Bandung's history runs from a prehistoric lake that filled the whole basin to the courtroom where Sukarno put Dutch rule on trial. This route follows karst caves, Siliwangi war museums and the night the city burned itself down in 1946.
Indonesia's national geological collection fills a 1928 Art Deco hall: Bandung Basin lake sediments, Homo erectus skulls from Sangiran and the Tambora 1815 eruption record. Open Tue–Thu 09:00–15:00, weekends to 14:00.
West Java's provincial museum, named for Prabu Siliwangi (Sri Baduga Maharaja), fills a joglo-roofed hall with Pajajaran-era stone inscriptions, Sundanese kris and a replica of the 1533 Batutulis stone from the royal capital at Bogor.
A limestone cave in the Citatah karst 25 km west, where 2003 excavations uncovered human skeletons and shell tools dated to roughly 9,500 years ago — people living on the shoreline of the prehistoric Lake Bandung.
Wind-carved limestone pinnacles on the ridge above Goa Pawon — a Miocene coral reef lifted out of the sea, now looking down on the flat basin floor that stayed underwater until the lake drained about 16,000 years ago.
The Siliwangi Division museum occupies a 1910 Dutch officers' house on Jalan Lembong: bambu runcing spears, captured KNIL weapons and photographs of the 1948 Long March, when Siliwangi troops walked back to West Java from Yogyakarta.
One cell and a guard tower are all that remain of the Dutch prison where Sukarno was held from December 1929: cell number 5, barely two metres square, where he drafted the defence plea that turned him into a national figure.
The 1907 landraad courthouse where Sukarno read his Indonesia Menggugat plea in August 1930, indicting colonial rule for four hours straight. Restored in 2005 with the courtroom bench, prisoner's dock and trial transcripts on show.
A 45-metre steel flame in Tegallega park marks the night of 24 March 1946, when some 200,000 residents burned their own city and walked south rather than hand Bandung back to the returning Allied and Dutch forces.
Bandung's oldest Chinese temple, built in 1885 as Hiap Thian Kiong on Jalan Kelenteng, keeps its Fujianese swallowtail roof and heavy bronze bell, with pre-war shophouse lanes running down towards Jalan Cibadak.
Traders have worked this site since 1906, when the Dutch moved the burnt-out old market here. The tower block is modern, but the alleys behind it towards Jalan Otista still hold the batik and kain wholesalers that made Bandung a textile city.
Sukarno studied civil engineering here from 1921 to 1926, when it was the Technische Hoogeschool. Henri Maclaine Pont's 1920 halls graft Sundanese timber roof trusses onto a Gothic frame — a deliberate answer to colonial classicism.
Wolff Schoemaker's 1933 streamline villa for press baron Dominique Berretty became a Japanese command post in 1942 and is now the UPI rectorate. Its curved white decks are aligned on a north axis pointing at Tangkuban Perahu.