🇮🇩 Indonesia
Bandung
Bandung (Indonesian: Bandung — possibly from the Sundanese word "bendung" meaning "dam" or from a word meaning "lake" relating to the ancient lake that once occupied the Bandung Basin, population 2.5 million in the city proper and 8.7 million in the metropolitan area (Greater Bandung — one of the ten largest urban agglomerations in Southeast Asia) — the capital of West Java Province and the third-largest city in Indonesia after Jakarta and Surabaya) is a city of multiple extraordinary identities: the "Paris of Java" (the Dutch colonial-era epithet for Bandung — the city that the Dutch colonial government of the Dutch East Indies planned as the future capital of the colony (the plan to move the colonial capital from Batavia (Jakarta) to Bandung was under active preparation when the Japanese invasion of 1942 ended the Dutch colonial era): the Dutch built Bandung in the Art Deco style (the 1920s and 1930s Dutch interpretation of the Art Deco architectural movement — the "Nieuwe Zakelijkheid" or "New Objectivity" in the Dutch-Indonesian colonial context: the most complete surviving Art Deco colonial streetscape in Southeast Asia after Hanoi), the city of the 1955 Bandung Conference (the Asian-African Conference of 1955 — the meeting of the leaders of 29 African and Asian newly independent nations that founded the Non-Aligned Movement (the political movement of countries that refused to align with either the US-led NATO bloc or the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact during the Cold War): the Bandung Conference is one of the most important political events of the 20th century and the founding moment of the Global South as a political category), the city of Sundanese culture (the Sundanese people — the largest ethnic group in West Java and the second-largest ethnic group in Indonesia (42 million Sundanese): the Sundanese culture is distinct from Javanese culture in language, music (the "gamelan degung" — the Sundanese gamelan orchestra which is distinct from the Central Javanese gamelan), cuisine and visual arts), and the city of volcanoes (Bandung sits in the Bandung Basin — a volcanic caldera at 768m altitude surrounded by active and dormant volcanoes (Tangkuban Perahu (2,084m — the "upside-down boat" volcano), Papandayan (2,665m) and Galunggung (2,168m)).