Kalimantan (Borneo)

The oldest written records in Indonesia come from Kalimantan: stone pillars known as yupa, inscribed in Sanskrit for King Mulawarman of Kutai in the second half of the 4th century, were found at Muara Kaman on the Mahakam. Later, coastal sultanates grew on river trade — Kutai Kartanegara on the Mahakam, Banjar at Banjarmasin from the 16th century, and Pontianak, founded in 1771 by an Arab-descended ruler, Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie. Inland, the Dayak peoples lived by shifting cultivation, hunting and river trade. In the 18th century Chinese miners formed self-governing gold-mining federations, the kongsi, in West Kalimantan.

The Dutch extended their control slowly. The Banjarmasin War of 1859–63 counted Prince Antasari among its leaders, and the Dutch abolished the Banjar sultanate. Oil was struck near Balikpapan in the 1890s, making it an oil town, and Balikpapan and Tarakan were battlefields in the Second World War. After independence, Kalimantan was the front line of Indonesia's Konfrontasi with Malaysia in 1963–66.

Under Suharto, logging, transmigration from Java and Madura and later oil palm transformed the island; the failed Mega Rice Project of the 1990s drained huge areas of peat in southern Kalimantan, leaving it prone to fire. Tensions over land and jobs led to violence between Dayak and Madurese communities in West Kalimantan in the late 1990s and in Central Kalimantan, around Sampit, in 2001. North Kalimantan was split from East Kalimantan in 2012, and in 2019 the government chose East Kalimantan as the site of Nusantara, the planned new capital.

The Dayak are not one people but dozens, among them the Iban, Kenyah, Kayan, Ngaju and Bahau, each with its own language. Many once lived in longhouses, called betang or lamin, and a few still do; older traditions include hornbill motifs in carving and beadwork, the sape lute, the mandau sword, tattoos and, among older women in some communities, elongated earlobes. Many Dayak are now Christian, but the Ngaju of Central Kalimantan keep Kaharingan, long classed officially as a form of Hinduism, whose tiwah ceremony moves the bones of the dead to carved ossuaries.

The coasts are Malay and Banjar country, Muslim and river-oriented. The Banjar of South Kalimantan are known as traders, for sasirangan tie-dyed cloth, and for the Martapura diamond market. Chinese communities, many Hakka and Teochew, are prominent in Pontianak and above all Singkawang, whose Cap Go Meh festival draws crowds to see the tatung, spirit mediums carried through the streets. Tenggarong revives the Kutai court each year in the Erau festival.

Tension between tradition and change runs through everything: customary land rights against concessions, longhouse villages against logging roads.

Kalimantan covers over half a million square kilometres, larger than Java several times over, yet has only around 17 million people. Samarinda, with about 850,000, and Balikpapan, Banjarmasin and Pontianak, each with roughly 650,000 to 750,000, are the main cities; Palangka Raya, built in the 1950s as the capital of Central Kalimantan, is smaller, and Tanjung Selor is the capital of North Kalimantan.

The economy runs on extraction. East and South Kalimantan are among Indonesia's main coal regions, Bontang processes natural gas, Balikpapan has a large refinery, and oil palm plantations cover huge areas of every province; West Kalimantan also mines bauxite. Deforestation, mining pits left unfilled, river pollution and conflicts over customary land are persistent issues.

Rivers remain the roads of much of the interior. Houses stand on stilts or float on rafts along the banks, and people wash, trade and travel on the water. Nusantara brings construction, speculation and uncertainty to the area between Balikpapan and Samarinda; its first buildings opened in 2024, but the capital has not yet formally moved from Jakarta, and the pace and scale of the move remain unsettled.

Banjar cooking is the best known. Soto Banjar is a fragrant chicken soup with rice cakes or noodles, egg, spiced with cinnamon and cloves; ketupat Kandangan is rice cake served with smoked snakehead fish in coconut sauce; and nasi kuning, turmeric rice, is a breakfast favourite. Freshwater fish — haruan snakehead, patin catfish and the giant river prawns called udang galah — are the region's great ingredients, and Samarinda is known for amplang, crisp fish crackers.

Pontianak has a lively coffee-shop culture and Chinese-influenced snacks such as chai kue, steamed dumplings filled with vegetables. The Malay communities of West Kalimantan cook bubur pedas, a spiced rice porridge with vegetables, herbs and peanuts. Dayak cooking uses forest ingredients: juhu umbut rotan is a soup of young rattan shoots, and rice is fermented into tuak, a rice wine drunk at ceremonies.

Borneo's forests are rich in fruit: durian and its relative lai, cempedak, rambutan and many varieties found in few other places appear in the markets in the rainy season.

Central Kalimantan's Tanjung Puting National Park is the best-known sight: a klotok houseboat carries visitors up the Sekonyer River from Kumai, stopping at feeding stations where orangutans come out of the forest and at Camp Leakey, founded in 1971 by the researcher Biruté Galdikas. Near Palangka Raya, Sebangau National Park protects peat-swamp forest.

In South Kalimantan, Banjarmasin's floating markets, such as Lok Baintan, start at dawn, with women selling from wooden canoes; the Martapura diamond market lies nearby, and the Meratus mountains offer bamboo rafting at Loksado.

East Kalimantan's Mahakam River is navigated upstream from Samarinda past Tenggarong's Kutai palace museum to the lakes of Jempang and Semayang, where rare freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins survive, and on into Dayak villages. The Derawan islands, off the Berau coast, include Derawan with its nesting turtles, Maratua, Sangalaki with its manta rays, and Kakaban, whose inland lake is full of stingless jellyfish. Nusantara, the planned new capital, rises on the hills inland from Balikpapan, where Bukit Bangkirai has a canopy walkway.

West Kalimantan's Kapuas, the longest river in Indonesia, flows through Pontianak, where the Equator Monument and the Kadriah Palace stand near its banks; upstream are the seasonal lakes of Danau Sentarum and the forests of Betung Kerihun. Singkawang, with its Chinese temples, lies on the coast to the north, and North Kalimantan's Kayan Mentarang National Park covers remote highland forest.