The
black Benz Victoria Phaeton came rolling through the crowd like something out
of a fever dream—all gleaming metal and slender wheels, making a sound that
wasn’t quite like anything the people of Surakarta had ever heard before.
Inside sat Sri Susuhunan Pakubuwono X, and if you’d asked the townsfolk
gathered there on that day sometime between 1894 and 1900, they would have told
you they were watching the devil himself ride through their streets.
The
devil’s carriage,
they called it. The demon’s cart.
It spat
fire. It moved without horses. It was wrong, somehow, in the way that
things that break the natural order are always wrong. The people coughed into
their hands, covered their mouths and noses with whatever cloth they had handy,
but not a damn one of them looked away. No sir. They watched with wide eyes and
open mouths, their terror mixing with something else—something like wonder, or
maybe even love. Because the Susuhunan, you see, he knew how to put on a show.
The
thing that really got under the skin of the Dutch—and brother, did it ever get
under their skin—was that this Indigenous ruler, this man they’d spent decades
looking down their long European noses at, had beaten them to the punch. While
the Governor-General and his stuffed-shirt officials in Batavia were still
clip-clopping around in horse-drawn carriages like it was the goddamned Middle
Ages, Pakubuwono X was motoring through the streets in an automobile that cost
him somewhere between six and ten thousand guilders. Even the emperors of China
and Japan hadn’t gotten their hands on one yet.
The
colonial elites felt it like a slap across the face. Humiliation has a
particular taste, metallic and bitter, and they were choking on it.
How
dare he? That was the question that burned in their bellies, kept them up at
night. How dare this colonial-era king have access to modernity that surpassed
their own?
But
Pakubuwono X—well, he understood something those Dutch bureaucrats never quite
got through their thick skulls: in the colonial era, symbolism was a weapon.
Wealth was a shield. And he had both in spades.
---
They
called him De Keizer van Java—the Emperor of Java. Some folks called him
Sunan Sugih, the Rich Sunan. The richest man in the Dutch East Indies,
they said, and they weren’t lying.
Born
Gusti Raden Mas Sayyidin Malikul Kusna on November 29, 1866, he’d taken the
throne at the tender age of twenty-six and held it for forty-six years—longer
than any other monarch in the history of the Surakarta Sunanate. His reign was
Surakarta’s golden age, a time when political stability and economic prosperity
came together like lovers in the dark.
The man
was intelligent. Flamboyant. Visionary. The kind of person who collected honors
like some men collect stamps—decorations from the Dutch Crown, sure, but also
from Siam, Cambodia, Mecklenburg, Austria, the Chinese Empire (the “Double
Dragon,” no less), and even the Black Star from Benin, Africa. He enjoyed
luxury the way a drowning man enjoys air. Seven bathtubs full of gold,
diamonds, and jewels, if you believe the stories. And hell, why wouldn’t you?
But
here’s the thing about Pakubuwono X—behind all that glitter and show, behind
the champagne and the fancy automobiles and the finest-bred horses, there was
something else going on. Something darker and more complex.
The
money didn’t come from tribute or taxes, not primarily. It came from sugar.
Sugar.
At the
end of the nineteenth century, the whole world had sugar fever, and Java was
ground zero. Under Pakubuwono X’s rule, the Bengawan Solo River became a vein
pumping sweet poison through the heart of the land. Factories with names like
Gondang Winangoen, Tjolomadu, Tasikmadu, and Modjo belched black smoke into the
Javanese sky, processing thousands of pikul of sugar for export to
international markets.
Each
refinery was its own little ecosystem of exploitation—sugarcane plantation
laborers bent double in the fields, trolley networks moving the harvest,
factory workers breathing in that thick, sweet air that probably took years off
their lives. But the profits? Oh, the profits were beautiful. They gave
Pakubuwono X something the Dutch couldn’t easily take away: financial
independence.
---
Now,
you might think a man with that much money would hole up in his palace and
count his gold, but Pakubuwono X was smarter than that. He knew that power isn’t
just about hoarding wealth—it’s about being seen to use it.
So he
built. Sweet Jesus, did he build.
Pasar
Gede Hardjonagoro in 1927. Railway stations at Jebres and Sangkrah. Sriwedari
Stadium, which would later host Indonesia’s first National Sports Week. A
crematorium for the Chinese community. The Catholic Church of St. Antonius
Purbayan.
And on
every gate, every bridge, every public building, he left his mark: the “PB X”
monogram. A reminder to everyone who saw it that Surakarta’s prosperity came
from their king, not from the colonial government in Batavia. It was a middle
finger carved in stone, and it would outlast them all.
The
palace lifestyle transformed too. Traditional drinks gave way to champagne and
hard liquor. Lavish banquets became the norm. The Javanese aristocracy started
aping European habits, and nobody seemed to notice or care that they were
losing something in the translation.
