“GRID-IRON OF THE EAST.”

Hokitika Guardian, 8 April 1922, Page 4

“GRID-IRON OF THE EAST.”

WONDERFUL PALACES OF JAVA, j (By Viscount Northclifi’e in Daily Mail). ' LONDON, Feb. 10. ' Torn between two ambitions —to see the great Buddhist Sanctuary of tne Boro-Budur in Java, and to see the ruins of Angkor in Indo-China —I made ( a compromise. I would pay a very short visit to Java, leaving out the i Boro-Budur: in Indo-China I would ■ travel at greater leisure and examine ( | with the assistance of a French savant, 1 j the' ruins of Angkor—of which more I hereafter.

Though my stay in Java was short, I gathered a great deal of information from British residents of long standing. All spoke well of their treatment at the hands of the Dutch authorities. J went convinced that 300 years of experience had taught our friends the Dutch how to administer; and I am satisfied, on British evidence, that they rule excellently well. But i was particularly urged to press upon British readers the great opportunities that Java offers to British enterprise. On the Germans they need no pressing. German firms are full of activity, and are rapidly recovering lost ground in Java as elsewhere. I was prepared to find Java very beautiful —and very Lot; and I was not disappointed. Java is well known to bo one of the most beautiful of Oriental lands, but I believe it to be not more beautiful than Ceylon, many parts of Japan, of India, and Malaya, or the Hawaiian Islands. Of Holland’s other beautiful possessions—which include Pornej), the Celebes, and Amboina — some 1 have visited, others I'have seen through a telescope. None that I have ■;[<(.it is so beautiful as our island of Penang, as you look on it from The Hill.” HAMBURG PAMPHLETS.

! was prepared also to find Java veiy pro-German ; and in this, to some extent, I was disappointed, and agreeably s-n. Dutch sympathy with t]ie German, the close trade connection between Germany and the Dutch Indies, do not forbid fair treatment and courtesy to British visitors and British traders. Education in Germany by no means necessarily makes a Dutchman antiEnglish. English tourists arc well heated in the excellent Javanese 'hotels; and in spite of warnings that I had received from some English and American travellers, I met with nothing but kindness in Java, except tor some anonymous letters, some attacks in the Press, and some pamphlets about myself which-.had been printed in Hamburg.

It is surprising how little is known today in England, or even nearer at band, about these Dutch East Indies— hisulinde is the Dutch name for them—ol which people do not realise even the extent until, perhaps, they have been sailing about them for some weeks.

The commercial links between Britain and the Dutch Indies are very close, as a talk with British residents in Java will reveal; yet I doubt whether we know as much about these regions today as we did in the second decade of the nineteenth century, when they fell for a few years under the rule of the great Sir Stamford Raffles.

The Dutch are generous in their appreciation of former enemies. I hoy > peak warmly of Raffles; bis memory is kept green in Java ; and the tomb ol his wife, a little Greek temple in the utit'nl gardens' at Buitenzorg, is tended with generous eare. Java’s neighbours, flritisli Malaya, French Indo-China, China, Japan, seem to know nothing of her. In the Straits Settlements I found very few Englishmen who bad ventured the short fo'uriiey. The explanation is simple. When the Frenchman working in the East gets furlough, he makes straight for Marseilles ; the Englishman makes straight for his native white cliffs. And though there are myriads of newssheets, British, French, Dutch, vernacular, in the?‘Far E;fst, each' confines itself tp" loch 1 ‘affairs and brief cables from home, anrf has no space to spare for regions comparatively near at band. TOWN OF CANALS.

Batavia, the old Dutch town at the western end of Java, is all canals, like Bangkok, and, like the Siamese capital, has excellent roads. It lacks the rush and fever of Shanghai and the Londonlike traffic of parts of Singapore; hut it is a metropolis, and it shows it. If anyone imagines that the white folk in the Far East, .British, Dutch, or French, are idle, 1 can assure him, after seeing a good deal of Netherlandish officials, planters, and miners, that there is no more room for the idler in Java than there is in any Far Eastern country that I have visited. The white man is on his mettle here, as he is all over the Ear East, because the Eastern man is showing that he can do many things (though not all) as well as the man of Europe or America. So it happens that the beautiful old Stadliuis in Batavia is jest as busy to-da,v as the adjacent modern town of Weltevreden.

