The Ommelanden

 

Listen: I’m going to tell you a story about two pieces of land separated by a river, and how one of them remembered its name while the other forgot how to breathe.

But first, you need to understand what Batavia was—really was, I mean, not the sanitized version you’d find in some dusty history book gathering cobwebs in a small-town library. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a walled city where the Dutch VOC ran their Asian empire like a combination of Wall Street and a maximum-security prison. And like any organism that wants to survive, it needed to feed. The feeding grounds? A hinterland they called the Ommelanden.

The Dutch learned the hard way—and the Dutch always seemed to learn things the hard way, God bless ‘em—that walls alone won’t save you. Not when Mataram comes knocking twice, not when Banten’s making noises. So they did what colonizers do: they carved up the land beyond those walls into something they called particuliere landerijen. Private estates. Fancy words for “we’re selling off the buffer zone to whoever’s got the guilders.”

Europeans bought in. Some Chinese. A handful of Mardijkers. They became landheeren—landlords—and they built their landhuizen, their country houses, monuments to hubris and agriculture in equal measure.

Now, pay attention, because this is where it gets interesting.

The River Remembers

The Ciliwung River—and if you can’t pronounce it, don’t worry, neither could most of the Dutch—cut through that hinterland like a knife through butter, fast and clean. Along one of its upper bends, two estates emerged, twins separated at birth by nothing but water. On the west bank: Tandjong-West. On the east: Tandjong-Oost.

Tanjung Barat, as it came to be called, showed up in the records during Baron van Imhoff’s time as Governor-General. He was the kind of man who thought cardinal directions could organize chaos. Maybe he was right. The southern Ommelanden—Tanjung Barat, Pasar Minggu, Pasar Rebo, Lenteng Agung—they all had something the coast didn’t: water. Good water. And soil so fertile you could probably grow money if you planted coins deep enough.

The first owner we know about was Jan Andries Duurkoop, a retired major who bought the place sometime between 1760 and 1780. The land wasn’t great for farming—too stubborn, too rocky—but Duurkoop had vision. He built a cattle empire. Five thousand head of cattle. You read that right. Five thousand. Milk and meat for Batavia, all flowing from a place people started calling Oostvriesland, after some dairy region back in Europe.

And here’s the thing that’ll make your skin crawl if you think about it too long: Duurkoop kept four hundred enslaved workers to make it all run. Four hundred human beings, their names lost to history, breaking their backs so colonials could have cream in their coffee.

The man built himself a landhuis with a Baroque gate tower twenty-five meters high. Twenty-five meters. That’s about eighty feet of “look at me, I’m important.” The painter Johannes Rach saw it, drew it, preserved it in pigment before time could swallow it whole.

The Railway Changes Everything (It Always Does)

Jump forward to the 19th century. Governor-General Daendels—a man who believed in dams the way some men believe in God—built Setu Babakan. The water flowed. Dry land became fertile. The old estate began to transform.

But the real change? The real shift in the fabric of things?

That came with the railway.

In 1873, the Batavia-Buitenzorg line opened, built by the Nederlandsch-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij. The railway cut through estates like a surgeon’s scalpel: Jagakarsa, Lenteng Agung, Srengseng, Ragunan, and yes, Tandjong-West. Three stations connected them: Pasar Minggu, Lenteng Agung, and Tandjong-West Halt.

That’s when Tanjung Barat stopped being a private playground and became part of the public consciousness. Trains ran. Schedules were kept. The name appeared on tickets, timetables, maps. Repetition has its own kind of magic—say something enough times and it becomes real, becomes necessary.

Today, where Duurkoop’s grand landhuis once stood, there’s a university. Make of that what you will.

Across the River, Something Different

Tanjung Timur—Tandjong-Oost to its colonial parents—that’s where the real story lives. Or lived. Or haunts, depending on how you look at it.

In 1756, a man named Van de Velde built a country retreat there. He died three years later, as men do. The property passed to Adrian Jubbels in 1763, and then to Jacobus Johannes Craan, a VOC big shot who renamed it Groeneveld. “Green field” in Dutch. Pretty name for a pretty place.

Craan renovated with French Louis XV ornaments and Chinese decorative touches. His family crest—a crane, naturally—went above the main entrance. The building had two stories, twin pavilions, and the kind of architectural pedigree that made other landhuizen look like sharecropper shacks.

