The mosque began as a Javanese structure, and its bones remain Javanese: a rectangular prayer hall topped by a multi-tiered pyramidal roof supported by four central posts called saka guru. But each generation of Banten's sultans added something from someone new. Sultan Maulana Muhammad added the pawestren, a women's prayer hall, between 1580 and 1586. In 1632, a Chinese craftsman known as Cek-ban-cut constructed the 24-meter brick minaret on an octagonal base ten meters across. Its shape recalls a lighthouse more than a traditional Islamic tower, its surface decorated with Indian Mughal patterns and ancient candi ornamentation from Java's Hindu-Buddhist past. Around the same period, Hendrik Lucaasz Cardeel -- a Dutchman who had converted to Islam and joined the Banten court with the title Pangeran Wiraguna -- designed the tiyamah, a two-story Dutch-style building that still stands on the mosque's southwest side. Cardeel wove early European Baroque features into the minaret and mosque walls. The result is a building that looks like nothing else in Indonesia.

Step inside the prayer hall and the walls are spare, almost austere. There is no calligraphy, no ornamental arabesque -- only geometrical patterns cut into the air ventilation openings. This minimalism echoes the Pecinan Tinggi Mosque, built for Java's Chinese Muslim community. But look down. The column stumps tell a different story. Each one bears a detailed lotus motif, circular and balanced, drawn from a Chinese artistic tradition steeped in Buddhist symbolism. The lotus appears at both the top and bottom of every column, representing balance of all forces and strength. Some scholars have connected these designs to the sixty levels of Buddhist meditation -- the columns becoming focal points through which the energy of prayer travels upward to the mosque's highest tier. In a building dedicated to Islamic worship, Buddhist and Hindu symbols sit in quiet dialogue with the faith practiced above them.

Banten was no backwater. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, it was the Indonesian archipelago's preeminent trading hub, a port where Chinese merchants, Indian traders, Dutch factors, and Javanese nobles jostled for advantage in the pepper trade. The mosque's eclectic architecture was not a deliberate aesthetic statement so much as a natural byproduct of this cosmopolitan reality: when you need skilled builders, you hire whoever is available, and in Banten that meant craftsmen from half the known world. The port declined after the Dutch East India Company tightened its grip on the region's trade, and the city itself largely vanished. What remains is this mosque complex -- the Great Mosque, the tiyamah, and a cemetery that holds the tombs of Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin and his wife, Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa, and other members of the royal dynasty. Many visitors come not for the mosque's architecture at all, but to pay respects at these graves.

The mosque's roof is its most debated feature. Today it rises in five tiers, the three uppermost arranged in a way that recalls a Chinese pagoda more than a conventional Javanese mosque. But historical sketches from 1596, 1624, 1661, and 1726 show no more than three tiers. The Dutch scholar Valentijn, writing in 1858, described five. Somewhere between the early depictions and the later accounts, the roof grew -- or perhaps the artists simplified what they saw. This ambiguity is fitting for a building whose entire identity resists simple categories. The covered verandas, or serambi, extend from the north and south sides, providing entrance to the main prayer hall. Unlike most traditional Javanese mosques built on a square base, the Great Mosque sits on a rectangle, a practical accommodation for the pawestren and the tombs that the sultans insisted on incorporating into the sacred space.