Bali

• 1. Introduction

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  Bali, an Indonesian island east of Java and west of Lombok, goes silent once a year. The festival is Nyepi, the Hindu New Year. On that day everyone stays at home, and tourists are encouraged, or even required, to remain in their hotels.

  A full day of quiet is a striking request on an island where tourism-related business makes up 80% of the economy. By mid 2024 the province held about 4.46 million people, and it is the only Hindu-majority province in Indonesia.

  How did a small island keep its own kingdoms, rituals and calendar through centuries of outside pressure? Why did the wider world decide it was paradise? And what has that reputation cost the people who live there?

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• 2. Kingdoms and Colonisers

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  A stone pillar at Belanjong carries one of the earliest written appearances of the island's name. The inscription gives it as Vali-dvipa, with dvipa meaning island, and dates it to about 914 under King Sri Kesari Warmadewa. Nobody knows exactly what Vali meant. One reading ties it to the Sanskrit word for offering, tribute or sacrifice. Another links it to power or strength.

  People had lived there far longer. Austronesian settlers, who had travelled out from Taiwan, were on the island around 2000 BC. Stone tools from that era turned up near the village of Cekik in the west.

  In ancient Bali, nine Hindu sects existed side by side, among them the Pasupata, Bhairawa and Ganapatya. Each revered its own deity. Around 989 Mahendradatta, a great-granddaughter of Mpu Sindok, married the Bali king Udayana Warmadewa. Their son Airlangga was born around 1001, and the marriage brought still more Hinduism and Javanese culture to the island.

  In 1343 the Majapahit Empire of eastern Java founded a colony on Bali. When Majapahit fell in 1520, Javanese immigrants arrived in large numbers, and the island became a collection of independent Hindu kingdoms. That arrangement lasted for up to 386 years.

  Europeans appeared early but stayed at the edges. In 1512 a Portuguese expedition led by Antonio Abreu and Francisco Serrao sighted the northern shores, and Francisco Rodrigues charted the island. In 1585 a ship foundered off the Bukit Peninsula and left a few Portuguese in the service of Dewa Agung. The Dutch merchant-explorer Cornelis de Houtman arrived in 1597, and the Dutch East India Company followed in 1602.

  Real Dutch control began in the 1840s on the north coast, where Dutch officials set rival Balinese realms against one another. In the late 1890s they exploited struggles between the southern kingdoms to tighten their grip.

  In 1906 the Dutch mounted large naval and ground assaults in the Sanur region. Thousands of royal family members and followers met them. Rather than yield, they chose puputan, ritual mass suicide. An estimated 200 Balinese died rather than surrender. A similar mass suicide followed a Dutch assault at Klungkung.

  Even afterwards, Dutch rule on Bali was never as firmly established as on Java or Maluku. Local control of religion and culture largely survived. The Dutch even pursued a policy called Baliseering, or Balinization, to maintain traditions. They also tried to keep out the Islamization pressed by sultanates on Java, and they banned Christian missionary activity.

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• 3. Rice and Fire

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  In June 1860 the Welsh naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace travelled from Singapore and landed at Buleleng on Bali's north coast. What he saw stopped him. In his memoir The Malay Archipelago he wrote: "I was astonished and delighted." He added that he "had never beheld so beautiful and well-cultivated a district out of Europe." He singled out the rice grounds, watered by "an elaborate system of irrigation that would be the pride of the best-cultivated parts of Europe."

  That system is called subak. Islanders developed it in the early era when Indian cultural influence took hold, as they learned to grow rice in wet fields. In June 2012 the subak of Jatiluwih in central Bali was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  The water comes from mountains. Several peaks rise above 2000 metres, and the highest is Mount Agung at 3031 metres, known as the mother mountain. Volcanic soil gives the island exceptional fertility, while the tall ranges draw the heavy rain that feeds the rice terraces south of the mountains.

  The same mountain is a threat. Mount Agung is rated one of the world's most likely sites for a massive eruption within the next 100 years. Its 1963 eruption killed thousands, wrecked the economy and forced many displaced Balinese to be moved to other parts of Indonesia. On the 27th of November 2017 it erupted five times, evacuating thousands and disrupting air travel.

  On the cooler northern slopes, the Kintamani highlands near Mount Batur produce Arabica coffee. Many growers belong to a farming system called Subak Abian, built on the Hindu philosophy of Tri Hita Karana. It names three causes of happiness: good relations with God, with other people and with the environment. Kintamani Arabica was the first product in Indonesia to request a geographical indication.

