Indonesia's tin island turned paradise — boulder-strewn turquoise bays, the clearest snorkeling water in the archipelago, and a kampong fishing village that starred in a beloved Indonesian film
Belitung (also Belitong) is a small island off the east coast of Sumatra in Bangka-Belitung Province, famous for two things: a century of Dutch tin mining that made it one of Southeast Asia's wealthiest provinces per capita, and Tanjung Tinggi beach — the setting for Andrea Hirata's novel and the film 'Laskar Pelangi' (Rainbow Troops, 2008), the highest-grossing Indonesian film ever made. The island's beaches are defined by huge smooth granite boulders rising from flat turquoise water so clear you can see the sand 5 meters down. Island-hopping by speedboat to Pulau Lengkuas lighthouse island,…
Belitung's colonial history is inseparable from tin. The Dutch began mining operations in 1851 under the NV Billiton Maatschappij — a company whose name eventually became 'BHP Billiton', one of the world's largest mining corporations today. For over a century, Malay laborers and later Chinese Hakka immigrants extracted tin ore that funded Dutch colonial expansion. The tin mines closed in the 1990s as reserves depleted, leaving behind a landscape of artificial lakes (bekas tambang — abandoned pit lakes), old Hakka shophouse architecture in Tanjungpandan, and a population with deep Chinese-Mala…