Ubud: Heart of Balinese Culture

What you need to understand about Bali before you go further is the religion. Bali is the one island in the Indonesian archipelago that remained predominantly Hindu when Islam spread through the rest of the region from the thirteenth century onward. Today roughly ninety percent of Bali's population practises a form of Hinduism that exists nowhere else on earth — a syncretic tradition that blends Indian Hindu theology with pre-Hindu animism and Javanese influence, shaped over more than a thousand years into something entirely Balinese. In a country where roughly eighty-seven percent of the population is Muslim, Bali stands apart. The difference is visible the moment you land: the stone carvings at the airport, the incense at every doorway, the offerings placed at the base of trees and on the bonnets of parked motorcycles.

The palace compound behind this gate was the seat of the Ubud royal family, which rose to regional prominence in the nineteenth century. The raja of Ubud in that era was a patron of the arts — court dancers, gamelan musicians, and painters worked under his sponsorship — and this tradition of royal patronage set the template for the artist colony that would transform Ubud in the twentieth century.

In the evening, this courtyard becomes a performance space. Kecak dance — the fire dance, performed by a circle of men whose chanting voices create an entire percussion orchestra without instruments — is staged here several nights a week. The torchlight, the volcanic stone carvings flickering in the shadows, the chorus of voices rising and falling: it is one of the great performance experiences in Southeast Asia. Even if you cannot stay for a performance, linger at the gate. Watch the preparations. The daily offerings — small palm-leaf trays woven fresh each morning and filled with flowers, rice, salt, and incense, called canang sari — are placed at the threshold of the palace, on the demon-guardian statues flanking the gate, at the base of the frangipani tree in the corner. These offerings are not symbolic. They are practical communications with the spirit world, placed to maintain the balance between sekala, the visible world, and niskala, the invisible one.

The market sits directly across from the palace because this arrangement is deliberate and ancient. In Balinese urban planning — which follows a system called the Catus Patha, the four crossroads — the ideal configuration of a village places the palace and the main temple on the kaja side (toward the sacred mountain, Gunung Agung, in the north), and the market on the kelod side (toward the sea, the direction of impurity and the world of the dead). The market is where transactions happen, where money changes hands, where the human world of desire and commerce plays out. It is therefore appropriately placed on the less sacred side of the crossroads. The whole town is a cosmological diagram.

The smell here in the morning is something to slow down for: wood smoke from the food stalls, frangipani blossoms, the green vegetal scent of freshly cut banana leaves, the sweetness of palm sugar being melted for jajan pasar — the small ceremonial cakes sold in the market for temple offerings. Balinese cooking uses turmeric, galangal, ginger, lemongrass, shrimp paste, and an enormous variety of fresh and dried chillies in combinations that vary not just from island to island but from village to village. Every Balinese family maintains that their mother's version of babi guling — the spit-roasted suckling pig that is the ceremonial dish of the island — is the correct one.

The market is also the place to understand the economics of offering culture. Balinese Hinduism requires daily offerings at every household shrine, every workplace, every vehicle, every doorway. A family might make fifty or a hundred canang sari a day. The materials — palm leaves, flowers, rice, salt, incense — are purchased here. The labour of weaving the offerings falls to the women of the household, who learn from their mothers and grandmothers, and who spend hours each morning in this quiet focused work before the rest of the day begins.

The lotus pond in front of the inner temple is filled with plants at every stage of their cycle — tight green buds, opening pink blooms, fully open flowers, spent heads going to seed above the water. The lotus is the central image of Hindu and Buddhist iconography across Asia: a flower that rises from mud through murky water into clean air and opens toward the light, it represents spiritual development, the possibility of purity in an impure world, the soul's journey from ignorance toward understanding.

In the evenings, the temple is the setting for traditional dance performances — Legong, the refined court dance performed by young girls in gold headdresses and layered silk costumes, and Barong, the ritual performance that enacts the eternal battle between the protective lion-dragon Barong and the witch Rangda, representing the Balinese understanding that good and evil are in permanent equilibrium rather than resolved toward a final victory. This is theology in motion: Bali has no concept of a final triumph of good over evil. The battle is ongoing, the balance must be maintained through ritual, and the dance that represents it is therefore never really over.

If you visit in the early morning before the tours arrive, you may see a priest performing the water blessing ceremony at the inner shrine, pouring holy water from a silver vessel, the sound of the brass bell carrying across the empty pond while a single stick of incense sends smoke straight up through still air. This is Bali before the cameras. This is what the town has always been.

The museum houses several hundred of Blanco's works — theatrical, erotic, deeply coloured paintings and drawings in which his Balinese subjects are rendered with both technical skill and a baroque excess that is entirely his own sensibility. He corresponded with Salvador Dali, who was a friend, and the influence is visible in some of the surrealist elements woven through otherwise representational compositions.

