with building, feasts and disputes, and some of the pairs link a Christian village with a Muslim one. Sasi, the customary closure of a reef, river or grove to harvest for a season, is still declared and lifted with ceremony on the islands nearby. Ambonese Malay, soft and quick, is the language of the streets, and there is a long-standing connection with the Netherlands through the Moluccan families who settled there after 1950.

The conflict of 1999–2002 remains a presence in the city, in rebuilt churches and mosques and in where people live, and it is spoken about by residents with care rather than avoidance. Everyday life is sociable: people eat together, talk loudly and at length, and treat guests as an obligation of the household. Church services and Friday prayers set the week; weddings, funerals and village feasts fill the rest of it.

About 357,000 people live in the city of Ambon, the largest in Maluku and its administrative and educational centre. Government offices, Pattimura University and the schools employ a great many residents; the rest of the economy runs on the port, fishing and fish processing, trade with the smaller islands, construction, and the markets that redistribute everything arriving by ship. Spices are still grown on the island — cloves and nutmeg in village gardens — though they no longer decide the city's fortunes.

The city is squeezed between the bay and steep hills, so it has grown along the shore and up the slopes, with neighbourhoods reached by narrow stepped lanes. The bridge across the inner bay has pulled the university side closer to the centre and encouraged new building around it. Traffic in the centre is heavy at the start and end of the day, and minibuses set the rhythm of getting about.

Mornings are early — markets before dawn, fish landed and smoked by mid-morning, offices and schools starting soon after. Afternoons slow in the heat, and the evening brings people to the waterfront, the food stalls and the western shore. The persistent problems are water supply, drainage and landslides after heavy rain, the cost of shipped-in goods, unemployment among young people, and preparedness for the earthquakes that the province regularly experiences.

Ambonese food is built on fish, sago and coconut. Papeda, a sticky, near-clear sago porridge, is the traditional staple: lifted from the pot with two sticks and eaten with ikan kuah kuning, a broth of fish, turmeric, lime, lemongrass and lemon basil. Rice is now common too, and boiled cassava, called kasbi, and sweet potato fill the same place at the table.

The city's best-known speciality is ikan asar, skipjack tuna split open and smoked over a low fire on bamboo frames, sold from roadside stands along the inner bay and eaten with rice and sambal. Colo-colo, the Maluku relish of raw chopped chilli, shallot, tomato and lime, accompanies almost every grilled fish; kohu-kohu mixes smoked fish with beansprouts, greens and grated coconut. Grilled fish with vegetables in coconut milk is the standard meal on the western shore.

Sweet things and drinks reflect the spice islands and the Dutch: nutmeg and clove appear in sweets, syrups and candied fruit, and bagea and sago biscuits are taken home as presents. Rujak, unripe fruit with a hot peanut and palm-sugar dressing, is the snack associated with Natsepa beach. Coffee and sweet tea are drunk everywhere, and sopi, a distilled palm spirit common in Christian villages across Maluku, appears at celebrations rather than in restaurants.