Part 13
A Dutch engineer, seeking to build a fort in the disturbed country between the two native capitals, first reported these Brambanam temples in 1797; but it was left for Sir Stamford Raffles to have them excavated, surveyed, sketched, and reported upon. Then for eighty years—until the year of our visit—they had again been forgotten, and the jungle claimed and covered the beautiful monuments. The Archæological Society of Djokja had just begun the work of clearing off and rescuing the wonderful carvings, and groups of coolies were resting in the shade, while others pottered around, setting bas-reliefs in regular lines around the rubbish-heaps they had been taken from. This salvage corps chattered and watched us with well-contained interest, as we, literally at the very boiling-point of enthusiasm, at three o’clock of an equatorial afternoon, toiled up the magnificent staircases, peered into each shrine, made the rounds of the sculptured terraces, or processional paths, and explored the whole splendid trio of temples, without pause.
Herr Perk, the director of the works, and curator of this monumental museum, roused by the rumors of foreign invasion, welcomed us to the grateful shade of his temporary quarters beside the temple, and hospitably shared his afternoon tea and bananas with us, there surrounded by a small museum of the finest and most delicately carved fragments, that could not safely be left unprotected. While we cooled, and rested from the long walk and the eager scramble over the ruins, we enjoyed too the series of Cephas’s photographs made for the Djokja Society, and in them had evidence how the insidious roots of the graceful waringen-trees had split and scattered the fitted stones as thoroughly as an earthquake; yet each waringen-gripped ruin, the clustered roots streaming, as if once liquid, over angles and carvings, was so picturesque that we half regretted the entire uprooting of these lovely trees.
When the director was called away to his workmen, we bade our guiding Mohammedan lead the way to Chandi Sewou, the “Thousand Temples,” or great Buddhist shrine of the ancient capital. “Oh,” he cried, “it is far, far from here—an hour to walk. You must go to Chandi Sewou in a boat. The water is up to here,” touching his waist, “and there are many, many snakes.” Distrusting, we made him lead on in the direction of Chandi Sewou; perhaps we might get at least a distant view. When we had walked the length of a city block down a shady road, with carved fragments and overgrown stones scattered along the way and through the young jungle at one side, we turned a corner, walked another block, and stood between the giant images that guard the entrance of Chandi Sewou’s great quadrangle.
The “Thousand Temples” were really but two hundred and thirty-six temples, built in five quadrilateral lines around a central cruciform temple, the whole walled inclosure measuring five hundred feet either way. Many of these lesser shrines—mere confessional boxes in size—are now ruined or sunk entirely in the level turf that covers the whole quadrangle, and others are picturesque, vine-wreathed masses, looking most like the standing chimneys of a burnt house. This Buddhist sanctuary of the eleventh century has almost the same general plan as Boro Boedor, but a Boro Boedor spread out and built all on the one level. The five lines of temples, with broad processional paths between them, correspond to the five square terraces of Boro Boedor; and the six superior chapels correspond to the circles of latticed dagobas near Boro Boeder’s summit. The empty central shrine at Chandi Sewou has crumbled to a heap of stones, with only its four stepped-arch entrance-doors distinct; and the smaller temples, each of them eleven feet square and eighteen feet high, with inner walls covered with bas-reliefs, are empty as well. When the British officers surveyed Chandi Sewou, five of the chapels contained cross-legged images seated on lotus pedestals—either Buddha, or the _tirthankars_, or Jain saints; but even those headless and mutilated statues are missing now. Every evidence could be had of wilful destruction of the group of shrines, and the same mysterious well-hole was found beneath the pedestal of the image in each chapel—whether as receptacle for the ashes of priests and princes; a place for the safe keeping of temple treasures; as an empty survival of the form of the earliest tree-temples, when the mystery of animate nature commanded man’s worship; or, as M. de Charnay suggests, the orifice from which proceeded the voice of the concealed priest who served as oracle.
