This blog post looks at a nineteenth-century primary source in Chinese from Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the Netherlands Indies. The legal document which can be seen here recorded the pleas and ruling by the Chinese Council of Batavia in 1874. In the 1870s, the Chinese population in Batavia comprised slightly more than 20% of population of the Dutch colonial capital city. The bulk of the population were of course Javanese. There were also other Indonesians, as well as Arabs, Jews and Europeans. They were all bound by Dutch colonial rule, but possessed different degrees of autonomy with
