Palembang

Before Singapore, before Malacca, before any European set foot in Southeast Asia, Palembang ruled the maritime trade routes. The Srivijaya Empire (7th-13th century) operated from this city on the Musi River, controlling the Strait of Malacca and taxing every ship that passed between China and India. At its peak, Srivijaya was the wealthiest polity in Southeast Asia—a thalassocracy that projected power through naval force and Buddhist scholarship rather than territorial conquest.

The Chinese monk Yijing spent six months in Palembang in 671 CE, studying Sanskrit and describing a cosmopolitan center where over a thousand monks studied Buddhist texts. Srivijaya's collapse in the 13th century—likely from a combination of Chola dynasty raids, volcanic eruptions, and shifting trade routes—left Palembang as a river port without an empire.

Dutch colonizers discovered oil near Palembang in the 1880s, and the city became the center of Royal Dutch Shell's Indonesian operations. Japan captured Palembang in 1942 specifically for its oil refineries—the first major airborne assault in Pacific theater history targeted these facilities. Oil shaped Palembang's modern economy until reserves declined, and the city pivoted to coal, rubber, and palm oil processing.

The Musi River still defines the city. The Ampera Bridge (1965), gifted by Japan as war reparations, spans the Musi and connects Palembang's two halves—the commercial north bank and the traditional Malay stilt villages (rumah limas) of the south. The river is simultaneously a highway, a sewer, and a food source for the floating communities that live on it.

Palembang hosted the 2018 Asian Games alongside Jakarta, using the event to build infrastructure. The LRT system—Indonesia's first outside Jakarta—now connects the airport to the city center.

Palembang's arc—from maritime empire to colonial extraction point to mid-tier Indonesian city—maps the full lifecycle of a resource-dependent economy.