I first heard the gong ageng at dawn, in a pendopo pavilion west of the Kraton. The air was still thick with clove smoke from the night offerings, and the bronze was cold enough to feel damp against my palm. Empu Sumarto, seventy-three and built like the trunk of a banyan, struck it once with a padded mallet and let the note hang in the air for seventeen seconds before it faded into the carved teak beams. ‘That one,’ he said, without looking at me, ‘began as a flat disc of copper and tin in 1876.’

What the foundry forgets

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a bronze foundry between pours. It hums with cooling metal inside its clay mould, closer to a whisper than a ring. The Javanese word is sunyi. In a workshop outside Klaten, the smiths still judge the pour by the colour of the glow.