Why it looks like this

The city fills a cool mountain basin surrounded by volcanoes, which is why the Dutch loved it: plantation owners and officials escaped the heat of the coast here, and in the 1920s the colonial government began preparing Bandung to replace Batavia (Jakarta) as capital.

That plan died with the colony, but it left its mark: leafy planned avenues, art-deco buildings and the grand Gedung Sate government complex in the north, against the older market town grid near the railway in the centre.