Bali

This entry covers the colonial and modern island, from the nine kingdoms that followed Gelgel to the province of today. The earlier Balinese kingdoms have their own entry.

At a glance

What was Bali after Gelgel?

A set of nine kingdoms. When Gelgel fell in 1686, its authority passed to Klungkung, whose ruler kept the title Dewa Agung and a primacy of honour, but the island fragmented into rival courts — Badung, Tabanan, Mengwi, Karangasem, Buleleng, Gianyar, Bangli and Jembrana — each with its own dynasty, its own temple network and its own claim to legitimacy.

The nine kingdoms fought, married and traded with one another for two centuries. Their politics were intensely dynastic, their culture shared, and their economy based on irrigated rice, the subak water societies and a long-distance trade in slaves, opium and textiles.

How did the Dutch conquer the island?

In stages, with treaties and then with force. The Dutch first intervened in Bali in 1846–49, in the northern kingdom of Buleleng, imposing treaties that opened the island to Dutch trade. For fifty years afterwards they governed through contracts and residents, while the southern kingdoms kept their independence.

The end came in 1906, when a shipwreck and a Chinese trader's goods gave the Dutch a pretext to attack Badung. On 20 September 1906 the royal family and their followers marched out of the palace at Denpasar and killed themselves in front of the Dutch troops — the puputan, a ritual suicide in the face of defeat. Tabanan surrendered, and in 1908 Klungkung resisted and was destroyed in a second puputan, in April.

The two puputan became the central image of Balinese history under colonial rule, and the island's conquerors used them to justify their rule as the end of "feudal anarchy".

What happened under Dutch rule?

Direct rule, and the invention of Bali. The Dutch abolished the kingdoms, exiled the rulers, and governed through a bureaucracy of Balinese officials under Dutch controllers; they also preserved and codified Balinese religion and custom — adat — as a system, which had the effect of fixing what had been fluid.

In the 1920s and 1930s the island became a tourist destination and an object of Western fascination: the "last paradise", the painters of Ubud, the anthropologists, the artists and the dancers. Tourism changed the economy and the image of the island, and it began before independence, not after.

What is Bali now?

A province of Indonesia, and the country's tourist capital. Bali has a population of about four million, a Hindu majority in a Muslim country, and an economy built on tourism, crafts and agriculture; the bombings of 2002 and 2005, the volcanic eruption of 2017 and the collapse of tourism in 2020–21 have each tested it.

Its culture remains distinctive: the temple festivals, the gamelan, the dance, the subak irrigation system (a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape), and a system of customary law that operates alongside the Indonesian state.

Common myths about Bali

Timeline of Bali

What the map shows next

At 1797 on the map the nine kingdoms are independent, and Gelgel is a century gone.

At 1907 on the map the Dutch have conquered the south, and the Dutch East Indies governs the island.