Bali was known as a ‘holiday paradise’ as early as the colonial era, but the tourist industry here took off later than it did in Java and Sumatra. In 1908 the island was fully colonised by the Netherlands following a violent conquest. Some years later, the first tourist travel guides and brochures targeting (potential) Western pleasure travellers appeared, as did travel books that generated interest in the island as a tourist ‘wonderland’. One of the main tourist attractions in Bali was the funeral pyre. The open-air cremations were announced days ahead of the ceremony in the Indies papers, and ships of the KPM (Royal Packet Navigation Company) would change their course especially for them. When the then Assistant-Resident of Kebumen and Mojokerto, Max Buttner van der Jagt, travelled to Bali in 1921, the cremation was taking place of Tjokorda Gde Sukawati and some of his relatives and followers who had passed away before him. The nobleman Sukawati was the local administrator of Tianyar in North-Bali. Greatly affected by the proceedings, Van der Jagt writes in his travel account:
The cremation [...] produced an extraordinary and grand spectacle and sensation. [...] At 7 p.m., when darkness had fallen, the wooden sarcophagi, together with the lions and cattle were closed, the fuel, mostly bamboo, was piled around them and set on fire. Soon, the fire crackled and the flames leaked upwards, fantastically illuminating hill and surroundings. Soundlessly, the crowd had crouched down. Only a few, including the Raka, the son and successor of the deceased, moved about, silently tending the fire, until, with the gradually collapsing wooden animals, the human remains had also been consumed.
A funeral pyre in Bali, around 1915. [KITLV 4488]