Indonesia

Indonesia: capital Jakarta, population 285.7M, area 1,904,569 km². The 4th most populous country, in Asia. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Indonesia scatters about 17,000 islands across the equator between the Indian and Pacific oceans, the largest archipelagic state on Earth. More than 700 languages are spoken across it, roughly a tenth of all the languages alive today. Its volcanoes have twice reached the whole planet: Tambora in 1815 cost the world a summer, Krakatoa in 1883 was heard 4,800 kilometres away.

• The Majapahit empire, founded on Java at the end of the 1200s, was a thalassocracy: its reach ran along sea lanes and tribute rather than along any drawn border.
• Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Banda Islands were the only place on Earth where nutmeg and mace grew, which is why European fleets fought over specks of land.
• The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was heard 4,800 kilometres away at Rodrigues near Mauritius, and its pressure wave travelled round the planet more than three times.
• Independence was read aloud in Jakarta at ten in the morning on 17 August 1945, opening four years of revolution before the Netherlands acknowledged it.

• Kartini argued for girls' schooling in letters to friends in the Netherlands; published in 1911, seven years after she died at twenty-five, they founded a movement she never saw.
• B. J. Habibie worked on the Airbus A300B at Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm in Hamburg, where the thermodynamics result he derived is still called the Habibie Factor.
• Susi Susanti took badminton gold at Barcelona in 1992, the first Olympic title Indonesia had ever won — at the same Games, her future husband won the men's singles.
• Raden Saleh trained in Europe in the 1830s and brought Romantic painting home, turning its storm-and-shipwreck drama on the landscapes and rulers of Java.

• Borobudur carries 2,672 relief panels and once held 504 Buddha statues; the ninth-century monument lay under ash and jungle until word of it spread again in 1814.
• Komodo National Park was created in 1980 for a single animal, the Komodo dragon, the largest lizard alive and one that exists in the wild almost nowhere else.
• The reefs of Raja Ampat hold more than 600 species of hard coral, about three-quarters of every hard coral species known to science, on 1,500 islands and shoals.
• Lake Toba fills the caldera of a supervolcano and runs about 100 kilometres across northern Sumatra, with a whole inhabited island sitting inside it.

• UNESCO listed Indonesian batik in October 2009, and the country has kept Batik Day on the second of that month ever since.
• More than 700 living languages are spoken across the archipelago, about a tenth of all the languages on Earth and second only to Papua New Guinea.
• A gamelan is built around metallophones struck with mallets and a pair of hand drums called kendang that hold the tempo; Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese ensembles each have their own.
• Indonesian was agreed on as the national language in 1928, a standardised Malay that belonged to no dominant group; by the 2020 census over 97 percent of the country spoke it.

What is the capital of Indonesia?

The capital of Indonesia is Jakarta.

What is the population of Indonesia?

Indonesia has about 285.7M people — the 4th most populous country in the world.

How big is Indonesia?

Indonesia covers 1,904,569 km², making it the 14th largest country by area.

Which region is Indonesia in?

Indonesia is in South-Eastern Asia, Asia.