  Agriculture, not tourism, remains the island's biggest employer. Bali's artisan villages each tend to adopt a single product, such as wind chimes or wooden furniture.

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• 4. Wallace's Line

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  The deep water of the Lombok Strait, on Bali's eastern side, marks a biological boundary. It divides the animals of the Indomalayan realm from the very different fauna of Australasia. The line carries the name of Alfred Russel Wallace, who first proposed a transition zone between these two biomes.

  During the Pleistocene ice age, falling seas joined Bali to Java, Sumatra and the Asian mainland, so Asian animals walked in. Deep water kept Lombok and the Lesser Sunda archipelago isolated. The result is that Bali has more in common with Java than with Lombok. One exception is the yellow-crested cockatoo, which belongs to a mainly Australasian family.

  Around 280 species of birds live on the island, including the critically endangered Bali myna, found nowhere else. The big cats are gone. The last definite record of the endemic Bali tiger came in 1937, when one was shot. The subspecies may have survived into the 1940s or 1950s. Leopards are found only on neighbouring Java.

  Monkeys are everywhere. The crab-eating macaque, called kera locally, gathers around temples, including the three monkey forest temples, where visitors feed it. The rarer Javan langur, or lutung, is born orange and has usually turned blackish by its first year. At the Goa Lawah cave, known as the Temple of the Bats, locals worship the bats that roost there.

  Underwater the variety is greater still. Scientists surveyed 33 sea sites from the 29th of April to the 11th of May 2011. They counted 952 species of reef fish, 8 of them new, and 393 coral species, 2 of them new. Healthy coral covered an average of 36% of the surveyed reef. The highest coverage was at Gili Selang and Gili Mimpang near Candidasa.

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• 5. The Invented Paradise

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  In the 1930s a remarkable group of Westerners spent time on Bali. They included the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the artists Miguel Covarrubias and Walter Spies, and the musicologist Colin McPhee. Their accounts shaped a Western picture of the island as "an enchanted land of aesthetes at peace with themselves and nature."

  Cinema sharpened the picture. The 1932 documentary Virgins of Bali followed a day in the lives of two teenage Balinese girls and mostly showed topless Balinese women. A loophole in the looser version of the Hays code, which applied until 1934, banned nudity of white women. It allowed nudity of non-white women, and the producers exploited that. The film was a great success in 1932 and was perhaps the main catalyst for Bali's popularity with tourists.

  Growth came slowly at first. Before the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur opened in 1963, built by Sukarno, the island had only three significant tourist-class hotels. The Ngurah Rai International Airport opened in 1970. After the 1965-66 turmoil, Suharto's New Order government revived the pre-war image of paradise in modern form, and Balinese living standards rose dramatically.

  Books and awards kept the story going. Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, filmed in 2010, set her search for balance in Ubud and fuelled a boom there. Travel and Leisure gave Bali its Best Island award in 2010. In March 2017 Tripadvisor named it the world's top destination.

  The numbers swung wildly. Bali drew 2.57 million foreign tourists in 2010. In 2012 it drew 2.88 million foreign tourists and 5 million domestic ones. Then came the pandemic. International arrivals fell 87% in 2020, and the first half of 2021 brought just 43 international travellers. Bali reopened to foreign tourists on the 3rd of February 2022, after two years closed. The 2025 total was 9.72% higher than in 2024.

  Tourists have also tested local patience. At the beginning of 2023 the governor, Wayan Koster, demanded a ban on motorcycle use by tourists after a series of accidents. He proposed cancelling the visas of violators. The idea set off widespread outrage on social media.

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• 6. Occupation, Purge and Bombs

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  On the 19th of February 1942 Japanese forces landed near Sanur. Bali had not been an original target. Heavy rains had left the airfields on Borneo inoperative, and Bali's weather was better. The island had no regular Royal Netherlands East Indies Army troops. Only about 600 native soldiers in the Korps Prajoda, under Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Roodenburg, stood guard, and the island fell quickly.

  The occupation bred resentment. The Japanese treated Balinese more harshly than the Dutch ever had, and the Balinese officer I Gusti Ngurah Rai formed a freedom army. In 1945 the British 5th Infantry Division under Major-General Robert Mansergh took the Japanese surrender. In 1946 Bali was handed back to the Dutch.

  The Dutch then placed Bali in the State of East Indonesia, a rival to the Republic proclaimed by Sukarno and Hatta. The Netherlands recognised Indonesian independence on the 29th of December 1949. In 1958 Bali became a province, and Sukarno appointed its first governor, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja.

