Jan Wolkers describes in his novel De kus (The Kiss, 1977) how he once, on a group tour of Indonesia, visited the grave of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn. Wolkers had never heard of him, but learnt from someone in his party that he was the ‘discoverer of the beauty of Java’s mountain world’. Known as the ‘Humboldt of Java’, Junghuhn recorded his research in his monumental, four-volume work Java, deszelfs gedaante, bekleeding en inwendige structuur (Java, Its Configuration, Flora, and Internal Structure, 1850-1854), in which he discloses his research on the volcanoes of Java. When he died in 1864, Isaäc Groneman had a monument erected on his grave: a white obelisk, which still stands there today. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Junghuhn’s final resting place grew into a tourist attraction.
1. The grave of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn in Lembang, by I. Groneman, 1865. [KITLV 51A2_1]
2. Europeans looking at the grave of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, around 1929. [KITLV 159426]