In 1955, the world’s attention was on Bandung.

The first large-scale Asian-African Conference, also known as the Bandung Conference, took place on April 18-24, 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. The twenty-five countries that participated at the Conference represented 1.5 billion people or approximately half the World’s population at the time.





Organised by Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and India, the conference’s stated aims were to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation.

This rare footage from Critical Past gives us an insight into what Bandung looked like 60 years ago…







Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2015 and has been updated.