Blanco died in nineteen ninety-nine. His compound was turned into a museum shortly thereafter. Michael Jackson visited in nineteen ninety-six and the photograph of the two of them — Blanco in his customary theatrical costume, Jackson in sunglasses — is displayed prominently. The compound also houses peacocks, which wander the gardens freely, and a small theatre where traditional performances are occasionally staged.

Stand on the terrace and look down. The Wos River runs deep in the valley below, invisible in the ravine. The sound of water is constant. Coconut palms and banana trees fill the slopes. On the far ridge, a cremation tower might be visible being carried in procession — cremations in Bali are public, elaborate, joyful events, the body elevated to the heavens on a tall wooden tower decorated with paper flowers and symbolic figures, because death in Balinese Hinduism is a transition to reincarnation, not a final ending. Blanco chose his hillside well. The view has not diminished.

In nineteen thirty-six, the German-Russian painter Walter Spies and the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet settled in Ubud and began working with local artists. What happened next is one of the genuinely transformative cultural encounters of the twentieth century. Spies and Bonnet introduced perspective, shading, and Western compositional ideas not to replace the Balinese tradition but to offer tools that individual artists could absorb and transform. The Balinese artists — particularly the painters of Batuan village — took these elements and did something entirely unexpected with them: they kept the density and visual complexity of the classical tradition but began painting scenes of everyday life, not just religious narratives. Rice harvest processions. Market scenes. Cock-fighting circles. The trance ceremonies where a performer walks across hot coals.

Spies and Bonnet co-founded the Pitamaha artists' cooperative in nineteen thirty-six, giving Balinese artists a structure to exhibit and sell their work. Ubud became, essentially overnight, a destination for people who cared about contemporary art. Margaret Mead was here. Charlie Chaplin visited. Noel Coward came. The identity of Ubud as an international cultural destination — the identity that fills the restaurants and yoga studios today — was established in a few concentrated years in the late nineteen thirties.

Walter Spies's story ends badly. He was arrested by the Dutch colonial authorities in nineteen thirty-nine on morality charges and was aboard a ship being evacuated from the Dutch East Indies when the vessel was sunk by a Japanese submarine in nineteen forty-two. He died in the water. The paintings he made in Ubud, and the painters he influenced, are his legacy. Bonnet survived the war and returned to Bali. His collection forms part of what you see in this museum.

What makes the Subak system remarkable beyond its engineering is its theological framework. The distribution of water is understood as a sacred responsibility, governed by the goddess Dewi Sri, the rice goddess, whose favour must be maintained through regular ceremony. Planting schedules are timed by the Balinese calendar, which is itself a cosmological system — a two-hundred-and-ten-day cycle that determines the auspicious moments for every significant act from cutting timber to holding a wedding. The rice terraces you are looking at are not simply agricultural landscape. They are a continuously maintained ritual landscape.

Look at the terraces carefully. The stepped fields follow the contours of volcanic hillsides at gradients that would defeat less sophisticated hydrology. The water level in each terrace is maintained with extraordinary precision — too shallow and the roots dry out, too deep and weeds proliferate. The water moves silently from terrace to terrace through small notched openings in the earthen bunds. When all the paddies in a valley are flooded at the same planting stage, the reflections of sky and cloud create a landscape of such geometric beauty that it has been painted and photographed constantly since the nineteen thirties.

The specific smell of a flooded rice paddy — cool water, mud, the vegetable sweetness of young rice seedlings — is one of the most distinctive sensory experiences of the Balinese landscape, and it changes through the growing season from the green freshness of planting to the richer, drier smell of ripening grain. The harvest is followed by ceremony: offerings to Dewi Sri, the first sheaves cut with a small blade concealed in the palm so the rice spirit is not frightened, a communal meal shared between the farming families of the subak.

The iconography of a Pura Dalem is deliberately unsettling by design. The stone carvings at the entrance often depict rangda — the witch figure whose terrifying mask, with its protruding tongue, bulging eyes, and clawlike hands, is one of the most potent images in Balinese visual culture. Rangda represents the destructive forces that are always present in the world and must be addressed through ritual rather than denied. The Barong dance you may have seen performed at tourist venues is the ritual expression of this theology: Barong the protector battles Rangda the destroyer, and neither wins, because neither can win. Balance, not victory, is the goal.

Cremation in Bali is among the most elaborate funerary traditions in the world, and the Death Temple is where you understand its logic. The Balinese believe that the soul is temporarily imprisoned in the body and that cremation releases it to begin its journey toward reincarnation. The ceremony is therefore not a funeral in the Western sense — it is a liberation, and it should be joyful. The cremation tower, called a bade, can stand several metres tall and is decorated with symbolic figures, mirrors, and paper carvings. The entire village participates in carrying it to the cremation ground. The higher the caste of the deceased, the taller and more elaborate the tower — a high-caste cremation can cost more than the average family earns in a year, and community members contribute labour and materials as a form of mutual obligation.

