The 5-star hotel in Indonesia that sparked a bloody war against colonialism
- Hotel Majapahit in Surabaya, in Indonesia’s East Java province, was the scene of the ‘Flag Incident’ in 1945, a watershed moment in Indonesian history
- Now an art deco monument that invokes the grandeur of a bygone age, it features 144 rooms and suites decorated with historical paintings and handmade furniture
On September 18, 1945, a group of Dutchmen led by WVC Ploegman arrived at the Hotel Yamato, in Surabaya, an ancient seaport that is now the capital of Indonesia’s East Java province.
The previous month, the hotel had been occupied by the Imperial Japanese, who had named it after a historical area in their homeland’s Nara prefecture surrounded by yama: mountains.
But following Tokyo’s surrender at the end of World War II, the grand whitewashed building had been sequestered by the Allies as a rehabilitation centre for internees and prisoners of war.
Accounts of what exactly happened next vary, but after checking into room 33, Ploegman appears to have ordered his colleagues to fly the tricolour red, white and blue Dutch flag on a pole on the top floor of the hotel to mark the recent birthday of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.
It was also a means of symbolically reasserting control over the Dutch East Indies in the face of a burgeoning Indonesian independence movement determined to oust the European colonialists who had ruled over them with an iron fist for more than 350 years.