With these Brambanam temples, when Sivaism or Jainism had succeeded Buddhism, and even before Mohammedanism came, the decadence of arts and letters began. The Arab conquest made it complete, and the art of architecture died entirely, no structures since that time redeeming the people and religion which in India and Spain have left such monuments of beauty.
The ruins of the “Thousand Temples” are more lonely and deserted in their grassy, weed-grown quadrangle, more forlorn in their abandonment, than any other of the splendid relics of Java’s past religions. The glorious company of saintly images are vanished past tracing, and the rows of little sentry-box chapels give a different impression from the soaring pyramids of solid stone, with their hundreds of statues and figures and the wealth of sculptured ornament, found elsewhere. The vast level of the plain around it is a lake or swamp in the rainy season, and the damp little chapels, with their rubbish-heaps in dark corners and the weed-grown well-hole, furnish ideal homes for snakes. As our Mohammedan had suggested snakes, we imagined them everywhere, stepping carefully, throwing stones ahead of us, and thrusting our umbrellas noisily into each chapel before we ventured within; but the long-anticipated, always expected great snake did not materialize to give appropriate incident to a visit to such complete ruins. Only one small wisp of a lizard gave the least starting-point for a really thrilling traveler’s tale. The only other moving object in sight at Chandi Sewou was a little girl, with a smaller sister astride of her hip, who followed us timidly and sat for a time resting on the knee of one of the hideous gate guardians—one of the Gog and Magog stone monsters, who, although kneeling, is seven feet in height, and who, with a club in his right hand, a snake wound around his left arm, and a ferocious countenance, should frighten any child into spasms rather than invite familiarity.
Herr Perk pointed out to us, on the common between the two great temples, a formless green mound which he would excavate the following week, and showed us also the Chandi Lompang, a temple cleared off eighty years ago, but covered with a tangle of underbrush and a few tall trees—a sufficient illustration of what all the Loro Jonggran temples had been when the Djokja Society began its work of rescue and preservation. The British engineers could see in 1812 that Chandi Lompang had been a central shrine surrounded by fourteen smaller temples, whose carved stones have long been scattered to fence fields and furnish foundation-stones for the neighborhood. It was hoped that the kind mantle of vegetation had preserved a series of bas-reliefs of Krishna and the lovely gopis, wrought with an art equal to that employed by the sculptors of the “Three Graces” at Loro Jonggran which the British surveyors uncovered. Every one must rejoice that a period of enlightenment has at last come to the colony, and that steps are being taken to care for the antiquities of the island.
There are other regions of extensive temple ruins in Java, but none where the remains of the earlier civilization are so well preserved, the buildings of such extent and magnificence, their cults and their records so well known, as at Boro Boedor and Brambanam. The extensive ruins of the Singa Sari temples, four miles from Malang, near the southeastern end of the island, are scattered all through a teak and waringen forest, half sunk and overgrown with centuries of vegetation. Images of Ganesha, and a colossal Nandi, or sacred bull of Siva, with other Brahmanic deities, remain in sight; and inscriptions found there prove that the Singa Sari temples were built at about the same time as the Loro Jonggran temples at Brambanam. The mutilation and signs of wanton destruction of the recha suggest that it was not a peaceful conversion from Brahmanism to Mohammedanism in that kingdom either.
