A port city on Java's north coast with one of the oldest and largest Chinese communities in Indonesia. Its best-known landmark, the Sam Poo Kong temple, is dedicated to Zheng He, the Ming admiral whose fleets reached the archipelago in the early fifteenth century.
It stands in this archive for the ordinary depth of Chinese settlement in Java: not a recent diaspora but a presence older than the Dutch, with institutions of its own long before the twentieth century made them dangerous to display.