“The house’s north façade bore no decoration,” one chronicler wrote, “yet conveyed a serene and impressive impression.”

That’s the kind of understatement that makes you want to see the place for yourself, doesn’t it? To stand in front of it and feel whatever that “serene and impressive impression” meant.

The west side had an upper balcony. Side wings. An L-shaped layout around a courtyard. Glass-covered corridors. Hunting grounds for deer and wild boar stretching in every direction. Tamarind trees lining the roads, throwing shade like benedictions.

After Craan died, his daughter inherited it. She married into the van Riemsdijk family—Governor-General Jeremias van Riemsdijk’s bloodline. They held it through the 19th century, making it both retreat and economic engine.

In 1821, they sold to Tjalling Ament, a Cirebon businessman who married into the van Riemsdijk clan and turned the Aments into a landowning dynasty. When Tjalling died in 1870, his son Daniel Cornelis took over. Then Daniel’s son Edouard. The Aments raised six thousand cattle at their peak. Six thousand.

Workers came. Settled near the villa. Formed a community they called Kampung Gedong—“Village of the Big House”—because that’s what it was. The only permanent structure that mattered. Those workers became the ancestors of the Betawi people of Condet, developing their own culture in the shadow of colonial wealth.

By the 1800s, everyone called it Kampung Gedong. Or Gedong Tinggi—the tall house. Or Gedong Kongsi. Or Villa Nova. Or Gedong Ki Dekle’. Different names, same place, all pointing to that one landmark like a compass needle pointing north.

In 1916, it witnessed a revolt. Entong Gendut and Condet farmers rose up against the particuliere land system. They lost, of course. Peasants usually do.

What Fire Takes

After World War II, Groeneveld became a revolutionary headquarters, then a NICA rubber plantation, then a hotel, then office buildings. In 1962, during the implementation of the Basic Agrarian Law—when Indonesia was trying to figure out who owned what in a newly independent nation—Haji Sarmili sold it to the Jakarta Police.

“I joined the police in 1962,” a retired officer named Endang Subarna remembered. “This area became police housing. The building was large, luxurious, multifunctional. It had two sides, one facing forward and one back.”

Then came May 1985.

A kitchen explosion, they said. A stove belonging to one of the residents. The building had been neglected, left to rot despite being designated a cultural heritage site. (If you’ve ever wondered what “cultural heritage site” means when nobody’s got the budget or the will to maintain it, well, now you know.)

The fire took everything. The French ornaments, the Chinese decorative elements, the crane crest, the two-story grandeur, the serene and impressive façade. All of it gone in smoke and ash and screaming orange flame.

After the fire, what was left went to the Jakarta provincial government. Today it’s the Tanjung Timur Police Traffic Barracks on Jalan TB Simatupang. Some walls remain. Stone structures hidden among elephant ear plants and weeds. Last traces of something that once mattered, now slowly being consumed by jungle and forgetting.

The Difference

Here’s what it comes down to, the thing that kept me up at night after I learned this story:

Tanjung Barat lives on through infrastructure. Through the railway station that still operates, through the timetables and tickets and maps that repeat its name over and over until it’s etched into collective memory. It survives through function.

Tanjung Timur built everything on a single architectural icon. Grand, majestic, yes—but ultimately fragile. Impermanent. When Landhuis Groeneveld burned, there was nothing else to carry the name forward. No station. No schedules. Just a market held every Wednesday since 1762 in nearby Pasar Rebo, and a community that remained agrarian while its twin across the river urbanized and modernized.

One estate learned to speak the language of the modern world: timetables, infrastructure, public networks.

The other spoke in architecture and grandeur, in the language of a colonial past that Indonesia was actively trying to forget.

Guess which one survived?

The river still flows between them, fast and clean, just like it did three centuries ago. But now it separates a functioning railway station from a police barracks built on ashes, a living name from a forgotten one, infrastructure from icon, memory from ghosts.

Sometimes I think about those two estates, twins divided by water, and I wonder if places can have destinies the way people do. If some are meant to endure while others are meant to burn.

The Ciliwung River knows, I suppose.

But rivers don’t talk, and the fire already said everything it needed to say.