Banten, also written as Bantam, is a port town near the western end of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Gui ...

. It has a secure harbour at the mouth of

Banten River The Ci Banten, or Ci Peteh, is a river in Banten province on the island of Java, Indonesia. The rivers in Banten, the westernmost province of Java, run roughly parallel to each other. The main ones are the Peteh, called the Banten on the lower ...

, a navigable passage for light craft into the island's interior. The town is close to the

Sunda Strait The Sunda Strait ( id, Selat Sunda) is the strait between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. It connects the Java Sea with the Indian Ocean. Etymology The strait takes its name from the Sunda Kingdom, which ruled the western portion o ...

through which important ocean-going traffic passes between Java and

Sumatra Sumatra is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the sixth-largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 (182,812 mi.2), not including adjacent i ...

. Formerly Old Banten was the capital of a sultanate in the area, was strategically important and a major centre for trade.

History

In the 5th century Banten was part of the Tarumanagara kingdom. The Lebak relic inscriptions, found in lowland villages on the edge of Ci Danghiyang, Munjul, Pandeglang, Banten, were discovered in 1947 and contains 2 lines of poetry with

Pallawa script The Pallava script or Pallava Grantha, is a Brahmic script, named after the Pallava dynasty of South India, attested since the 4th century AD. As epigrapher Arlo Griffiths makes clear, however, the term is misleading as not all of the relevant sc ...

and

Sanskrit language Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

. The inscriptions mentioned the courage of king Purnawarman. After the collapse of the kingdom Tarumanagara following an attack by the

Srivijaya Srivijaya ( id, Sriwijaya) was a Buddhist thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra (in modern-day Indonesia), which influenced much of Southeast Asia. Srivijaya was an important centre for the expansion of Buddhism from the 7th ...

empire, power in western Java fell to the

Kingdom of Sunda The Sunda Kingdom ( su, , Karajaan Sunda, ) was a Sundanese Hindu kingdom located in the western portion of the island of Java from 669 to around 1579, covering the area of present-day Banten, Jakarta, West Java, and the western part of C ...

. The Chinese source, ''

Chu-fan-chi ''Zhu Fan Zhi'' (), variously translated as '' A Description of Barbarian Nations'', ''Records of Foreign People'', or other similar titles, is a 13th-century Song Dynasty work by Zhao Rukuo. The work is a collection of descriptions of countri ...

'', written c. 1200,

Chou Ju-kua Zhao Rukuo (; 1170–1231), also read as Zhao Rugua, or misread as Zhao Rushi, was a Chinese historian and politician during the Song dynasty. He wrote a two-volume book titled ''Zhu Fan Zhi''. The book deals with the world known to the Chinese in t ...

mentioned that in the early 13th Century, Srivijaya still ruled Sumatra, the Malay peninsula, and western Java ( Sunda). The source identifies the port of Sunda as strategic and thriving, pepper from Sunda being among the best in quality. The people worked in agriculture and their houses were built on wooden poles (''rumah panggung''). However, robbers and thieves plagued the country. It is highly possible that the port of Sunda mentioned by Chou Ju-kua referred to the port of Banten. According to Portuguese explorer, Tomé Pires, in the early 16th century the port of Bantam (Banten) was one of the important ports of the Kingdom of Sunda along with the ports of Pontang, Cheguide (Cigede), Tangaram (

Tangerang Tangerang ( Sundanese: , ) is a city in the province of Banten, Indonesia. Located on the western border of Jakarta, it is the third largest urban centre in the Greater Jakarta metropolitan area after Jakarta and Bekasi; the sixth largest cit ...

), Calapa ( Sunda Kelapa) and Chimanuk (estuarine of Cimanuk river). As a trading city Bantam received an influx of

Islam Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God (or '' Allah'') as it was revealed to Muhammad, the ...

ic influence in the early 16th century. Later in the 16th century Bantam became the seat of the powerful

Banten Sultanate The Banten Sultanate (كسلطانن بنتن) was a Bantenese Islamic trading kingdom founded in the 16th century and centred in Banten, a port city on the northwest coast of Java; the contemporary English name of both was Bantam. It is sai ...

English Bantam

The English

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Sou ...

began to send ships to the

East Indies The East Indies (or simply the Indies), is a term used in historical narratives of the Age of Discovery. The Indies refers to various lands in the East or the Eastern hemisphere, particularly the islands and mainlands found in and around ...

around 1600 and established a permanent trading post at Bantam in 1603, as did the Dutch also. In 1613, John Jourdain was appointed as Chief Factor there, holding the administrative post until 1616, apart from a few months of 1615, when Thomas Elkington was Chief Factor; he was succeeded in 1616 by George Berkley, but from 1617 until 1630 the factory was under a chosen President. From 1630 until 1634 a succession of Agents were appointed annually, but from 1634 the series of Presidents resumed until 1652. Aaron Baker (1610-1683) served for twenty years as President of Bantam, as is recorded on his mural monument in Dunchideock parish church, Devon. In the thirty years following 1603, the trading factories established by the English on the

Coromandel Coast The Coromandel Coast is the southeastern coastal region of the Indian subcontinent, bounded by the Utkal Plains to the north, the Bay of Bengal to the east, the Kaveri delta to the south, and the Eastern Ghats to the west, extending over an ...

of India, such as those at Machilipatnam (estd. 1611) and Fort St. George (estd. 1639), reported to Bantam.N. S. Ramaswami, ''Fort St. George, Madras'', Pub. No. 49, Tamilnadu State Department of Archaeology (T.N.S.D.A.), Madras, First Edition 1980 During the 17th century, the Portuguese and the Dutch fought for control of Bantam. Eventually, the fact that the Dutch found they could control their Batavia trading factory, established in 1611, more thoroughly than Bantam may have contributed to the decline of the English trading post.

The town today

Today, Banten is a small local seaport, in the economic shadow of the neighbouring port of Merak to the west and

Jakarta Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital city, capital and list of Indonesian cities by population, largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coa ...

to the east. There is a significant Chinese presence in the community.

In fiction

South-Bantam or Bantan-Kidoel or Lebak was the place where the eponymous character in Multatuli's novel '' Max Havelaar'' acted as the assistant-resident.

References

Works cited