The temple is quiet during the day, the shrines receiving their morning offerings from the temple priest. Step carefully inside if the gate is open. Remove your shoes. Wear a sarong — a length of fabric tied around the waist — which is required for entry to any Balinese temple and which vendors sell or loan at the gates of the major ones. The silence here is different from the silence of empty spaces. It is the silence of a place that is consistently attended to.

The forest itself — roughly ten hectares of dense tropical growth in the valley of the Wos River — is worth experiencing even once the initial theatre of the macaques settles. Ancient ficus trees have grown through and around the stone temple structures, their roots descending from aerial branches to crack paving stones, their canopies thirty metres overhead filtering the tropical light into green columns. Moss covers everything. The sound is bird calls, the distant sound of water, and the constant social chatter of the monkeys moving through the canopy.

The main temple complex includes Pura Dalem Agung Padangtegal, another Death Temple associated with the goddess Durga. The stone carvings here are among the most expressive in Ubud — figures in various stages of dissolution, the imagery of death and transformation made visible in volcanic stone that has been worn smooth by generations of ceremony and tropical rain. Some of the carvings predate the current temple buildings by centuries.

Bali took two devastating blows in the early twenty-first century. In October two thousand and two, bombs exploded at two nightclubs in Kuta, on the tourist coast south of Ubud, killing two hundred and two people from twenty-one countries. In two thousand and five, further bombings killed twenty people in Bali. The island's tourism economy, already under stress after the two thousand and two attacks, collapsed. Ubud and the rural inland areas suffered along with the coast. The recovery was slow, built through a combination of Balinese cultural resilience, the loyalty of visitors who returned specifically to support the island, and eventually the Eat Pray Love effect — Elizabeth Gilbert's two thousand and six memoir described her year of self-reinvention, a third of it spent in Ubud with a traditional healer, and the book's global success sent a particular kind of spiritually oriented traveller to Bali in numbers that transformed the town's guesthouse economy and have not diminished since.

The gamelan music you may have been hearing at intervals throughout the morning comes from a practice space somewhere nearby. Gamelan is the bronze percussion orchestra of Bali and Java — an ensemble of gongs, metallophones, drums, and flutes that produces music of extraordinary complexity from instruments tuned to scales that have no equivalents in Western music. Every Balinese village maintains at least one gamelan set, which is owned communally by the banjar — the neighbourhood association that is the basic unit of Balinese social organisation. The banjar organises cremations, temple festivals, irrigation maintenance, and the rehearsal schedule for the village gamelan. Membership in the banjar is mandatory for adult men and carries obligations as well as rights.

The Dutch colonial presence in Bali began in the late nineteenth century and ended formally in nineteen forty-five, but its weight was lightest in the interior. The Dutch fought a series of devastating puputan battles on the southern coast — the word puputan means a final, honourable act of mass suicide, in which the royal courts of Badung and Klungkung marched into Dutch gunfire rather than surrender — and the horror of these events shaped Dutch colonial policy to allow Balinese cultural and religious life to continue relatively undisturbed. Ubud, far from the coast and governed by a raja who cooperated with the Dutch administration, was insulated from the worst of colonial disruption. The art colony of the nineteen thirties flourished partly because the Dutch allowed it to.

The confluence of the two rivers at the bottom of the ridge is marked by Pura Gunung Lebah, an ancient temple whose foundations date to the eighth century, traditionally attributed to the Javanese Hindu priest Rsi Markandeya, who is credited in Balinese religious history with the first organised settlement of the island. The temple has been rebuilt and restored across thirteen centuries of floods, earthquakes, and volcanic ash, but it occupies the same sacred ground it always has. Water, in Balinese Hindu cosmology, flows from the sacred mountains where the gods reside to the sea where the demons live, and a confluence is therefore a point of meeting and potential imbalance, requiring a temple to maintain the correct relationship between the forces that flow through it.

Look back toward Ubud from the ridge. What you see is a town that has managed the nearly impossible trick of remaining genuinely itself while becoming one of the most visited destinations in Southeast Asia. The temples are still used for the purposes for which they were built. The offerings are still made every morning. The gamelan still rehearses in the banjar hall on Tuesday nights. The rice terraces below you are still farmed by the subak cooperative whose water management system has not fundamentally changed in a thousand years. Tourism has changed the economics — the art galleries and retreat centres and upmarket restaurants represent an overlay on the original culture — but the original culture is not merely preserved as display. It continues.

Bali is often described as a magical island, which is true in the way that lazily accurate descriptions are true: it gestures at something real without quite saying what it is. What it is, more precisely, is a small island with extraordinary natural beauty and a living religious culture of exceptional sophistication, one in which art, ceremony, agriculture, architecture, and daily life are understood as parts of a single coherent practice rather than separate domains. The Hindu cosmology that survived here while the rest of Indonesia converted has shaped everything: the orientation of buildings toward the sacred mountain, the schedule of the agricultural year, the iconography carved into every gateway, the dancer's posture and gesture codified over centuries in the palace courtyards below you. Stand here a moment longer. The two rivers meet in the valley. The ridge stretches ahead. Behind you, the town goes on with its ancient business.