Trowulan

What tells most about Trowulan is not its buildings but its ground: aerial survey and excavation show a grid of straight canals crossing at right angles, dividing the area into blocks, with large reservoirs such as the Segaran. The arrangement agrees with the Nagarakretagama's description of a gridded capital with walls and squares, and that agreement is the principal ground for identifying this site as the Majapahit capital.

The canals managed water on a plain that is dry in the dry season and waterlogged in the wet. Brick construction — rather than the andesite of central Java — was the material available and also the material most easily taken away again, and the removal of brick from the site went on for centuries.

Trowulan is not an empty fenced reserve. Tens of thousands of people live on it, farm it, and make bricks from its earth — work which in several hamlets has passed down generations and whose raw material is the layer that holds the remains. Every protective measure is therefore a measure about livelihoods and not only about objects.

A plan to build a steel plant in the area in 2013 was cancelled after opposition. Designation as a National Cultural Heritage Area gives a legal basis, and its implementation still faces the same question: what the inhabitants may do on land they own. This encyclopedia records that dispute as part of the entry rather than as an interference with it.