It was not silt which led to Gresik's eclipse; plenty of exotic sailing craft still bob on the polluted waters of its harbor. The culprit was the mighty colonial port of Surabaya, just 25 km along the coast to the southeast. Ceded to the Dutch by Mataram in 1743, Surabaya was still smaller than Gresik in 1800. However, it had been selected as the chief Dutch entrepot and administrative center for East Java; and the massive growth of the colonial economy in the 19th century made Surabaya the busiest port and the biggest city in the Dutch Indies, outstripping even Batavia and ranking almost alongside Singapore in international importance. Today, Surabaya has again been overtaken by Jakarta in size, but at 5.1 million people it is the second largest in the country and growing fast. Surabaya's sweet name belies a reality of heat, dirt and noise, but it is an interesting and gripping place. This is a living cultural center, both in the formal sense of plays and performances and in the sense of the fusion and regeneration of folk cultures.

Surabaya is cosmopolitan, but without the jarring pseudo-Western glitter of Jakarta. Give or take an air-conditioned shopping complex or two, Surabaya's atmosphere is more purely Indonesian, with a special cast Indonesian flavor. For as Surabaya grew as an export point for Javanese products, it also became the hub of the maritime trading network for the eastern archipelago as a whole. Much of its population is from nearby Madura, but there are also large numbers of Banjar from Kalimantan, Bugis and Minahasans from Sulawesi and Ambonese from the Moluccas.
Surabaya's colonial boom was in a sense, a renaissance, for the port has a long history. In 1620, it was a fortified trading city over 30 kilometers in circumference, a state in its own right with lordship over Gresik and Sidayu. However, five years later Mataram took it by siege, thus ending Surabaya's luster for more than two centuries. According to tradition, the conquered king's son took on the life of an ascetic at the holy grave of Surabaya's founder - yet another wali, Sunan Ngampel, who was a pupil of Malik Ibrahim of Gresik.

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