De Javasche Bank established its Surabaya branch on 14 September 1829, when the city was already the commercial engine of East Java. For decades, a modest building served the purpose, but by the turn of the twentieth century the institution demanded something grander. The original structure was demolished in 1904, and in its place rose a building of 1,000 square metres designed by the Amsterdam architect Eduard Cuypers. A nephew of the legendary Pierre Cuypers -- who designed Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and Central Station -- Eduard brought the family talent for monumental architecture to the tropics. His design echoed the De Javasche Bank headquarters in Batavia, blending Neo-Renaissance grandeur with subtle Javanese ornamentation. Arched windows, classical columns, and decorative flourishes gave the building the gravitas expected of a colonial central bank, while local motifs acknowledged the soil it stood on.

When Indonesia declared independence in 1945, the building's purpose shifted but its function remained. De Javasche Bank became Bank Indonesia, and the Surabaya branch continued operating in the same halls where Dutch clerks had once tallied trade revenues. For nearly three decades after independence, the building served as the central bank's local office, its vaults and teller windows adapting to a new nation's currency and regulations. In 1973, Bank Indonesia relocated to a more modern facility, and the Cuypers building fell quiet. The decades of disuse might have ended in demolition -- a fate that befell many colonial structures across Indonesia as cities modernized. Instead, Bank Indonesia undertook a careful restoration, and on 27 January 2012 the building reopened as a museum dedicated to the history of banking and currency in Indonesia.

The museum spreads across three floors, but its most evocative spaces are three purpose-built exhibition rooms. The Collection of Old Currencies Room occupies the former safe deposit area -- the same vault that once secured the colony's financial reserves. The irony is deliberate: where money was hoarded, it is now displayed. Visitors trace the evolution of Indonesian currency from pre-colonial trade beads and Chinese coins through Dutch guilders, the Japanese military scrip imposed during World War II, and the early rupiah notes of the fledgling republic. The Collection from Conservation Room preserves the physical story of the building itself, displaying original materials replaced during restoration -- tiles, brickwork, ironwork -- alongside architectural drawings and construction records. The Collection of Cultural Treasure Room houses vintage banking equipment: mechanical adding machines, embossing stamps, the heavy brass instruments of pre-digital finance.

Eduard Cuypers spent much of his career adapting European architectural traditions to Southeast Asian conditions. His work for De Javasche Bank in both Batavia and Surabaya shows a designer thinking carefully about how Neo-Renaissance formality could coexist with equatorial heat, monsoon rains, and the cultural expectations of a colonial society that wanted its institutions to look both powerful and refined. High ceilings allowed hot air to rise. Deep eaves sheltered walkways from tropical downpours. The Javanese ornamentation Cuypers incorporated was more than decoration -- it signaled that even a Dutch institution recognized, however selectively, the aesthetic traditions of its surroundings. Walking through the museum today, the building's architectural details tell a story parallel to the currency exhibits: one of cultural encounter, adaptation, and the gradual assertion of local identity within structures originally designed to project foreign authority.