The building's history reads like a parable about impermanence. In 1640, Dutch colonists erected a church on this site and called it the Old Dutch Church. Nearly a century later, in 1732, it was renovated and renamed the New Dutch Church - a fresh coat of relevance for a congregation that had outgrown the original structure. Then, in 1808, an earthquake brought it all down. The site sat empty for over a century before a Neo-Renaissance building rose on the same foundations in 1912, this time as a commercial warehouse for the trading firm Geo Wehry & Co. By 1938 it had been renovated again, this time in the Dutch colonial architectural style that characterized Batavia's government quarter. The Batavia Society of Arts and Sciences eventually purchased the building and transferred it to the Old Batavia Foundation, which opened it as the Old Batavia Museum on December 22, 1939. After Indonesian independence, ownership passed through the Institute of Indonesian Culture and the Ministry of Education and Culture before the DKI Jakarta Administration designated it the Wayang Museum on June 23, 1968. The official inauguration came seven years later, on August 13, 1975.

Wayang is not simply puppetry. UNESCO recognized Indonesian wayang as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, and the tradition stretches back at least a thousand years on Java. The flat leather puppets of wayang kulit are cut from buffalo hide, perforated with intricate patterns, and painted in rich detail. During a performance, a dalang - a master puppeteer who is part storyteller, part musician, part priest - manipulates the figures behind a backlit cotton screen, casting shadows that shift and dance while he narrates stories drawn from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, or local Javanese legends. A single performance can last all night. The museum's collection spans not only the wayang kulit tradition but also wayang golek, the three-dimensional wooden rod puppets favored in Sundanese West Java, and wayang klitik, flat wooden puppets used for Javanese historical dramas. Puppets from China, Thailand, Cambodia, and other countries round out the collection, placing Indonesia's traditions in a broader Asian context.

The garden where visitors pause between exhibits occupies the former churchyard of the Old Dutch Church, and it was here that Jan Pieterszoon Coen was buried after his death in 1629. Coen served twice as Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company and is credited with establishing Batavia as the VOC's Asian headquarters. He is also remembered for the Banda massacre of 1621, in which he ordered the killing and enslavement of the islands' population to enforce a spice monopoly - an act brutal enough that even some of his Dutch contemporaries condemned it. His grave was marked by a memorial plaque that still exists in the museum's grounds, though the exact location of the remains is uncertain after centuries of construction and demolition. Walking through the garden today, past schoolchildren and tourists, the disconnect between the site's violent colonial past and its present role as a place of cultural celebration is sharp but unresolved. The museum does not pretend the history is simple.

The Wayang Museum is not a static archive. Periodically, the museum hosts live wayang performances and workshops on puppet-making, keeping the tradition active rather than merely displayed. A dalang will set up behind a screen in the museum's small theater, and for an hour or two the building returns to something like its original purpose - a gathering place where a community watches stories about gods and heroes play out in shifting patterns of light and dark. The workshops teach visitors how to cut and assemble their own puppets, a process that requires patience and a surprisingly steady hand. For Indonesian visitors, these events connect to childhood memories of all-night wayang performances at village celebrations. For international visitors, they offer something rarer: a performing art form that has survived colonialism, independence, urbanization, and the digital age, still practiced by master puppeteers who trained through years of apprenticeship. The museum sits among Kota Tua's cluster of cultural institutions, a few steps from the Jakarta History Museum and the Fine Art and Ceramic Museum, all facing the same cobblestoned square where Batavia once governed.