Daily life in Surabaya during the early 20th century

A grounded look at routines in an East Javanese port city shaped by kampungs, markets, dockyards, factories, railways, tramways, domestic service, and unequal colonial institutions.

Between about 1900 and the early 1940s, Surabaya grew from roughly 150,000 residents in 1905 to 342,000 in 1930. It was the leading commercial and industrial city of the Netherlands Indies: sugar and other produce from eastern Java passed through its warehouses, while engineering shops, the naval base, rail yards, printing works, food processors, and the new Ngagel industrial estate offered urban employment. The deep-water harbor at Tanjung Perak and electric tram system shifted activity north toward the port and south toward new suburbs. Yet much of daily life remained organized through the kampung, the market, the household workshop, and ties to nearby villages and Madura. Modern infrastructure was real but unevenly distributed, and a resident's routines depended heavily on income, occupation, gender, and the racial categories imposed by colonial law.[1]

Housing and Living Spaces

Most Indonesian residents lived in kampungs tucked behind commercial roads, beside workshops, or along waterways and transport corridors. A typical house used a timber or bamboo frame, woven-bamboo wall panels called gedek, and a tile or thatch roof. Rooms were small and adaptable: mats came out for sleeping, food was prepared at the rear, and sewing, repair work, selling, or the keeping of boarders could share the same space. Lanes, wells, prayer houses, food stalls, washing places, and neighbors' verandas extended domestic life beyond the walls. The 1930 census found that only 16 percent of Indonesian residents lived in brick houses, compared with 63 percent of Chinese residents and 91 percent of Europeans.[1]

Density brought practical difficulties. Several households might share a yard, well, latrine, or drain, while tenants and recent migrants fitted into back rooms or cheaply built extensions. Surabaya stood on low alluvial ground, so sluggish drainage, flooding, stagnant water, refuse, and polluted wells threatened health. The piped supply introduced in 1903 expanded, and the Ngagel filtration plant opened in 1922, but household connections remained unequal. Many kampung residents still carried water and used public taps, washhouses, pits, waterways, or shared toilets. Municipal kampung-improvement projects laid paths and drains and addressed waste in places such as Krembangan, but by 1939 less than half of the city's kampung area had been fully or largely improved.[1][2]

European officials and business families increasingly moved to garden suburbs such as Darmo, where detached masonry houses stood on wider plots with verandas, ventilation, bathrooms, septic tanks, electric lighting, and quarters for servants. Wealthy Chinese, Arab, Eurasian, and Indonesian families could also occupy substantial houses or shophouses. In older commercial districts, especially around Kembang Jepun, many Chinese businesses combined a street-facing shop with storage and family rooms behind or above it. These housing worlds were connected every day: cooks, nursemaids, gardeners, laundresses, drivers, tailors, and repairers traveled from modest neighborhoods to better-serviced homes, while wages and discarded goods flowed back into kampung economies. The city's built form made hierarchy visible without dividing daily life into completely separate spheres.[3]

Food and Daily Meals

Rice was the preferred staple, supplemented when money was short by maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, or thin porridge. Common accompaniments included tempeh, tofu, salted or fresh fish, eggs, leafy vegetables, bean sprouts, peanuts, sambal, and krupuk. East Javanese tastes favored strongly seasoned soups, grilled or fried foods, and savory pastes, while Madurese migrants, Chinese residents, Arab families, sailors, and inter-island traders added their own ingredients and dishes to the city's foodways. Meat was usually less frequent in low-income households and appeared in small portions, street foods, or meals marking religious and family occasions. Drinking water was safest after boiling, an important household task where wells and rivers were vulnerable to contamination.[4]

Markets connected the city to rice fields, fishing grounds, livestock, gardens, and processors across East Java and Madura. Women were prominent among small traders and commonly managed shopping, bargaining, cooking, and household money. Buyers purchased modest quantities according to the day's cash because most homes had no refrigeration. Baskets, shoulder poles, handcarts, bicycles, and small boats carried produce to stalls and mobile vendors. Surabaya's municipal Market Authority took control of eleven markets in 1915 and later built permanent halls, neighborhood markets, and ice-distribution points; by the end of 1938 it administered forty-one markets. Regulation brought tiled floors, screens, licenses, and inspections, but street sellers remained essential because they brought cooked rice, soto, satay, fruit, cakes, coffee, and other inexpensive food close to homes and workplaces.[1]

