Besides known for its traffic jam, Jakarta is also known with many museums where the history of Indonesian heritage kept. And so does the Gajah Museum at Jl. Merdeka Barat 12, Central Jakarta. Although named as Gajah Museum (gajah: elephant), but the museum collections don’t have correlations with elephants. So what is the specialty of this museum?
1. Museum Gajah is known with the name because there is an elephant statue from the King Chulalongkorn of Thailand in 1871. This statue then became the museum’s icon. But now the Gajah Museum is called the National Museum.
2. Previously, this museum is also called Arca Building (arca: statue) because there are many collections of statue here from over the past kingdom.
3. The museum building was designed in classicism style, adapted from the European-style building in the 18th century.
4. The National Museum then became the first and the biggest museum in Southeast Asia.
5. First, the National Museum was just only a building filled with books and cultural objects collected by J.C.M. Radermacher, the chairman of Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen.
6. The prehistoric heritage shows the civilization story of Indonesia’s nation can be seen around every corner of this museum.
7. The total collections in National Museum are more than 140.000 objects in 7 categories such as Prehistoric, Archeology, Ceramic, Numismatic & Heraldic, History, Etnography, and Geography.