Bandar Lampung
Pepper port destroyed by Krakatoa in 1883 and hit again by its successor Anak Krakatau in 2018—Sumatra's gateway to Java, where volcanic soil feeds commodity exports and volcanic risk never leaves.
Bandar Lampung exists because pepper exists—and because the Sunda Strait needed a southern Sumatran port to funnel Indonesia's spices toward Java and the wider world. By the 16th century, the Banten Sultanate controlled Lampung as a pepper breadbasket. When the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511, trade routes shifted through the strait, and Lampung's pepper flowed to European merchants via Banten. The Dutch arrived for the same reason: pepper profits. After taking control in the 18th century, they introduced coffee plantations alongside existing pepper cultivation.
Two settlements—Tanjung Karang (an inland market town) and Teluk Betung (a coastal port)—grew separately until the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa sent tsunamis of up to 22 meters crashing into Teluk Betung, obliterating the port and killing over 36,000 people across the strait. The city rebuilt on the same site—the resource-allocation logic of geography demanded a harbor at the strait's narrowest crossing regardless of volcanic risk. In 1983, the two towns merged as Bandar Lampung. Then in 2018, Anak Krakatau—Krakatoa's literal successor, growing from the 1883 caldera since 1927—collapsed and sent another tsunami into the same coastline, killing over 430 people across the strait region. Like a mangrove forest that recolonizes devastated shorelines after each storm, this city keeps regrowing from the same root: its position at Sumatra's gateway to Java.
The modern city of over one million people remains a commodity processing node. Lampung province anchors Indonesia's robusta coffee belt—together with neighboring South Sumatra and Bengkulu, these three provinces produce roughly three-quarters of the country's robusta output. Lampung also ranks as Indonesia's second-largest pepper producer. The Merak-Bakauheni ferry—departing every 12 minutes, 24 hours a day—is Sumatra's primary physical link to Java, a chokepoint where trucks queue for kilometers during weather disruptions. Palm oil, rubber, coffee, and pepper flow south through this bottleneck.
The planned Sunda Strait Bridge, first conceived under Sukarno in the 1960s and debated ever since, would replace the ferry chokepoint with a fixed link—the same phase transition that a causeway created for Johor Bahru. Until then, Bandar Lampung's niche remains the bottleneck itself: controlling the flow between Indonesia's two most important islands.