On the Dieng plateau, southwest of Samarang, and not far from Boro Boedor, there are ruins of more than four hundred temples, and the traces of a city greater than any now existing on the island. This region has received comparatively little attention from archæologists, although it has yielded rich treasures in gold, silver, and bronze objects, a tithe of which are preserved in the museum of the Batavian Society. For years the Dieng villagers paid their taxes in rough ingots of gold melted from statuettes and ornaments found on the old temple sites, and more than three thousand florins a year were sometimes paid in such bullion. The Goenoeng Praoe, a mountain whose summit-lines resemble an inverted praoe, or boat, is the fabled home of the gods; and the whole sacred height was once built over with temples, staircases of a thousand steps, great terraces, and embankment walls, now nearly lost in vegetation, and wrecked by the earthquakes of that very active volcanic region. These Dieng temples appear to have been solid structures, whose general form and ornamentation so resemble the ruins in Yucatan and the other states of Central America that archæologists still revolve the puzzle of them, and hazard no conjectures as to the worshipers and their form of worship, save that the rites or sacrifices were very evidently conducted on the open summits or temple-tops. I could not obtain views of these ruined pyramid temples from any of the Batavia photographers, to satisfy me as to their exact lines even in decay. There are other old Siva temples in that region furtively worshiped still, and the “Valley of Death,” where the fabled upas grew, was long believed to exist in that region, where the cult of the destroyer was observed.
M. de Charnay did not visit these pyramid temples of the Dieng plateau; but after seeing the temple of Boro Boedor, and those at Brambanam, he summed up the resemblances of the Buddhist and Brahmanic temples of Java to those at Palenque and in Yucatan as consisting: in the same order of gross idols; the pyramid form of temple, with staircases, like those of Palenque and Yucatan; the small chapels or oratories, with subterranean vaults beneath the idols; the same interior construction of temples; the stepped arches; the details of ornamentation, terraces, and esplanades, as in Mexico and Yucatan; and the localization of temples in religious centers far from cities, forming places of pilgrimage, as at Palenque, Chichen-Itza, and, in a later time, at Cozumel.[5]
XVIII
SOLO: THE CITY OF THE SUSUNHAN
As the two native states of Middle Java, the _Vorstenlanden_, or “Lands of the Princes,” were last to be brought under Dutch rule, Djokjakarta and Soerakarta are the capitals and head centers of native supremacy, where most of Javanese life remains unchanged. The Sultan of Djokja, and the so-called emperor, or _susunhan_, of Solo, were last to yield to over-sea usurpers, and, as tributary princes enjoying a “protected and controlled independence,” accept an “advisory elder brother,” in the person of a Dutch resident, to sit at their sovereign elbows and by “suggestions” rule their territories for the greater good of the natives and the Holland exchequer. All the region around Djokja and Solo is classic ground, and the oldest Javanese myths and legends, the earliest traditions of native life, have their locale hereabout. These people are the Javanese, and show plainly their Hindu descent and their higher civilization, which distinguish them from the Sundanese of West Java; yet the Sundanese call themselves the “sons of the soil,” and the Javanese “the stranger people.” The glories of the Hindu empire are declared by the magnificent ruins so lately uncovered, but the splendor of the Mohammedan empire barely survives in name in the strangely interesting city of the susunhan set in the midst of the plain of Solo—a plain which M. Désiré de Charnay described as “a paradise which nothing on earth can equal, and neither pen, brush, nor photography can faithfully reproduce.”
At this Solo, second city of the island in size, one truly reaches the heart of native Java—the Java of the Javanese—more nearly than elsewhere; but Islam’s old empire is there narrowed down to a kraton, or palace inclosure, a mile square, where the present susunhan, or object of adoration, lives as a restrained pensioner of the Dutch government, the mere shadow of those splendid potentates, his ancestors.
The old susunhans were descended from the Moormen or Arab pirates who harried the coast for a century before they destroyed the splendid Hindu capital of Majapahit, near the modern Soerabaya. They followed that act of vandalism with the conquest of Pajajaran, the western empire, or Sundanese end of the island; and religious conversion always went with conquest by the followers of the prophet. There was perpetual domestic war in the Mohammedan empire, which by no means held the unresisting allegiance of the Javanese at any time, and the Hindu princes of Middle Java were never really conquered by them or the Dutch. The Java war of the last century between the Mohammedan emperor, the Dutch, and the rebellious native prince, Manko Boeni, lasted for thirteen years; and in this century the same sort of a revolt cost the Dutch as imperial allies more than four millions of florins, and made the British rejoice that their statesmen had wisely handed back such a troublesome and expensive possession as Java proved to be. The great Mataram war of the last century, however, established the family of the present susunhan on the throne, after dividing his empire with a rebellious younger brother, who then became Sultan of Djokjakarta, and a new capital was built on the broad plain cut by the Bengawan or Solo River, which is the largest river of the island. At the death of the susunhan, Pakoe Bewono II (“Nail of the Universe”), in 1749, his will bequeathed his empire to the Dutch East India Company, and at last gave Holland control of the whole island. Certain lands were retained for the imperial family, and its present head, merely nominal, figurehead susunhan that he is, receives an annuity of one hundred thousand florins—a sum equal to the salary of the governor-general of Netherlands India.
