Bandung Looks East: A Community Project Rewrites Spice History in Sundanese
When conversations turn to Indonesia's spice trade, Maluku, Ternate, Tidore, and Banda dominate the story. Bandung rarely gets a mention. A community-driven Wikimedia project is working to change that, arguing that Tatar Sunda, the Sundanese homeland, was never a passive bystander in the centuries-long commerce that connected the archipelago to Europe and the Middle East.
The initiative is called WikiRempah, funded through the Wikimedia Foundation's Rapid Funds program and carried out with support from Wikimedia Indonesia. The Bandung chapter of the project was organised by a team including Hasnanf, Pijri Paijar, Adhiiik, Tanto Wijaya, and Mirani Pramitasari, continuing work originally launched by Ana Ainina, Supardi Sahabu, and Sofi Solihah.
What the Meetup Produced
At a single gathering, contributors delivered a concrete set of outputs across three Sundanese-language Wikimedia platforms. Participants wrote ten Sundanese Wikipedia articles covering historical buildings in Eastern Indonesia, compiled twelve traditional recipes from Maluku and North Maluku for Sundanese Wikibooks (currently in the Incubator), added more than fifty entries to Sundanese Wiktionary, and recorded more than fifty audio clips of local Sundanese dialect pronunciations of spice names using Lingua Libre.
The recipe documentation goes beyond ingredient lists. Contributors also captured the culinary philosophies and distinctive spice uses that define each region, giving Sundanese readers a window into Eastern Indonesian food culture in their own language.
A practical session on HotCat, a tool that allows registered users to manage categories on Wikipedia pages, was also held. Because HotCat is not yet available in Sundanese Wiktionary's preferences panel, Mirani Pramitasari walked participants through adding the relevant JavaScript to their personal common.js pages, a workaround that makes categorising new entries considerably faster.
In September, the expedition team is scheduled to visit historical sites across Ternate, Tidore, Jailolo, Bacan, and Makassar to gather material for further Sundanese Wikipedia articles.
Why Sundanese Voices Belong in This Story
The historical case for Sundanese involvement is solid. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, ports including Banten, Sunda Kalapa, and Cirebon functioned as active redistribution hubs where spices from Maluku were traded onward to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Portuguese accounts from the sixteenth century describe spices from Maluku passing through Javanese ports before reaching international markets. The 1522 treaty between Portugal and the Sunda Kingdom, and the later VOC establishment of Batavia as the administrative centre of the Dutch East Indies, formally wove Tatar Sunda and Maluku into the same commercial network.
Tatar Sunda was not a producer of cloves or nutmeg, but it was a critical node in transportation, trade, and cultural exchange. Documenting that role in Sundanese preserves a perspective that has largely been absent from the written record.
Why It Matters for Hosts
Independent accommodation and experience operators in Bandung and the wider Sundanese region can draw a direct line from this project to their own storytelling. Guests increasingly seek cultural depth alongside comfort. The growing body of Sundanese-language content on spice history, Eastern Indonesian recipes, and historic trade ports gives hosts credible, freely accessible material to build food tours, cooking workshops, or curated reading lists that frame Bandung as part of a much larger Indonesian story, not just a city of cool weather and factory outlets. Positioning your property or experience within that historical arc is a low-cost way to differentiate in a competitive market.
This post is published on the Qontaktly travel blog. The details reported here were first published by Sofi Solihah on Diff, the Wikimedia community blog, on 29 August 2026.
First reported by diff.wikimedia.org.