  Worse lay ahead. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, Bali split between defenders of the caste system and those who rejected it. The Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, stood on one side of the opposition. The Indonesian Nationalist Party, the PNI, stood on the other. The PKI's land reforms raised tension further. A purported coup attempt in Jakarta was averted by forces under General Suharto, and the army then launched a violent anti-communist purge.

  Most estimates say at least 500,000 people were killed across Indonesia in 1965-66. In Bali the toll is estimated at 80,000, about 5% of the island's population. No Islamic forces were involved, as they were in Java and Sumatra. Upper-caste PNI landlords led the killing of PKI members. The purge helped Suharto push Sukarno out of the presidency.

  Tourism brought a different kind of violence. A bombing in the Kuta tourist area in 2002 by militant Islamists killed 202 people, mostly foreigners. Another attack followed in 2005, and together they badly damaged tourism and caused hardship across the island. On the 9th of July 2008 Balinese voted directly for governor and vice governor for the first time in the island's history.

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• 7. Sacred Directions

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  Balinese people orient themselves not by north and south but by kaja and kelod, the direction of the mountain and the direction of the sea. Mount Agung is kaja. Gods and ancestors are believed to live on the mountain, while demons live in the sea. Temples and homes are laid out accordingly, with the most sacred spaces closest to the mountain and the unclean ones nearest the sea.

  Most temples have an inner and an outer courtyard, and the inner one lies furthest kaja. Wali rituals, offerings exclusively for the gods, take place in the inner courtyard. Bebali ceremonies, meant for gods and people, belong to the outer courtyard. Bali-balihan, performances solely for human entertainment, happen outside the walls. In 1971 a committee of Balinese officials and artists standardised this three-tier system. Their aim was to protect the oldest rituals from being staged for a paying audience.

  Tourism has still reshaped the stage. Since the 1930s, sacred rituals such as the barong dance have been performed both in their original setting and purely for paying tourists. Some villages now keep one barong mask for non-ritual shows and an older mask used only in sacred performances.

  On the evening before Nyepi, huge colourful Ogoh-ogoh monsters are paraded through the streets and burned to drive away evil spirits. Other festivals follow the pawukon calendar, and families mark tooth-filing, cremations and the odalan, or temple festival. A guiding concept is desa kala patra, which holds that a ritual must fit its specific and general social context. Hence arts such as wayang kulit and topeng are highly improvisatory.

  The resulting atmosphere is called rame, loud and boisterous, and distinctly Balinese. Two or more gamelan ensembles may play within earshot and compete to be heard. Audience members chat, walk around or cheer.

  About 86.40% of Balinese follow Balinese Hinduism. It blends local animist belief with influences from India and Southeast Asia. In this view a rock, tree, dagger or woven cloth can house spirits. Under Indonesia's national ideology, Pancasila, only monotheistic belief is permitted. The government therefore presents Indonesian Hinduism as monotheistic, a description some scholars contest. In the village of Blimbing Sari, the residents are native Balinese Christians, yet their church is shaped like a Hindu temple.

  Even names follow a pattern. Balinese children are generally named by birth order, and the same names serve boys and girls.

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• 8. The Price of Paradise

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  In 2017, the year Bali received nearly 5.7 million tourists, officials declared a "garbage emergency" after the tide covered a 3.6-mile stretch of coastline in plastic waste. Some estimates suggest Indonesia is the source of around 10 per cent of the world's plastic waste. On the 3rd of February 2026, after criticism from President Prabowo Subianto, hundreds of police, soldiers, students and volunteers cleaned Kuta and Kedonganan beaches.

  Water is the quieter crisis. Over-exploitation by the tourist industry has dried up 200 of the island's 400 rivers, and southern Bali faces a shortage. The central government planned a facility on the Petanu River in Gianyar to channel 300 litres of water per second to Denpasar, Badung and Gianyar.

  The sea is also taking land. Erosion at Lebih Beach strips away 7 metres every year. Decades ago more than 10,000 pilgrims gathered there for holy rites, but they have moved to Masceti Beach.

  One official measure was kinder to the island. A 2010 Environment Ministry report on water quality gave Bali a score of 99.65, the highest of Indonesia's 33 provinces.

  Traffic is the third pressure. The Bali Mandara Toll Road opened on the 23rd of September 2013, built over 2 km of mangrove forest and 2.3 km of beach. It rests on 18,000 concrete pillars, with 300,000 mangrove trees planted as compensation. The island has no railway. A memorandum of understanding envisaged 565 km of line around the coast. In 2019 Governor Koster was reported to be considering an electric rail network.

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