The present susunhan of Solo is not the son of the last emperor, but a collateral descendant of the old emperors, who claims descent from both Mohammedan and Hindu rulers, the monkey flag of Arjuna and the double-bladed sword of the Arab conquerors alike his heirlooms and insignia. His portraits show a gentle, refined face of the best Javanese type, and he wears a European military coat, with the native sarong and Arab fez, a court sword at the front of his belt, and a Solo kris at the back. Despite his trappings and his sovereign title, he is as much a puppet and a prisoner as any of the lesser princes, sultans, and regents whom the Dutch, having deposed and pensioned, allow to masquerade in sham authority. He maintains all the state and splendor of the old imperialism within his kraton, which is confronted and overlooked by a Dutch fort, whose guns, always trained upon the kraton, could sweep and level the whole imperial establishment at a moment’s notice. The susunhan may have ten thousand people living within his kraton walls; he may have nine hundred and ninety-nine wives and one hundred and fifty carriages, as reported; but he may not drive beyond his own gates without informing the Dutch resident where he is going or has been, with his guard of honor of Dutch soldiers, and he has hardly the liberty of a tourist with a toelatings-kaart. He may amuse himself with a little body-guard of Javanese soldiers; but there is a petty sultan of Solo, an ancient vassal, whose military ambitions are encouraged by the Dutch to the extent of allowing him to drill and command a private army of a thousand men that the Dutch believe would never by any chance take arms against them, as allies of the susunhan’s fancy guard. Wherever they have allowed any empty show of sovereignty to a native ruler, the Dutch have taken care to equip a military rival, with the lasting grudge of an inherited family feud, and establish him in the same town. But little diplomacy is required to keep such jealousies alive and aflame, and the Dutch are always an apparent check, and pacific mediators between such rivals as the susunhan and the sultan at Solo, and the sultan and Prince Pakoe Alam at Djokja.
The young susunhan maintains his empty honors with great dignity and serenity, observing all the European forms and etiquette at his entertainments, and delighting Solo’s august society with frequent court balls and fêtes. Town gossip dilates on his marble-floored ball-room, the fantastic devices in electric lights employed in illuminating the palace and its maze of gardens on such occasions, and on the blaze of heirloom jewels worn by the imperial ladies and princesses at such functions. The susunhan sometimes grants audiences to distinguished strangers, and one French visitor has told of some magnificent Japanese bronzes and Chinese porcelains in the kraton, which were gifts from the Dutch in the early time when the Japanese and Javanese trade were both Holland monopolies. No prostrations or Oriental salaams are required of European visitors at court, although the old susunhans obliged even the crown prince and prime minister to assume the dodok, and sidle about like any cup-bearer in his presence. The princes and petty chiefs were so precisely graded in rank in those days that, while the highest might kiss the sovereign’s hand, and those of a lower rank the imperial knee, there were those of lesser pretensions who adoringly kissed the instep, and, last of all, those who might only presume to kiss the sole, of the susunhan’s foot. The susunhan is always accompanied on his walks in the palace grounds, and on drives abroad, by a bearer with a gold pajong, or state umbrella, spreading from a jeweled golden staff. The array of pajongs carried behind the members of his family and court officials present all the colors of the rainbow, and all the variegations a fancy umbrella is capable of showing—each striped, banded, bordered, and vandyked in a different way, that would puzzle the brain of any but a Solo courtier, to whom they speak as plainly as a door-plate.
