Semarang
— — a Dutch old town that learned the heat.
Not only on a wall.
“A port on the north coast of Central Java where Dutch colonial brick still holds the centre of the old town and a 15th-century Zheng He shrine sits in the hills behind it. The streets near Gereja Blenduk run on equatorial heat and call-to-prayer at sunset. Lawang Sewu, the old railway headquarters, keeps a thousand window-doors open to the wind. from the studio
Semarang, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Semarang is the capital of Central Java province on Indonesia's northern coast, with a population of roughly 1.6 million in the city proper. It served as the main Dutch colonial port on Java's north coast from the 17th century, and the old town, Kota Lama, still holds dozens of intact 18th- and 19th-century brick buildings within a few blocks of the harbour. The city sits where the coastal plain meets the foothills of Mount Ungaran, and the older neighbourhoods climb those hills inland from the sea.
Kota Lama centres on Gereja Blenduk, a domed Protestant church completed in 1753 and still the visual anchor of the district. A few blocks east, Lawang Sewu — Javanese for thousand doors — was finished in 1907 as the headquarters of the Dutch East Indies Railway Company, with hundreds of tall louvered openings cut for cross-ventilation. In the hills behind the city, the Sam Poo Kong shrine marks the 1416 landing of the Ming admiral Zheng He on Java's north coast.
Kota Lama was restored in stages through the 2010s and reopened with a pedestrianised core; it is walkable in an afternoon. Lawang Sewu opens daily and offers underground passage tours of the old railway cellars. Sam Poo Kong runs ceremonies on the 29th and 30th days of the sixth Chinese lunar month, the anniversary of Zheng He's landing. Semarang's port still handles a large share of Central Java's container traffic, and the airport carries direct flights to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.