Port trade and colonial commerce widened the range available to residents with money. Chinese shops, European grocers, bakeries, hotels, restaurants, ice works, and mineral-water factories sold bread, biscuits, coffee, tea, dairy products, tinned food, beer, and imported condiments alongside local staples. European households often employed Indonesian cooks and ate rice-based meals as well as European dishes, while office workers and students might combine bread or coffee bought near Tunjungan with food prepared at home. The Jaarmarkt, Surabaya's annual fair established in 1905, gathered regional crafts, machinery displays, entertainment, and food vendors in one crowded setting. Such consumption suggested a shared modern city, but diet and dining space still revealed sharp differences in wages and status.[5]

Work and Labor

Surabaya's working day began early at markets, rail yards, wharves, workshops, and servants' quarters. Porters unloaded rail wagons and moved cargo through warehouses; lighter crews transferred goods to ships before Tanjung Perak's deep-water facilities were complete; dockworkers, sailors, mechanics, and clerks kept the harbor functioning. The naval base employed about 3,400 men in 1914, while railway workshops and private metalworking firms created additional skilled and unskilled jobs. Harbor construction in the 1910s and early 1920s drew day laborers with comparatively attractive wages. Work could be physically demanding and insecure, with hiring shaped by contractors, foremen, kin, neighborhood reputation, and fluctuations in shipping and trade.[1]

Manufacturing ranged from major engineering plants to family workshops. The municipality established the Ngagel industrial estate in 1916 beside the river and railway; by the end of 1919 it had allocated land to engineering, chemical, oil, rubber, battery, mineral-water, and timber businesses. Elsewhere, residents made or repaired furniture, carts, shoes, clothing, metal goods, cigarettes, soap, printed material, tiles, and food products. Workshops depended on machinists and trained artisans but also on carriers, cleaners, packers, watchmen, and casual labor. The 1930 census recorded manufacturing and household service as the largest identified occupational groups, each about one-fifth of the workforce, followed by trade at 15 percent and transport and communications at 9 percent.[1]

Household economies rarely depended on one wage. Women sold food, produce, textiles, or household goods, took in laundry and sewing, kept boarders, worked in small manufacturing, or entered domestic service as cooks, nursemaids, and house servants. Men combined factory, port, transport, construction, trading, clerical, and government work with periods of casual employment. Children ran errands, cared for siblings, assisted in stalls, or entered apprenticeships, though expanding schools offered some families another path. Wage workers increasingly followed factory whistles, railway timetables, tram schedules, and office hours; traders and household producers followed customers, daylight, prayer, and market cycles. Bicycles helped workers reach the port, naval base, and Ngagel as employment spread beyond easy walking distance.[1]

Social Structure

Colonial law divided the population into Europeans, Foreign Orientals, and Indigenous people, categories that shaped courts, schools, voting, residence, and access to senior employment. In 1930 Indonesians made up about 79 percent of Surabaya's residents, Chinese residents about 11 percent, Europeans about 8 percent, and other Asian communities the remainder. These labels concealed considerable variety. The Indonesian majority included Javanese, Madurese, and migrants from other islands; Arab families and other Muslim trading communities lived around Ampel; Chinese society ranged from wealthy merchants and manufacturers to shop assistants and artisans; and European society included both newcomers and long-established Eurasian families.[1]

Occupation, education, and wealth created further divisions within each legal group. Dutch trading houses, government departments, and the military concentrated authority in European hands, while Chinese businesses were especially prominent in trade and manufacturing. Indonesian residents worked across factories, domestic service, government, transport, markets, workshops, and casual labor. A small but expanding Indonesian middle stratum of teachers, clerks, doctors, journalists, technicians, and shopkeepers used education and salaried work to claim public standing. Access remained limited: the 1930 census recorded literacy among Indonesian adults at 14 percent, compared with 44 percent among Chinese adults and 97 percent among Europeans. School enrollment expanded during the 1920s, but language, fees, and a strongly tiered system preserved inequality.[1]

For most people, everyday support came through households, neighborhoods, religious institutions, workplaces, and mutual-aid networks. Relatives helped newcomers find rooms, apprenticeships, customers, or introductions to a foreman. Kampung neighbors shared water points, watched children, organized ceremonies, contributed to funerals, and negotiated with landlords or officials. Mosques, churches, temples, Chinese associations, schools, unions, charitable clinics, and hometown groups connected residents beyond the lane. Public leisure included cinemas, coffee stalls, football, parks, religious celebrations, markets, and the Jaarmarkt, although price, dress, and restricted clubs still marked rank. These settings allowed different communities to meet without dissolving the unequal structure of the colonial city.[5]

