Dili

Portuguese traders and Dominican friars worked the Timor coast from the sixteenth century, but their base lay at Lifau in what is now Oecusse. After repeated conflict there the governor moved the seat of Portuguese Timor to Dili in 1769, choosing a malarial stretch of the north coast with a sheltered anchorage. The town grew slowly around a customs house, a fort and a handful of churches, its economy resting on sandalwood, coffee brought down from the hills and forced labour; epidemics and rebellion troubled it through the nineteenth century.

Japanese forces occupied the town in 1942, fighting a long campaign against Australian commandos and their Timorese supporters in the mountains behind it, and the bombing and reprisals of those years cost tens of thousands of civilian lives. Portuguese rule returned until the revolution in Lisbon in 1974. Fretilin declared independence on 28 November 1975; Indonesian forces landed in the city nine days later.

For twenty-four years Dili was the administrative centre of an occupation and the seat of its resistance: students organised clandestinely, and in November 1991 troops fired on a funeral procession at the Santa Cruz cemetery, an event whose smuggled film brought worldwide attention. After the referendum of 30 August 1999 militias and departing troops burned much of the city, destroying government buildings, power and water systems and most homes. International forces and a UN administration rebuilt from ruins, and Timor-Leste became independent on 20 May 2002. A crisis in 2006 again emptied parts of the city into camps, but Dili has been peaceful since, and building has continued along the seafront.

Dili is a capital of arrivals: almost everyone here has roots in a district elsewhere, and families keep ties to a home village, its sacred house and its obligations. Weddings, funerals and house ceremonies still involve the exchange of buffalo, pigs, tais cloth and heirlooms, and a city household will be called on to contribute. Tetum is the language of the street, Portuguese of official papers and older churchmen, Indonesian of the generation schooled under the occupation, and English of the offices and the diaspora returned from Australia.

The Catholic Church shapes public life more than in almost any other Asian capital. Cathedral masses fill the forecourt, statues stand at road junctions, and Holy Week processions and All Souls' Day bring out crowds. Alongside it customary authority, lisan, still governs land, disputes and respect for elders.

The memory of the occupation is present rather than hidden: in the museums, in street names, in the veterans who hold public office, and in a tolerant, direct manner of speaking about it. The arts have grown out of that history — Arte Moris trained a generation of painters and sculptors after 1999, and murals of resistance figures cover walls across the city. Football and martial-arts clubs are the passions of young men; music is Portuguese-inflected ballads, Indonesian pop and reggae. Greetings are unhurried, and handshakes are soft.

About 320,000 people live in the Dili municipality, roughly a quarter of the country's population, and the city keeps growing as young people arrive from the districts looking for work and schooling. The population is very young, and unemployment among them is high. Government, the United Nations and embassies, the port, small trading businesses largely run by Chinese-Timorese and Indonesian families, and construction paid for by the Petroleum Fund provide most formal jobs; many people live instead by street trading, driving microlets or selling phone credit and fruit at junctions.

The day starts before six, when the markets fill and the seafront is busy with walkers and runners, and again slows in the heat of the early afternoon. Offices keep to a long lunch. Electricity is now reliable in the city, though water supply is not, and the drains laid after 1999 struggle with the rains — the flood of April 2021, the worst in fifty years, damaged homes across the lower suburbs.

Housing spreads up the hillsides in compounds of concrete and tin behind walls, with pigs and chickens in the yards. Costs are high for wages that are not, so households pool income, and money sent home by Timorese working in Australia, South Korea and Britain supports many families. Traffic, rubbish collection and the price of rice are the everyday complaints.

Dili's everyday cooking is Timorese food met halfway by Indonesia. Rice with grilled or stewed fish, chicken or pork is the basic plate, brightened with a chilli condiment and lime; batar daan, a popular dish of maize, mung beans and pumpkin, appears in home kitchens and some local restaurants. Ikan sabuko, Spanish mackerel marinated in tamarind with basil and capsicum, is another of the dishes counted as Timorese. Boiled cassava, its leaves cooked as a green, sweet potato and green papaya fill out the meal.

The Indonesian years left bakso meatball soup, mie goreng and nasi goreng, padang-style warungs and satay stalls; the Portuguese centuries left bread rolls on every corner, caldo verde-style broths, pork dishes and a taste for strong coffee. That coffee is the city's best-known product to outsiders: arabica from Ermera and Letefoho, grown under shade trees with little or no chemical input, roasted and served in cafés in the centre and along the eastern shore road.

Fish is the treat — grilled whole over coconut husks at the seafront stalls and at Areia Branca, sold beside the road by men holding up a string of the morning's catch. Markets sell mangoes, bananas, avocados, palm sugar and betel nut. Palm wine, fresh or distilled into a clear spirit, is the local drink, though imported beer is what most bars pour.