Java, with it's rich and varied nature and culture, is the undisputed political, trading and population centre of Indonesia. Here lives sixty per cent of the population of the country of islands., while the land area is no more than seven per cent. It is not remarkable that the island carries the good and the bad things of the fifth most populous country in the world.
Java is an piece of art of nature. Massive vulcane make a big variation in the landscape. The high points and low valleys compared to low allivial plateaus, feeded by the powerfull rivers. Numerous eruptions created a fertile layer on the soil of the island. Much sunshine and heavy monsoon rains made the most wealthy tropical plants grow, the most wealthy the Earth has even known. A tru Tropical Eden, around the equator.
The extraordinary fertility of the island has been a returning theme in historical sources for a very long time. Buddhist monks from China and traders from Arabia and Europe reported it. The famous Victorian natureal scientist Alfred Russel Wallace declared Java "undoubdly the most fertile, denely populated and productive island in the tropic regions".
The blessing of nature were used to the utmost by generations of Javanese. On the cost of huge activity tey built terraced ricefields and irrigation canals. Long before the Colonial time Java belonged to the riched farming areas in the world. Seen the yield of the ricefields it still is, although they still use mostly primitive tools.
The famous old civilization if Java, which made religious arctifacts like Borobudur and Prambanan temples,also conquerred the russounding islands. In the 14th century the East-Javanese Kingdom of the Majapahit was the leader is an area the size of the current Indonesia. The agrarian rich Java could feed an bigger population than any Southeastern Asian country.
After 1800 an true population explosion occured. The island, not bigger than four times The Netherlands, nowadays counts about 115 milion people. The growing population has led to deforestation and the destroyment of tropical rainforest, the soil and ecosystems, the base of the Javanese wealth.
Ironically the countyside, once the provider of enormous surplusses of rice, tea, cofee, sugar, rubber, kinine, tobacco and indigo, now is is remarkably poor. More than fifty per cent of the Javanese on the countryside produces poducts for own use. Although the rising living-standard one-third of the people on the countryside cannot cope with their problems.
The cities have grown from small colonial villages to confusing metropoles, wich store a quarter of the Javanese people. The population of Jakarta, once a very small harour village in the coastal swamps, has exploded two thousand per cent in the last five years.
But desides the problems Java has also enourmous pulling factors. The landscape, culture, and surely also the warm and dignified Javanese, make it to a paradise for the traveler.
