In November 2023, the search for the gamelan of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair—an endeavor that had occupied me since I began my master's thesis in 2020—was no longer a priority. In fact, I imagined it falling to pieces in some garret in Paris or having been sent back to Indonesia, only to be melted down by the Japanese to make bullets during World War II.
That was when I came across an article in the press of the Dutch East Indies revealing the fate of the instruments after the exposition: they would be donated to the museum of Hamburg by Gustav Mundt, an administrator of the tea plantations in West Java. Minutes later, Luca Chiantore found the catalog of the ethnographic museum in the same city—now called Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK)—which indeed recorded a gamelan as having entered in December 1889 under the name Mundt. Two months later, we were finally able to stand before it.
The article we co-authored, published in The Galpin Society Journal 78 (2025), recounts the gamelan’s journey since its departure from the port of Tanjung Priok in Batavia—now Jakarta—on March 9, 1889. It is also the first study of the characteristics of each of its instruments, as the gamelan had remained, ever since, a heap of wood and bronze stored in the museum’s reserves, with no one ever imagining the history it carried. I hope these pages shed some light on the events of 1889 (which are part of my ongoing doctoral research supervised by Luca Chiantore and Elena Torres) and on the history of gamelan construction in Java.
© 2025 by the authors and the Galpin Society. This article is an open access article distributed under theterms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).