But
here’s where it gets interesting—and when I say interesting, I mean the kind of
interesting that keeps you up at night, wondering about the nature of good and
evil and whether you can do both at the same time.
Because
Pakubuwono X, for all his excess and hedonism, was also a kind of Robin Hood.
When he
traveled to remote areas, he’d distribute udik-udik—small coins—to the
commoners who gathered to see him. He played the loyal ally to the Dutch Queen
in public, attending ceremonies and accepting honors like a good little puppet.
But behind the scenes? Behind those palace walls? He was funneling money from
his sugar factories to nationalist organizations. Budi Utomo. Sarekat Dagang
Islam. Figures like H.O.S. Tjokroaminoto found political protection under his
wing.
The
Dutch were too afraid of his wealth to interfere. The nationalist movement saw
him as a patron, a provider of political space in an increasingly suffocating
world.
It was
a dangerous game, the kind that could get a man killed if he played it wrong.
But Pakubuwono X? He played it just right.
---
In the
South Square of the Surakarta Palace, two old train carriages still stand like
ghosts from another era.
The
first—green and white—he used for inspecting his sugar empire, traveling with
his family from the grand station at Solo Jebres. The second carriage, though,
that one’s different. That one was painted white. Built for a specific purpose.
It was
ordered in 1909 and completed in 1914, but it sat unused for twenty-four years.
Waiting. Because you see, it was a funeral carriage, and Pakubuwono X wasn’t
planning on dying anytime soon.
But
death, as any horror writer worth his salt will tell you, doesn’t care about
your plans.
On
February 22, 1939, just before World War II would tear through the region like
a combine harvester through wheat, Pakubuwono X finally took his last ride in
that white carriage. They took his body from Solo to Yogyakarta, buried him at
Imogiri, and left the carriage at Balai Yasa Yogyakarta where it sat, forgotten
and useless, slowly rotting away until someone finally thought to bring it back
to Solo.
A void
opened up after his death—not just in the palace, but in the very economic
structure of the region. The sugar factories that had made him rich were
destroyed or seized during the Japanese occupation and the revolution that
followed. Palace lands fell into neglect. What had been symbols of prosperity
became sources of conflict.
Sriwedari
Park—built in 1877 as a gift to the people—became the subject of a nasty
dispute in 1970. Kadipolo Hospital, constructed in 1915, got tangled up in a
deal involving President Soeharto’s son in 1985.
But the
real kicker? The shares.
---
Pakubuwono
X had been smarter than anyone gave him credit for. He’d quietly purchased
stock in twelve major Dutch East Indies companies—oil, pharmaceuticals,
logistics. The whole nine yards. These shares were managed by Spaarfonds Bank,
then transferred to Bank Indonesia after the chaos of occupation and
revolution.
And
then… everyone forgot about them.
Decades
passed. The shares sat dormant, accumulating value like interest in a cosmic
savings account that nobody remembered opening. In 1973, Bank Indonesia
announced that colonial-era shares could be claimed. One of Pakubuwono X’s
grandchildren—K.B.H.M.H. Djombo Djajaningrat—took up the cause. He navigated
the bureaucracy, corresponded with the Netherlands, discovered that the shares
were still intact.
395,000
guilders in 1937. Billions of rupiah by the 1980s.
The
catch? Court decree required. Deadline: 1987.
At
first, the family agreed to let Djombo handle it. But as that deadline crept
closer, as the prospect of unimaginable wealth became real and tangible,
something ugly started to grow in the family tree. Suspicion. Distrust. Greed.
Not all
forty-two heirs—including the reigning Pakubuwono XII—were comfortable with
Djombo running the show. In 1983, some of them founded the Makuto Nugroho
Foundation to wrest control away from him. They revoked his authority. They
took him to court.
Djombo,
who’d spent ten years of his life chasing this ghost, felt the betrayal like a
knife between the ribs. He warned them: this infighting would destroy them all.
“Even
if the money were released,” he said, “it’s not as if I’d keep it all for
myself.”
But
nobody was listening anymore. The legal process dragged on like a dying man
crawling toward water he’ll never reach. Judges got tangled up in
jurisdictional disputes. The deadline approached like a freight train in the
dark.
1987
came and went.
There’s
no record of any massive fund release. No evidence that any of those forty-two
heirs ever saw a single rupiah of their grandfather’s fortune.
What
remains is just a story—the kind of story that Stephen King might tell you late
at night, when the wind is howling outside and the shadows are long—about
assets forfeited to the state, buried under ego and distrust, a fortune lost
because the people who should have inherited it couldn’t stop fighting long
enough to actually claim it.
The
devil’s carriage rolled through Surakarta over a century ago, spitting fire and
making people cough. But the real demons, as it turns out, were never in the
machine.
They
were in us all along.
They
always are.
Comments
Post a Comment