I have mentioned, T think, that Java is very hot. Old Batavia is hot, even for Java. It is never cool. There is no spring, no autumn, no winter. The heat, even during the rains, is always far beyond our summer heat. Life is not easy in the best of the Far East, despite all the modern devices—featherweight clothing, electric light, electric punkahs, cold storage, artificial ice, and what not. What must it have been for those early Dutchmen? They voyaged for five or six months in ships scarcely larger than those used by Sir Francis Drake (the first Englishman to set foot in Java). Their companies were almost always halved by scurvy and sometimes wiped out by Malay pirates or captured by Portuguese or English. And those who reached Java must settle down, clad in their heavy European clothes, at their fort of Batavia, close to the water, where the mosquitoes rose in mighty clouds and malaria took its toll of all hut the strongest. No wonder Batavia became known as “the grid-iron of the Fast,” “the graveyard of Europeans.” BEAUTIFUL HOMES.

These old Dutchmen, however, came to Java to settle, not to make fortunes quickly and return home. Even now the Dutch appear to lx* less anxious than our own Far Eastern exiles to go home on leave. They make many beautiful homes for themselves in Java (where access is easy to lull stations), homes unlike any other European

houses in the Far East, the great feature of them all being the large open saloon, exactly like the selamlik where the host receives his men friends in the big houses of Turkey and Egypt.

In the same spirit their forerunners of the 17th century built for home and permanence. Their forts, their canals, their high-gabled brick houses were all exactly as in Holland. The old parts of Batavia are Holland- in Java, with all the charm that lingers about the Eng' lish-built parts of" Boston or Philadelphia. And these thick-walled 17-century "buildings, designed to unite comfort with safety against attack, are . far cooler than''some of the newer buildings that arc being run up apace all over the Far East—in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, and Yokohama.

The great, cool office buildings have walls as thick as some in the Tower of London. The first Netherlander laid well the foundations of their Insulinde!

And their modern successors take reverent eare of'their legacy—the Dutch kirks with their old church plate; the gravestones from Holland ; the portraits of early notables, and tile specimens of every kind of old furniture from home; which they cherish in their excellent museums. One object that particularly attracted me was a 17 century child’s cot, with its little mosquito curtains. Owing to the increase of business, many very suitable and artistic modern buildings are being put up in Batavia, as well as in the modern districts; but the men of to-day are not tearing down old Batavia as they Lave torn down old New York; and I don’t believe they ever will.

WONDERFUL PALACE. On the whblij, ! ‘ the Dutch and the French in the Orient come nearer than \Vc do to the dignity ‘and splendour adopted by the native rulers of the Ehst. Going to'pay my respects to the Gover-uof-Gencriil of Java/'l found bis palace at Batavia to be one of the stateliest and most beautiful buildings 1 have seen out of Europe.

A great loggia runs the whole length of the house. Its flooring is mainly of white Carrara marble, specially imported. Its roof is borne 'by'hugc fig ted columns; and the effect of this Corinthian edifice, lending back into a series of noble chandelier-lit salons, is superb, ■cVe’ii when Seen from the road. When the bright dresses of 1 women and the gold-laced uniforms of officers were reflected in the minors and on the glassy surface of the marble, the picture was magnificent. The dining-room, panelled in white marble, one end opening on to a garden beyond which lies another part of the palace, is wonderfully beautiful; ami the table was decorated very tastefully with little clumps and trails of the Jaequaranda or flamboyant tree. Tt was not at his Excellency’s table, •however, that we ate a dish which, 1 am told, is exclusively Javanese. It is called rijsttafcl, which is the Dutch for “rice tabic.” You are banded first some dry boiled rice, as for curry. Then you are given an incredible number of tilings to put oil top of the rice or on the plates which are provided to take the overflow. Here is what we had one day:

Beef, roast and dried ; mutton, roast; chicken, fried dry; do. boiled; do. roast; fish, fried; fish, dried; eggs, poached; eggs, fried; eggs, ard-boiled; white of egg fried with mashed prawns; egg-plant (locally called bringah) ; cucumber, whole; curried noodle (a Dutch f, i-m of vermicelli—outsize), three kinds ; ground nuts, fried ; bananas, fried; anchovies, and seventeen different kinds of curry accompaniments, including ginger, chillio, Bombay duck (soft and wet), chopped coconut and a local seed. All this took ten men to serve to us; and when they came in procession T felt as if I was part of the banquet scene in the Russian ballot Scheherazade. A really important rijsttafel demands as many as 50 footmen if-the accessories are to keep pace with the innocent and bland boiled rice.