Intro

Before this video/article starts, please allow me to announce a thing. I’m very glad the last video/article has gotten more views and I saw that many friends have many valuable information about muskets. So I created a Discord server as you can see my youtube post and there’s the link in the description of this video/article as well. We know that the search engines can help us find many photos and video/articles but it’s still limited if we want to dig deeper. Plus, although the AIGC is smarter and smart, if we ask them very details and rare things, they often give us a not good enough answer or even fake information. AIGC has a very good logical thinking ability but it’s still limited in the training corpus. So even though now it’s 2025 I think we still need a sharing group and then I created this Discord server. Here we can share photos, videos and links more conveniently and it may be an open source information station in a musket or vintage cannon field or other interesting field. So welcome here. Ok now the notice is at the end. Let's start our topic today.

Join: https://discord.gg/nu9Z7Sy4

Balinese Matchlock

In the last video/article we mentioned the Balinese gun dance and I guess the ancient Balinese should have their own muskets. Very surprisingly when I almost finished editing my last video/article, I found this photo and here it said this is a Balinese matchlock gun from Klungkung.

This matchlock has a very typical snap-matchlock shape that looks like the Japanese, Malay and Vietnamese matchlock, although this photo is not very clear. This gun was donated to a museum in 1909 so it also told us this is indeed a very old gun. However, there isn't any other more detailed information, like the building time, history, close-up photos, etc. So in order to deeper learn about this matchlock, I think we need to search some background history of Bali.

Portuguese, Dutch in Bali

In this video/article, let’s focus on the Bali history between the 16th century to the 18th century and we don’t expand it to the whole Indonesian islands and Malaysian islands temporarily, because the whole islands history is an epic, we have to unfold it slowly and at the same time I will also learn more stories about this region.

This Balinese matchlock showed out a very typical snap-matchlock feature, it’s always called indo-portuguese style matchlock, Goa style matchlock etc. Meanwhile this style should be the most popular matchlock style in Southeast Asia and Japan and even these matchlock muskets have a very similar stock and a very similar igniting mechanism. Since there are so many similar points, naturally we can have an idea, they should be from the same family.

In Bali history, the first group of European people who arrived in Bali should be Portuguese. In 1512 Bali was mapped by Francisco Rodrigues. Plus this man also documented the first portuguese map of China. Back to Bali, Bali became independent at the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century and always kept the independence until 1908 when the Dutch intervened and eliminated Bali.

Although the Portuguese had colonies in Malacca and wanted to build a fort and a trading post in 1585, the plan failed since the ship foundered on the reef of the Bukit peninsula. In the 17th century and the 18th century the Dutch also wanted to establish trading posts but it was always not smooth. The Dutch and the kings of Bali were always in a hostile relationship. So the VOC left the Bali trade to private traders, mainly Chinese, Arab, Bugis and occasionally Dutch, who mainly dealt with opium and slave trade.

(maybe) Based on the history from the 16th century to the 18th century, Bali was in not so many foreign trading situations. So firearms should not be a very popular thing in Bali. But the ancient Balinese should have known these gunpowder weapons were powerful.

Plus, because of the European colonies and trading posts near Bali, I think maybe the ancient Balinese could obtain the matchlocks was not hard and this might be able to explain why this Balinese matchlock is very like the Malay, Goa matchlock. But I think this video/article is still the first look for Balinese matchlock. If I find more information, I will continue talking about this topic in the future.

So this is today’s video/article and thank you for watching. If the next video/article follows my schedule, we will move our sight to a kind of vintage cartridge. Hope you can like this video/article. Have a good day. See you next time. Bye!