Solo has the same broad streets and magnificent shade-trees as the other towns of Java, and some of the streets have deep ditches or moats on either side of the drive, with separate little bridges crossing to each house-front, which give those thoroughfares a certain feudal quaintness and character of their own. At the late afternoon hour of our arrival we only stopped for a moment to deposit the luggage at the enormously porticoed Hotel Sleier, and then drove on through and about the imperial city. The streets were full of other carriages,—enormous barouches, “milords,” and family carryalls, drawn by big Walers,—with which we finally drew up in line around the park, where a military band was playing. We had seen bewildering lines of palace and fort and barrack walls, marching troops, and soldiers lounging about off duty, until it was easy to see that Solo was a vast garrison, more camp than court. Later, when we had returned to the hotel portico, to swing at ease in great broad-armed rocking-chairs,—exactly the Shaker piazza-chairs of American summer life,—there was still sound of military music off beyond the dense waringen shade, and the fanfare of bugles to right and to left.
Solo’s hotel, with its comforts, offered more material inducements for us to make a long stay, than any hotel we had yet encountered in Java; and the clear-headed, courteous landlady was a hostess in the most kindly sense. The usual colonial table d’hôte assembled at nine o’clock in the vast inner hall or pavilion, looking on a garden; and in this small world, where every one knows every one, his habitat and all his affairs, the new-comers were given a silent, earnest attention that would have checked any appetites save those engendered by our archæological afternoon at Brambanam. When beefsteak was served with a sauce of pineapple mashed with potato, and the succeeding beet salad was followed by fried fish, and that by a sweet pudding flooded with a mixture of melted chocolate and freshly ground cocoanut, we were oblivious to all stares and whispers and open comments in Dutch, which these colonials take it for granted no alien understands or can even have clue to through its likeness to German. While we rocked on the great white portico we could see and hear that Solo’s lizards were as gruesome and plentiful as those of other towns. While tiny fragilities flashed across white columns and walls, and arrested themselves as instantaneous traceries and ornaments, a legion of toads came up from the garden, and hopped over the floor in a silence that made us realize how much pleasanter companions were the croaking and bemoaning geckos, who keep their ugliness out of sight.
At sunrise we set out in the company of an American temporarily in exile at Solo, and drove past the resident’s great garden of palms and statues and flower-beds, into the outer courts of the emperor’s and the sultan’s palaces, watching in the latter the guard-mount and drill of a fine picked body of his troops. The palace of one of the younger princes of the imperial house was accessible through kind favor, as the owner is pleased to let uitlanders enjoy the many foreign features of these pleasure-grounds. This foreign garden did not, however, make us really homesick by any appealing similarity to the grounds of citizens or presidents on the American side of the globe; for the progressive prince has arranged his demesne quite after the style of the gardens of the cafés chantants of the lower Élysée in Paris—colored-glass globes and all, marble-rimmed flower-beds, and a cascade to be turned on at will and let flow down over a marble staircase set with colored electric bulbs. Colored globes and bulbs hang in festoons and arches about the bizarre garden, simulate fruits and flowers on the trees and bushes, glow in dark pools and fountain basins, and play every old fantastic trick of al-fresco cafés in Europe. A good collection of rare beasts and birds is disposed in cages in the grounds, and there are countless kiosks and pavilions inviting one to rest. In one such summer-house, with stained-glass walls, the attendants showed photographs of the prince, his father and family, the solemn old faces and the costumes of these elders almost the only purely Javanese things to be seen in this fantastic garden, since even the recha, gray old images from Boro Boedor and Brambanam, have been brightened with red, white, and blue paint and made to look cheerful and decorative—have been restored, improved, brought down to modern times, and made to accord better with their café-chantant surroundings.