The Land That Remembers

 

The thing about old cities is that they remember everything. Every brick, every shadow, every bloodstain scrubbed clean by a century of tropical rain. Jakarta remembers. Oh, it surely does.

On February 7, 2026, President Prabowo Subianto stood at the pulpit of Istiqlal Mosque—the largest mosque in Southeast Asia, big as a fever dream, its dome squatting against the sky like something that had always been there and always would be—and he made a promise. Four thousand square meters, he said. Right in front of the HI Roundabout. For the Indonesian Ulema Council. For God’s house on Earth.

The crowd cheered.

Nobody mentioned the ghost.

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Here’s what you need to understand about that particular plot of land, that deceptively innocent 4,000 square meters sitting at the corner of Jl. M.H. Thamrin and Jl. Prof. Moch. Yamin like a patient man waiting for a bus that is never, ever going to come: it has a history. And history, as any fool who’s stared too long at an old photograph can tell you, has teeth.

Go back far enough—1910, say, when a Dutch architect named Pieter Adriaan Jacobus Moojen was drawing his garden city in the jungle heat—and the land was nothing. Dense wilderness. Trees and shadows and whatever lives inside shadows when nobody’s looking. Moojen had grand ideas. Nieuw Gondangdia, he called it. Menteng. Streets radiating outward from a great circular field like the spokes of a wheel, or like cracks in ice just before it breaks.

They called one of those streets Nassau Boulevard.

The land that would become the British Embassy was still just vegetable gardens then. Kebon Kacang. Kebon Sayur. Bean garden. Vegetable garden. Humble, ordinary names for a place that was quietly, steadily, biding its time.

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By 1937 it was villas and shady trees, the kind of neighborhood where men in white linen suits sipped their evening drinks and did not think about what might be listening in the dark beyond the garden wall. A 1947 photograph shows Jl. Madura as a quiet road with a drawbridge and Art Deco houses, everything neat and civilized and perfectly fine, thank you very much.

But independence has a way of shaking loose the things that get buried under colonial politeness.

In 1955, the British secured their land rights. Construction started November 1960. Eric Bedford—Chief Architect of Britain’s Ministry of Works, a man who built things for governments, which is to say a man who built things that were meant to last—designed a four-story box of simple modernist functionality. Tropical adaptations. About £180,000. Practical. Sturdy. The kind of building that looked like it had never once harbored a dark thought.

It opened August 2, 1962.

Thirteen months later, the mob came.

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September 16, 1963. Write that date down. Feel it.

They came in crowds, the way mobs always do, which is to say they came as a single organism with a thousand screaming mouths and no conscience to speak of. The Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation was raging, and the Union Jack flying above that neat modernist building might as well have been a red cloth waved in front of something very large and very angry.

They tore down the flag. They broke things. They lit fires.

Indonesia paid £600,000 in compensation afterward, in careful installments, until April 1968. Six hundred thousand pounds for a building that cost a hundred and eighty thousand to build. You do the math. Some of that extra money wasn’t for broken windows and scorched walls.

Some of it was for something else.

The British eventually moved out entirely in 2013—relocated to the safer, quieter southern reaches of Jl. Patra Kuningan Raya, far from the protest-haunted shadow of the HI Roundabout. You couldn’t blame them, really. There’s a point at which a building stops being a building and starts being a reminder, and who in their right mind wants to wake up every morning in a reminder?

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The Jakarta provincial government bought the land in August 2016 for Rp 479 billion. And then—and this is the part that should make the hairs on the back of your neck do something interesting—Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama signed a decree. Governor’s Decree No. 60/2016. Dated August 26, 2016.

Cultural heritage site, it said.

Protected, it said.

The decree cited the building’s age, its architectural character woven into the urban fabric, and the longstanding rules that had made Menteng a conservation zone since 1975, when Governor Ali Sadikin had looked at his city slowly being devoured by commerce and said: not this place. Not here.

The decree was, in its quiet bureaucratic way, a ward against evil. A protection spell written in legal language.

And now someone wanted to tear it down and build a forty-story skyscraper.

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Forty stories, friend. Let that settle in your stomach for a moment.

They’re envisioning something that rivals the BCA Tower. Something that would rise above the HI Roundabout like a concrete middle finger aimed at the sky, or at history, or at whatever it is that watches over the places where mobs have burned things and blood money has changed hands and old promises have been buried under new ambitions.

Georgius Budi Yulianto, chairman of the Indonesian Institute of Architects, chose his words carefully the way a man chooses his steps crossing a frozen lake. The rule of law, he said, was being tested. Law No. 11/2010 on Cultural Heritage was clear: you don’t demolish protected buildings. You don’t alter their character. You certainly don’t erase them for a forty-story skyscraper.

It would set a dangerous precedent, he said.

A dangerous precedent.

In my experience—and maybe yours too, if you’ve been paying attention—that’s the phrase people use right before the thing they warned you about actually happens.

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Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung reminded everyone that any construction must comply with heritage regulations. Must align with protection rules. Must not violate legal principles.

He said this carefully, the way a man says things he isn’t entirely sure will be heard.

Meanwhile, the land sits there at the corner of Thamrin and Yamin, under the tropical sun that beats down on Jakarta like a slow, patient punishment. The old British Embassy building—modest, functional, stubbornly there—waits. It has been waiting since 1962, through mobs and fires and compensation payments and independence celebrations and reform movements and protest marches. Through every government that rose and every governor who signed his name to one decree or another.

It has seen things. It remembers things.

The garden city that Moojen dreamed in 1910 still whispers under the concrete, under the protocol road, under the roundabout with its Welcome Monument pointing at heaven. Menteng breathes green through every crack in the asphalt. Somewhere beneath the noise and the ambition and the forty-story dreams, Nassau Boulevard is still running east to west, still meeting those other old boulevards at Taman Suropati, still doing what it was built to do.

The land remembers.

The question—the real question, the one that ought to keep certain architects and governors and presidents staring at their ceiling at three in the morning when the city is quiet and the past feels close—is this:

What happens when you make it forget?

Buildings fall. Decrees get revoked. Heritage laws bend under the weight of ambition. It’s happened before, everywhere, in every city that ever decided its future was worth more than its past.

But the land.

The land always remembers.

And sometimes, in the deep humid dark of a Jakarta midnight, when the traffic has finally gone quiet on Jl. M.H. Thamrin and the Welcome Monument stands alone against the stars, you might just feel it—the faint, patient pressure of all that accumulated history, pushing back.

Pushing back.