CRA gallery

Vintage travel brochures & photographs

Travel Brochures

Publications from the Official Tourist Bureau of the Netherlands East Indies, Royal Netherlands Indies Airways (KNILM), and various shipping lines, including Rotterdam Lloyd, Royal Packet Navigation Company (KPM), and Nederland Royal Mail Line (SMN). Photographs Original photographs of people and landscapes in the Dutch East Indies by Woodbury & Page, Kurkdjian, Nieuwenhuis, and others, as well as Woodburytype lantern slides and glass stereoviews.

Miscellaneous Items

Pre-war travel brochures, picture books from Southeast Asian countries and the Netherlands, and other materials related to early tourism and travel.

Welcome The CRA gallery is an online collection dedicated to the history of tourism in the former Netherlands East Indies. The two main categories of the collection are Travel Brochures and Photographs. The “Official Tourist Bureau of the Netherlands East Indies” was founded in 1908 with the aim of promoting tourism in the former Dutch colony, which is now known as Indonesia. In cooperation with shipping lines, hotels, and other interested parties, the bureau began to publish promotional materials such as brochures and travel guides. Some of these were simple, while others were surprisingly sophisticated, especially when the skills of professional photographers, illustrators, and writers were employed. The brochures, posters, and guides published by the bureau (and other organizations involved in early tourism in the Netherlands East Indies) portrayed a tropical idyll that captured the imagination of many. Photography in the Dutch East Indies, pioneered by Woodbury & Page, van Kinsbergen, Cephas, and others, played an important role in this. The photographic images made their way to Europe and the US, and gradually, the beauty of the country and its people became known to the wider public. The shortening of the sea route from Europe to the Dutch East Indies with the opening of the Suez Canal, along with increased comfort on board of ever faster ships, gradually paved the way for a new type of travellers that can perhaps be described as tourists. The connection between photography and early tourism in the Dutch East Indies is the focus of this online collection. The office of the Official Tourist Bureau in Weltevreden (1912).