For centuries, Sunda Kelapa served the inland capital of Pakuan Pajajaran, about sixty kilometers to the south in the highlands now called Bogor. The port handled pepper, and pepper attracted the Portuguese, who arrived in 1513 and erected a stone marker in 1522 to seal a treaty with the local Sunda Kingdom. That treaty lasted five years. In 1527, Fatahillah -- a general fighting for the Sultanate of Demak -- drove the Portuguese out and renamed the port Jayakarta, meaning "victorious deed." Less than a century later, Jan Pieterszoon Coen of the Dutch East India Company seized the port from the Sultanate of Banten and rechristened it Batavia. The VOC built canals modeled on Amsterdam, erected the Stadhuis town hall in 1710, and founded the Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in 1778. In 1740, they massacred the city's ethnic Chinese population. The canals Coen had so proudly designed became open sewers breeding malaria, a detail the colonial histories tend to hurry past.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut the voyage from Europe to Batavia to five weeks, and the city began to feel less like a distant outpost and more like an extension of the Netherlands. That same year, the Batavia Tramway Company launched its first horse-drawn tram line from Amsterdam Poort to Molenvliet. By 1871, a railway connected Batavia to Buitenzorg in the cooler highlands. The Gedung Gajah museum had opened in 1868, the first in Southeast Asia. Hotels, medical schools, and botanical institutions followed. Batavia was becoming a place people came to on purpose, not merely the place where the spice trade required them to be. But the infrastructure was built for the colonizers. The indigenous population -- the vast majority -- lived in kampungs outside the canal-lined European quarter, a geography of exclusion that would shape the city's politics for the next century.

The Japanese occupied Batavia in 1942 and renamed it Jakarta, erasing three centuries of Dutch naming in a single decree. After Japan's surrender in 1945, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence, and the city became the capital of a republic that had to fight the Dutch for four more years before sovereignty was transferred in December 1949. Sukarno reshaped Jakarta as a showcase for the new nation. The National Monument rose in Merdeka Square -- a 132-meter marble obelisk topped with a flame plated in 35 kilograms of gold. Hotel Indonesia opened in 1962 to host the Asian Games, and Gelora Bung Karno Stadium gave the capital a sporting venue to rival any in Asia. Kebayoran Baru, a planned residential district begun in 1948, became the model for Jakarta's southward expansion. In 1966, Governor Ali Sadikin divided the city into five self-governing municipalities, a structure that persists today. The spelling shifted one last time in 1972, when Indonesia's Perfected Spelling system changed Djakarta to Jakarta.

Jakarta's population was 533,000 in 1930. By 1980, it had passed six and a half million. By the mid-1990s, it exceeded nine million, and population density had reached 12,200 people per square kilometer. The Istiqlal Mosque, the largest in Southeast Asia, was completed in 1978 directly across the street from Jakarta Cathedral -- a deliberate gesture of interfaith coexistence. The Jagorawi Toll Road opened the same year, linking Jakarta to Bogor and marking the start of an expressway system that would eventually girdle the metropolitan area. Wisma 46, the nation's tallest building when it opened in 1996, held that title for twenty years. But the late 1990s brought crisis: the Asian financial crash destroyed the rupiah, and in May 1998, riots against Suharto's government killed over a thousand people and burned entire neighborhoods. The Jakarta Stock Exchange was bombed in 2000. The Marriott Hotel was bombed in 2003. The Australian Embassy was bombed in 2004.

The twenty-first century brought TransJakarta in 2004 -- the first bus rapid transit system in Southeast Asia -- and the Jakarta MRT in 2019, a subway line that took thirty-four years to go from proposal to operation. Joko Widodo served briefly as governor before becoming president, and his successor Anies Baswedan presided over a city that hosted the 2018 Asian Games and opened an international stadium in 2022. Jakarta floods almost every year; the 2020 New Year's flood submerged entire districts. The city is sinking at alarming rates as groundwater extraction compresses the clay beneath it, and the national government has begun planning a new capital in Kalimantan. Whether or not the bureaucrats leave, Jakarta will remain what it has been since a Hindu port handled pepper for the kingdom in the hills: the place where Java meets the sea, where empires land and are eventually expelled, and where ten million people negotiate daily the gap between the city they have and the city they imagine.