Pontianak

Pontianak is younger than most Indonesian cities and has a precise founding: in 1771 Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie, of Arab Hadhrami descent through his father and local royalty through his mother, cleared a site at the junction of the Landak and Kapuas rivers and established a sultanate there. The story told locally is that he fired cannon into the forest to choose the spot and to drive off the kuntilanak, the vengeful spirit whose name the city carries. The palace and the great timber mosque he built still stand on the east bank.

Trade made the place. The Kapuas drains an enormous interior, and gold, diamonds, rattan, forest resins and later rubber came downriver to be shipped out. Chinese miners, organised into self-governing kongsi federations, worked the goldfields inland from the 18th century, and Teochew and Hakka merchants settled in the town. Dutch traders from Batavia arrived in 1778 and the Company endorsed the sultan the following year, with control tightening through the 19th century, making Pontianak the seat of the Residency of the Western Division of Borneo.

The Japanese occupation was catastrophic: in 1943 and 1944 the occupying forces executed the sultan of Pontianak and much of the region's Malay, Chinese, Dayak and other leadership in mass killings known as the Pontianak incidents, or the Mandor affair, after the place north of the city where many were put to death. Every Malay sultan in Kalimantan was among the dead. After independence the city grew as a provincial capital, absorbing migrants from Java and Madura and, in the late 1990s, families displaced by ethnic violence in the interior. Timber, palm oil, rubber and bauxite have driven its economy since.

Three worlds meet here. Malay culture provides the language of the coast, the sultanate's court traditions and a Muslim calendar that the whole city keeps time by; the Chinese community, one of the largest proportionally in Indonesia, runs much of the trade and gives the city its coffee shops, noodle houses, temples and lantern festivals; and Dayak peoples from the interior come to the capital for work, study and politics, with the reconstructed longhouse hall as their gathering place. Relations have not always been easy — the violence of the late 1990s in the interior is within living memory — but daily coexistence in the city is matter-of-fact.

Pontianak's particular traditions tend to be loud. Meriam karbit, the firing of huge carbide cannons made from hollowed logs along both banks of the Kapuas before Eid, is the city's own tradition and a point of civic pride. The equator is the other shared emblem, marked on souvenirs, certificates and the name of the monument's road, and the twice-yearly disappearance of shadows at noon draws crowds.

Social life is conducted over coffee. Meetings, gossip, business and politics all happen in kopi tiam that open early and close late, and an invitation to talk usually means an invitation to a small strong glass of it.

About 670,000 people live in the city itself, with several hundred thousand more in the surrounding regency of Kubu Raya, which contains the airport and much of the sprawl. The land is flat peat and alluvium barely above the rivers, cut by canals, so drainage, tidal flooding and subsidence are constant municipal problems and houses in the older quarters stand on ironwood piles.

Work is trade, transport, government and processing: rubber, palm oil, timber and plywood, bauxite from the interior and, distinctively, aloe vera, grown in the northern districts and turned into drinks, jellies and cosmetics. The port handles goods for the whole province, and the border crossing to Sarawak at Entikong sends traders and workers back and forth. Public sector jobs and the universities support a large student population.

Because the sun rises and sets at almost the same hour every day of the year, the rhythm is unusually fixed: prayers and markets before dawn, work and school from early morning, a long hot pause in the middle of the day, and a second life in the evening when the riverside square, the coffee shops and Jalan Gajah Mada fill up. Traffic on the bridges, flooding, and the price of rubber and palm oil are the standing local grievances.

Pontianak eats Chinese food in Malay company. Chai kue, also written choi pan, is the emblem: small steamed dumplings of soft rice-flour dough filled with garlic chives, shredded turnip, taro or dried shrimp, topped with fried garlic and eaten by the dozen. Bakmi kepiting tops egg noodles with crab from the estuary, kwetiau sapi is broad rice noodle fried with beef over a fierce flame, and bubur pedas, a spiced rice porridge with vegetables, herbs, coconut and peanuts, comes from the Malay communities of Sambas to the north.

River and sea provide the rest. Prawns and crab from the Kapuas delta, grilled fish with sambal, and pengkang — glutinous rice with dried shrimp wrapped in banana leaf and grilled in a triangular parcel, dipped in a spicy crab sauce — are all local staples. During Ramadan the streets fill with sotong pangkong, dried squid hammered flat, grilled and served with a sweet chilli-peanut dip.

The city is also known for aloe vera, grown in the northern districts and served as translucent cubes in iced drinks, and for its desserts: es krim in half a coconut shell, chendol and layered kue lapis. Coffee culture is the constant — strong local kopi with condensed milk, poured between glasses to cool it, and drunk at all hours in shops that have not changed their tables in decades.