The hotel changed names the way Batavia changed masters -- each renaming a signal of who held power and what they wanted to project. Chaulan's Hotel de Provence became Hotel Rotterdam in 1851 under Cornelis Denninghoff, a name that failed to distinguish it from the colonial competition. The following year a Swiss staff member named Francois Auguste Emile Wyss bought the property. Wyss had married Antoinette Victorine Chaulan, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the original owner, binding himself to the hotel's founding family. In 1856, on the advice of a patron named Eduard Douwes Dekker -- the writer better known as Multatuli, whose novel "Max Havelaar" would become one of the most devastating critiques of Dutch colonialism ever published -- Wyss renamed it Hotel des Indes. The name stuck for nearly a century. It was elegant, aspirational, and just French enough to suggest cosmopolitan sophistication in a tropical outpost.

Arriving in nineteenth-century Batavia was an ordeal. Ocean travelers disembarked at the port and were ferried to shore in small boats, deposited at the Kleine Boom customs office, then driven by carriage along Molenvliet street to the hotel. But the destination justified the journey. Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist who independently conceived the theory of evolution by natural selection, stayed at the Hotel des Indes in 1869 and described it approvingly: each guest received a sitting room and bedroom opening onto a verandah, with marble baths in the central quadrangle always ready for use, a table d'hote breakfast at ten, and dinner at six. The hotel was located near the elite Harmony Society and the French tailor shop Oger Freres -- the kind of neighborhood that made colonial life feel, for those who could afford it, like a provincial European city relocated to the equator. By 1845, the hotel was already famous for being the first in Batavia to sell European-style ice cream, a distinction that seems trivial until you consider what refrigeration meant in the tropics at mid-century.

The Japanese military seized the hotel in 1942 and renamed it. The Dutch director, G. Hotte, was initially kept on, but within a year the remaining staff -- both European and Indonesian -- were interned in a prisoner camp. Future Indonesian Vice President Mohammad Hatta was temporarily housed there by the Japanese authorities. After Japan's capitulation in 1945, the hotel became a safe haven for returning European refugees under the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI). But the Indonesian Revolution was underway, and most of the Indonesian staff quit in solidarity with the independence movement. The hotel's most consequential moment came on May 7, 1949, when it served as the location for the Roem-van Roijen Agreement -- the diplomatic accord that led to the release of Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta and, ultimately, the Dutch transfer of sovereignty to the Indonesian Republic. A hotel built by a French hotelier, named by a Dutch novelist, had become the stage for the end of Dutch colonial rule.

After independence, the hotel was annexed without compensation and renamed Hotel Duta Indonesia. But for a time it remained Jakarta's premier social stage. In August 1950, the national women's magazine Wanita published a description of a fashion show at the hotel that captured both its glamour and its shifting meaning. "The lights shone bright in the room at the top of the Hotel des Indes, the hotel that has been called the gateway to the island of Java," wrote S. Pudjo Samadi. "There was no end to the automobiles dropping off their passengers." The fashion show featured both Western and Indonesian designs -- the new nation trying on identities, using the old colonial ballroom as a fitting room. Pudjo's conclusion was pointed: "We should be pleased because we have seen the possibilities in front of us to bring our own Indonesian authentic women's clothing to the highest level, which is also in line with our authentic selves." The building that had served Dutch prestige was being repurposed for Indonesian self-definition.

By the late 1950s, the hotel's commercial decline was underway. The opening of the Sukarno-commissioned Hotel Indonesia in 1962 -- modern, purpose-built, a deliberate statement of postcolonial confidence -- drew away the elite clientele. John Wayne stayed at the Hotel des Indes in 1958, one of its last celebrity guests. The building lingered for another thirteen years, increasingly overshadowed, until it was demolished in 1971. A shopping mall replaced it. Nothing of the original structure survives. The marble baths Wallace admired, the verandahs where colonial travelers took their afternoon tea, the room where the Roem-van Roijen Agreement was signed -- all of it is gone, replaced by the kind of commercial space that could be anywhere. The hotel's 142-year history ended not with ceremony but with commerce, which is perhaps the most honest epitaph a colonial-era building could receive.