After the riots in 1998 spread to the Chinatown area of Jakarta, many Chinese-Indonesians fled. What’s left is a street of boarded-up memories

During the Chinatown riots of 1998, shopkeeper Tjie Thian Siak was lucky to escape harm. The mobs were more interested in looting electronics, raiding banks and burning tyres than they were in stealing house paint from his small store.

When the violence stopped, Siak, now 69, decided to stay in the neighbourhood. But he says many of the Chinese-Indonesian families who ran furniture stores here left and never came back.

“There’s not that many left, they are afraid,” says Siak. “They moved to residential areas: that’s why it’s quiet in the evening. Before the riots it was still busy until nine or 10pm. Now the shops close at five.”

Jakarta may be a city on the move – a metropolis of constant buzz, and what feels like perpetual construction – but one street in the Indonesian capital hasn’t changed much in almost 20 years.

Many of the storefronts of Pintu Besar Selatan, in the Glodok area of north Jakarta, are boarded up with bricks.



Vines and electrical wires mould into one. Peer into the empty windows and you can still see the charred ceilings, the steel beams curved into a parabola by the heat of the fires.

“The traces are still there,” says Abidin Kusno, director of the Centre for South-east Asia at the University of British Columbia. “No one seems to claim the buildings or repair them. It’s almost like a wounded landscape.”

The neighbourhood has long been associated with Jakarta’s Indonesian-Chinese community. In May 1998, when angry mobs vented their rage against the economic crisis and three decades of authoritarian rule under former president Suharto, much of the violence was directed at the ethnic Chinese minority.

Many Chinese-Indonesians have lived in the country for generations, and faced deep discrimination and cultural suppression under the Suharto regime. Today, they remain cautious: many shop owners here prefer not to discuss the past.



Some of the abandoned properties in the street are for sale, but the signs are looking a bit weathered now. One building affected by 1998 is impossible to access, even with the key: years ago, the local council mistakenly poured the concrete for the pavement too high, cementing in the door – and the stories behind it.

Many people who own these properties don’t seem to have any immediate plans on how to develop them – perhaps because it is easier to keep the spaces locked up and forgotten.

“People really do not want to bring it up again,” says Kusno of 1998. “At the same time, they don’t know what to do with [the empty buildings].”

Siak, for example, bought one of the abandoned buildings from a family who fled, but he hasn’t touched it for almost 20 years. Vines now drip down among the quiet bricks.

Not all of the vacant buildings here were destroyed in the riots – one is charred from a kitchen fire, while the greenery that carpets the now-defunct Metropole hotel speaks to a failed business venture.



Among the abandoned spaces, however, there are signs of creativity. Street artists now hawk portraits of princess Diana and Bono, using an abandoned building to store their supplies; some have settled here into makeshift shacks.



Chinatown’s most famous coffee shop, Kopi Tak Kie, opened in 1927, continues to bustle in the food market nearby. And a modern Chinese teashop has opened up on the corner, offering a view of the bridge to Glodok Plaza, an electronics arcade once burned and looted – but since rebuilt.

Yet these days many ethnic Chinese people choose to live and do business in other areas of the city, which aren’t tainted by bad memories.

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