In 1861, literary scholar Jan ten Brink, working as a private tutor in Batavia, raved about a journey he had made across the Priangan in West Java: ‘Oh, three times happy and blessed journeying across beautiful Java, where no guides, no Baedekers, no tourist industry […] spoil the opulence of travel.’ He had not been assailed here by traders giving him unwarranted advice about the ‘best hotels’ and the ‘most important ruins’; instead, he had been able to wholly immerse himself in the ‘loveliest nature.'

The Indies that received such high praise from Ten Brink and that as yet attracted hardly any tourists would gradually vanish in the decades to come. ‘It is curious,’ the Dutch painter Jan Veth wrote to his daughter Saskia Delprat some decades later, in 1920, ‘how nowadays so many people choose to go to the Indies for their enjoyment.'

Infrastructural improvements in the second half of the nineteenth century proved a catalyst for the development of tourism in the former Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). From then on, growing numbers of Europeans dared undertake the voyage to ‘the East’. The crossing became increasingly easy and comfortable. Steamships replaced sailing ships.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 no longer necessitated sailing round the Cape of Good Hope, which greatly reduced travel times. The crossing took some four months in the early nineteenth century, but only four weeks by the end of the century. In 1927 KLM operated its first return flight between Amsterdam and Batavia.

A tourist industry began to blossom in the colony: hotels, tourist bureaus and other amenities sprang up. Leaflets, attractively designed posters and other publications aimed to persuade tourists to visit the ‘fairyland’ of Java – and, later, Sumatra, Madura, Bali, Lombok, the Moluccas, Celebes (nowadays Sulawesi) and Borneo (nowadays Kalimantan).

The Asian Library of the Leiden University Libraries stores an abundance of sources that provide insight into the development of tourism in the Dutch East Indies over the 1870-1945 period: from travel accounts (in manuscript form and in print), letters, travel guides, hotel vignettes and postcards to drawings, menus, brochures, posters and photographs. This exhibition presents a selection from its wealth of material.