Pakuan Pajajaran

Pakuan Pajajaran was the capital of the Sundanese kingdom, on ground now within the city of Bogor, and fell to Banten in 1579. Almost nothing remains above ground: the Batutulis inscription of 1533, a few other stones, traces of ditches, and place names. There are no temple ruins, no walls, and no sculpture in quantity commensurate with the capital of a kingdom that lasted centuries.

The absence can be partly explained. Sundanese building used wood, bamboo and palm fibre, which do not survive in the wet tropics; the Sundanese kingdom did not build stone temples in the numbers central and eastern Java did; and the site of the former capital has been continuously inhabited for four centuries, so its archaeological layers are disturbed by modern construction.

The absence of standing remains affects the writing of Sundanese history in a way that does not apply to Java. Old Javanese history can be checked against abundant temples, inscriptions and sculpture; old Sundanese history rests chiefly on manuscripts — the Carita Parahyangan, the Sanghyang Siksa, the Bujangga Manik — and on few inscriptions.

The consequences run both ways. It makes the writing of Sundanese history more dependent on textual interpretation and more open to dispute; and it produces a situation felt in West Java as an imbalance of attention, since places that can be visited attract research, budgets and tourism, while manuscripts do not. This encyclopedia records that imbalance as information about the state of the sources and not about the state of the history.