Paris van Java — where Dutch colonial planners built one of Southeast Asia's finest concentrations of Art Deco architecture along Braga Street and Asia Afrika Street in the 1920s–1930s, Tangkuban Perahu (the upturned boat volcano) smoulders 30 km north, the Bandung Conference of 1955 assembled 29 newly independent nations to declare a Third Way between capitalism and communism and gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement, and Sundanese cuisine (pepes ikan, nasi timbel, siomay, batagor) is the most herbaceous and vegetable-forward cooking tradition in Indonesia
Bandung (2.5 million; metro 8.5 million Bandung Raya) is the capital of West Java Province and Indonesia's third-largest city — the cultural heartland of the Sundanese people (the second-largest ethnic group in Indonesia, approximately 40 million), known for batik textiles, angklung bamboo music (UNESCO-listed), and a culinary tradition emphasising fresh herbs, raw vegetables, and lighter sauces than Javanese or Sumatran cooking. The city sits at 768 metres altitude on the Bandung Plateau, surrounded by active and dormant volcanoes (Tangkuban Perahu (2,084m, accessible to visitors), Papandaya…
The Sundanese people (Sunda Kingdom, Pajajaran Kingdom 10th–16th centuries CE) occupied the West Java Plateau for over a thousand years before Dutch colonial contact. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established control of West Java in the 17th century; the Netherlands Indies government built Bandung in the early 20th century as a planned hill station and alternative colonial administrative capital. The Bandung Institute of Technology (TH, now ITB, founded 1920) was the first engineering university in Southeast Asia, training both Dutch colonial engineers and the Indonesian intellectual gen…