Introduction

Deep inland Java, lifted roughly three hundred meters above the coastal heat, wrapped in volcanic mountains and drenched often enough to earn the nickname kota hujan, sits Bogor, the City of Rain (Kementerian Sekretariat Negara Republik Indonesia, n.d.; Atlas of Mutual Heritage, n.d.). The air runs cooler here and the ground opens wide, flat, and fertile. The horizon carries the kind of depth that makes a person breathe differently. Bogor offers relief first as weather, then as mood, then as complete reprieve.

That relief mattered to the commanders of the Dutch East India Company, who secured Batavia (now Jakarta) on the coast in 1619. There, they built a headquarters to operate as an administrative center for Dutch rule in Southeast Asia (Kehoe, 2015; Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.). Batavia offered expansive opportunity, but with it heat, disease, and mosquitos. This was a capital that forced its administrators to live inside the physical consequences of their own colonial geometry. Bogor was the inland answer. Retreat became a privilege, then a policy, then a spatial strategy.

In 1745, Governor-General Gustaaf Willem van Imhoff chose Kampong Baru, about 54 kilometers from Batavia and about 300 meters above sea level, for a country house outside the “busy and unhealthy” capital (Atlas of Mutual Heritage, n.d.). The name was blunt in its ambition. Buitenzorg translates as “away from sorrow or care,” a promise carved into place as if worry could be designed out of existence (de Wit, 1896). The estate was conceived as respite, a landscape for recovery and distance, an island palace where the ruling class could step out of the humidity and into a calmer tempo. Retreat does not sit outside power: retreat is power at ease.

The Dutch East Indies were controlled through steep class differences, with Europeans occupying dominant positions and indigenous “inlanders” governed as a subordinated category (Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, n.d.). Hierarchy was not a social affliction, it was administration. It was categories, mobility, access, and a daily system of sorting. Under those conditions, landscapes carry political weight because landscapes can enforce hierarchy without compromising its covert application as enforcement. The ground can decide who belongs, the path can decide who approaches, the view can decide what authority looks like.

Colonial extraction sharpened the need for legitimacy. The Company imposed compulsory cultivation or labor obligations, formalizing economic coercion through policy and tying land and bodies to export value (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2026). Coercion produces instability, and instability demands stability that looks inevitable. Colonial authority could rely on capacity and force, but force alone does not make a regime feel permanent. Permanence is a performance. Landscapes turn politics into environment, becoming the indellible stage of power performance.

Buitenzorg’s landscape design, despite its function as a retreat from Batavia, signaled and imposed colonial power in Java through formalized plan order, managed circulation, and controlled vistas, staging authority over Indonesian land and people as stable and ordained, defended and enforced by military power and social hierarchy, then extended through managed ecologies that converted tropical abundance into inventory and administration (Oldenburger-Ebbers, 1999; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003; Atlas of Mutual Heritage, n.d.; Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, n.d.; UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.; Wereldmuseum, n.d.).