The sedan chair (also called tandu or palanquin) continued to be a favourite means of transport for Europeans well into the twentieth century – even after improvements had been made to the Indies infrastructure. Visitors could rent a sedan chair at hotels and pasanggrahans. Many have travelled in them, but some travellers felt uncomfortable. Once, journeying in the Moluccas in 1852, the Austrian Ida Pfeiffer had no choice but to rent a tandu: ‘Initially I did not want to make use of such a sedan chair, as nothing repels me more than being carried by people.’ Louis Couperus too had himself conveyed in a sedan chair, in 1921. Much like Pfeiffer, Couperus felt 'psychological qualms’ about this means of transport. But once he was comfortably seated, his objections disappeared like snow in the sun:
I set aside my scruples of a modern man of equality; now, there is nothing to be done about the fact that eight coolies are hauling me. They perspire, they pant, they toil, they laugh, I talk with them: they are not unfriendly. They do not seem to be plagued, like me, by any scruples about hauling me up, up the mountain.
Photo of a European woman in a palanquin in the Priangan, around 1910. [KITLV 28836]