Bandung

The basin was the floor of an ancient lake, farmed by Sundanese villages long before a town existed. Bandung dates its founding to 1810, when the regent moved his seat to the post road that Governor-General Daendels was driving across Java; the new settlement grew at the point where the road crossed the Cikapundung river. A railway from Batavia reached it in 1884, and the cool climate and plantations of tea, quinine and coffee around it made the town attractive to Europeans.

By the early 20th century Bandung was the most European city in the Indies, nicknamed the Paris of Java for its shops along Braga, and the Dutch planned to move the colonial capital here. The technical college opened in 1920, the elaborate government building, Gedung Sate, was completed in 1924, and architects filled the streets with art deco and modernist work. The plan for a new capital was overtaken by war.

In March 1946, ordered by British forces to evacuate the southern half of the city, Indonesian troops and hundreds of thousands of civilians left it and burned much of it behind them rather than leave it to the British and the returning Dutch, an episode remembered as Bandung Lautan Api, the sea of fire. The city's best-known moment came in April 1955, when Sukarno opened the Asian-African Conference at Gedung Merdeka, bringing together twenty-nine Asian and African states, most of them newly independent, in a meeting that gave its name to the Bandung spirit and was a step towards the non-aligned movement. Since then Bandung has grown into a large industrial and university city, spreading up the slopes of the basin with textile mills, campuses and weekend traffic from Jakarta.

Bandung is the cultural capital of the Sundanese, the second-largest ethnic group in Indonesia. Sundanese is the everyday language, and its music is distinctive: the bamboo angklung, shaken in tuned sets and taught in schools across the country; the kacapi suling, zither and flute played behind a singer; the jaipongan dance created by the Bandung composer Gugum Gumbira; and the wayang golek rod puppets, carved and performed in the villages around the city. Pencak silat martial arts and the reog and kuda lumping performances belong to the same tradition.

It is also a young city. The technology institute and dozens of other campuses give it a large student population, and Bandung has long been Indonesia's laboratory for independent music, design, streetwear and publishing; the local clothing industry grew directly out of that scene. Football is followed with unusual intensity, and the city's blue-shirted supporters are a visible part of its identity.

Weekend visitors from Jakarta shape daily habits too, filling the factory outlets, hill restaurants and cafés from Friday evening. Manners are Sundanese: soft-spoken, indirect and marked by the polite word punten used when passing someone. Religious observance is widespread but generally easy-going, and Bandung's mix of mosques, churches, Chinese temples and university halls sits together without friction.

About 2.5 million people live in the city, with a wider metropolitan area considerably larger, taking in Cimahi and the regencies that surround the basin. It is one of the most densely built cities in Indonesia, and the surrounding slopes have filled with housing over the past generation.

Textiles and garment manufacture are the traditional industries, along with aircraft and defence engineering, pharmaceuticals, and food processing; tea, vegetables and dairy come down from the highlands. Education is a major employer, and the student population supports a large economy of lodging houses, eating places and small shops. Tourism from within Indonesia is significant, concentrated at weekends.

The day starts early and cool, with markets and school runs before the traffic thickens, and ends with street stalls and cafés that stay open late. The city's persistent problems are congestion on roads never designed for this many vehicles, waste disposal, flooding in the southern districts when the Citarum rises, and the pollution of that river, which has been the subject of a long-running clean-up programme. Water supply and the loss of green slopes to building are constant local arguments.

Sundanese cooking is fresher and less sweet than Javanese food, built on raw vegetables and sambal. A typical meal is lalapan — cucumber, basil, long beans and cabbage eaten raw with a fiery sambal terasi — with grilled gourami or catfish, fried tempeh and tofu, and sayur asem, a sour tamarind vegetable soup. Nasi timbel wraps rice in a banana leaf to scent it, and karedok is a raw vegetable salad in peanut sauce, the uncooked cousin of gado-gado.

Bandung's own dishes are mostly snacks that became meals. Batagor, fried fish dumplings with tofu under peanut sauce, is the best known, with its steamed relative siomay close behind. Mie kocok is beef-broth noodles with tendon; cuanki is a soup of dumplings and meatballs sold from carts; and seblak, a chewy, chilli-heavy dish of crackers cooked with egg and garlic, spread from here across Indonesia.

The highland climate gives the city a taste for warm drinks and sweet things: bandrek and bajigur, ginger and coconut-milk drinks sold at night, surabi pancakes cooked in clay dishes over charcoal, peuyeum, fermented cassava hung up in shops along the hill roads, and colenak, grilled fermented cassava with palm sugar. West Javan coffee from the surrounding volcanic slopes supplies a dense network of roasteries and cafés.