Kort verhaal van d’oproer der Chineesen, op het eiland Java, dog voornamentlyk wegens de stad Batavia, voorgevallen in de maand October des jaers 1740.[Amsterdam?, 1741]. 4to. 19th-century brown wrappers.

8 pp.Very rare first and only edition of a short but very detailed eyewitness account of one of the most violent and terrible events in Dutch colonial history: the pogrom in which Dutch soldiers and native collaborators killed ethnic Chinese residents of the city of Batavia (now Jakarta). The anonymous author appears to have been a Dutch soldier, for he notes that “we” had only 3000 able men, “we” lost only 100 men, Chinese were killed by “ours” and that even at the time of writing, after order was restored in the city, “our folk” were still killing many Chinese outside the city. He must have written in the last week of November 1740, for he refers to the 22nd of “this month” November. He clearly accepts the massacre as justified and shows no sympathy for the Chinese. The violence in the city lasted from 9 to 22 October 1740, with, as the present account shows, Dutch troops continuing to kill Chinese outside the city walls until at least the last week of November. Historians have estimated that at least 10,000 ethnic Chinese were massacred, almost a quarter of the Batavian population; just 600 to 3,000 are believed to have survived, so about 80 or 90 percent of the Chinese were massacred.The massacre figures heavily in Dutch literature and is also cited as a possible etymology for the names of several areas in present day Jakarta.The pamphlet’s printer and place of publication remain a puzzle. It was almost certainly produced by a Dutch printer in the Netherlands or in Batavia. The VOC’s printing office in Batavia seems to have been barely functioning at this date, believed to have been printed in Batavia in or soon after 1741.In good condition.l Knuttel 17177; STCN (2 copies); J.Th. Vermeulen, De Chineezen te Batavia en de troebelen van 1740, Leiden University thesis (1938); WorldCat (same 2 copies); cf. A.R.T. Kemasang, “The 1740 massacre of Chinese in Java: curtain raiser for the Dutch plantation economy’, in: Bulletin of concerned Asian scholars, 14 (1982), pp. 61-71; P. Hagen, Koloniale oorlogen in Indonesië (2018), pp. 206-212; E. Vanvugt, Zwartboek van Nederland oversee (2002), pp. 142-145.