Tools and Technology

Everyday technology was layered. Kampung households relied on clay and metal cooking pots, knives, stone mortars, rice steamers, baskets, water jars, charcoal or firewood stoves, kerosene lamps, mats, needles, and hand tools. Traders used beam scales, measures, ledgers, crates, wrapping paper, handcarts, and shoulder poles. Carpenters, metalworkers, shoemakers, tailors, printers, and mechanics added saws, planes, hammers, anvils, awls, treadle sewing machines, presses, lathes, and powered workshop machinery. Larger plants used steam or electric power, but hand labor remained essential for moving materials, packing goods, and carrying products through narrow lanes.

Networked systems changed distance and time. Heavy rail brought sugar and other commodities from the interior to riverside warehouses and the harbor. Electric trams opened in 1923–24 and linked Wonokromo and Darmo with Jembatan Merah, Tanjung Perak, Gubeng, Sawahan, Simpang, and Tunjungan. Bicycles were more accessible than cars and grew from about 9,000 in 1917 to 36,000 in 1937. Clocks and posted timetables increasingly coordinated school, office, factory, and transport routines across the lengthening city. Telephones, telegraphs, typewriters, printing presses, electric lights, pumps, filtered water, cold storage, and motor vehicles became familiar in offices, shops, hospitals, factories, and affluent homes. Access remained uneven: one household might turn a tap and switch on a lamp while another nearby carried water and lit a kerosene wick.[1]

Clothing and Materials

Clothing communicated work, gender, ethnicity, religion, and rank. Many Javanese women wore a kebaya blouse with a batik or plain wrapped kain, choosing sturdier cotton and simpler patterns for market work, cooking, or washing and finer cloth for visits and ceremonies. Men commonly combined a shirt or jacket with trousers or a kain, adding a headcloth, peci, or other headwear according to setting. Madurese, Arab, Chinese, Eurasian, and other residents had distinctive habits, but urban dress also mixed readily. Porters and artisans needed washable garments and sandals that permitted movement, while clerks, teachers, railway staff, police, hotel workers, and domestic servants might wear uniforms or European-style shirts, jackets, and shoes.

Cloth represented money and labor, so garments were washed, patched, re-dyed, altered, handed down, and remade. Tailors and seamstresses worked from homes and shops with scissors, needles, pattern paper, irons, and treadle machines. Batik, local cotton, imported printed cloth, silk, lace, linen, shantung, felt hats, and leather footwear circulated through market stalls, Chinese and Indian shops, Japanese retailers, and European department stores. European women's fashion shifted markedly toward lighter cotton and linen summer dresses during the 1920s, and Surabaya gained a Gerzon fashion branch in 1933. Such stores served affluent customers, while most residents depended on market cloth and local makers. The resulting streetscape showed both colonial distinctions and the practical borrowing typical of a large port.[6]

Daily life in early 20th-century Surabaya was shaped by the close fit between a regional trading port and a city of household labor. Rails, trams, docks, factories, piped water, electric power, and formal markets changed how people worked and moved, but they did not replace the kampung, street seller, artisan, or family network. The city's modern systems rested on thousands of ordinary routines: carrying water, preparing rice, mending clothing, watching children, loading cargo, keeping accounts, repairing machines, and traveling between crowded neighborhoods and dispersed places of work.

References

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Setiyawan, I. (2017). Policy of kampong improvement and public housing: Surabaya colonial period (1900–1940). Lembaran Sejarah, 13(2), 150–162. https://doi.org/10.22146/lembaran-sejarah.33540
Yamamoto, N., & Funo, S. (2002). The development and the transformation process of the former walled town of Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. Journal of Architecture and Planning, 67(558), 235–241. https://doi.org/10.3130/aija.67.235_3
Formichi, C. (2022). The modernity of tradition: Women and “healthy progress” in late colonial Java and Sumatra. Modern Asian Studies, 56(6), 1983–2017. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X21000627
Van der Meer, A. H. C. (2017). Performing colonial modernity: Fairs, consumerism, and the emergence of the Indonesian middle classes. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 173(4), 503–538. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-17304015
Locher-Scholten, E. (2000). Women and the Colonial State: Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942. Amsterdam University Press. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/gdc/gdcebookspublic/20/20/71/95/28/2020719528/2020719528.pdf