In all of these posts about crowns, I have been ignoring/omitting the royal headdresses which I think are most gorgeous.  This is because crowns from this vast syncretic archipelago nation often defy traditional interpretation and classification as crowns (which sounds weird now, but which will become more comprehensible when you see today’s example).

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Also, Indonesia is enormous

Indonesia is a land of more than 17000 islands, including Java, the world’s most populous island.  Lying between major continents, oceans, hemispheres, and eco-regions, these islands have been reassembled in countless different forms into all manner of different empires, kingdoms, principalities, alliances, satrapies, colonies, and what ever other political units you can think of (although perhaps the most influential was the Majapahit Empire, a Hindu-Buddhist sea-based empire which was headquartered in Java and provided the cultural and aesthetic roots for contemporary Indonesian society).  Sometimes almost all of Indonesia has been unified.  Other times the islands have gone in different directions.

Anyway, as you can imagine, the complex history of these seventeen thousand islands partakes greatly of Indian, Chinese, South East Asian, Japanese, African, Australian, European (particularly Dutch), Melanesian, Polynesian, Papuan, Philippine, and American influences.  The gifted Indonesians (who have a particular genius for sculpture) have figured out ways to take all of these different flavors and make something which is breathtaking and uniquely their own.  Here is a crown from Singaraja, a Balinese City which was the courtly center for Dutch influence over Bali and the Sunda Islands between 1850 and 1950.  Like the British in India, the Dutch preferred to rule by subalterning small regional kingdoms into the merciless clutches of an anodyne-sounding “company” (The Dutch East India Company).

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King’s Crown from the Balinese Royal Court of Singaraja

This crown is from the second half of the nineteenth century (or maybe the early 20th century) when some local monarch had it made in emulation of a Dutch officer’s hat.  Look at how much it resembles an [American]  civil war cap!  And yet, despite its shape, this hat is nothing like an American/European military hat of that era.  It is made of gold and gemstones with undulating floral zoomorphic patterns on every inch!

Is this a crown?  Certainly. And yet if I pulled it out of a prop box, it would probably not pass muster.  Indonesian history has many similar caps, but I have never written about them, because of how hard it is to write about the baffling history of this enormous and complicated (yet not well-studied) part of the world.  Keep your eyes open for unfamiliar opulence ans (sigh) confusing and wordy explanations like this one!

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