Jakarta

The National Museum is Jakarta’s most famous museum. All in all, the collection contains a great number of fascinating objects from various eras. It is truly a very rich museum, both with regard to its collection and its historical value.

Sadly, only a few Indonesians consider visiting the museum. Most of the visitors to the museum are foreign tourists; when domestic tourists do come, most are schoolchildren or people interested in history. When most of the inhabitants of Jakarta think of the Museum Nasional, they envision only a row of dusty shelves in dark rooms; in short what they remember of the building from when they visited it during primary school.

This will not change anytime soon. The peaceful atmosphere is an everyday sight in a number of museums in Indonesia, including those in Jakarta. The valuable collections do not receive enough attention. Therefore, the government of Indonesia declared 2010 to the “Visit the Museum Year”. The theme of the festival is “Visit the museum, it’s fun!”

Indonesia has a total of 281 museums, 50 of them are located in Jakarta. Unfortunately not many people know that the museums exist, including the National Museum. For instance, you may ask a motorcyclist in the city the way to this museum and he will reply, “You want to go to the National Monument, right?”

To change this, the Office of Culture and Tourism of Jakarta’s provincial museum launched a three-day festival held from 10 until 12 December. It took place in a shopping centre of all places, the museum’s greatest competitor, on the first and third floors of FX Plaza, Senayan. Forty-one museums in Jakarta responded to the invitation and presented their collections. One of these was the National Museum.

The museum presented a series of collections and held talks, encounters and traditional games. The marketing manager of FX Plaza, Onov Siahaan, believes that this exhibition will increase the number of museum visitors. “If so,” he says, “we definitely must repeat such events.”

The director of the National Museum, Sulistianingsih Retno, said that one of the chief goals of her work programme is “to bring the museum closer to the inhabitants of Jakarta.” For this reason, the museum building, which houses the temporary exhibition and a permanent exhibition, was enhanced with a four-story building.

There, visitors can now enjoy a collection of sculptures, textiles, jewellery and various ethnographical objects from all provinces of Indonesia in a pleasant atmosphere. There is almost no dust and all of the labels contain information about the collections in Indonesian and in English.

The museum’s collection is much esteemed internationally. Tourists in particular visit the exhibitions in large numbers. In Germany, for example, it is part of any tourist’s daily routine to visit the local museum in a new city. It has become a habit for all. For them, the museum is the place they can enjoy the culture of a different country and get to know its history and its people. For tourists from Italy, like Nadia Antioni and her husband Stefano, who visited the National Museum, this kind of museum outing is a required course. However, not many local tourists can be found here.

Nadia says that she can visit not only a shopping centre and asks herself whether there are people in Indonesia who care about the history of their people. Exhibitions were first shown in Batavia, the former name of Jakarta, in the year 1779 by the Dutch. At that time, the exhibition of objects from all over the archipelago was only open to Europeans.

The forerunner of the National Museum was founded in 1868. Three years later, King Chulalaongkorn of Siam (Thailand) gave the city of Batavia a bronze elephant statue, which was set up in the courtyard of the museum. Even today, the elephant statue lends the museum the name Museum Gadjah (Elephant Museum) and the National Museum is better known by this name.