Commerce - Solo City Indonesia

Solo is Surakarta's commercial as well as its administrative center, and produce from the surrounding village fills the markets every day. Solo produces cigarettes, herbal medicines and various other light-industry products, but batik is far and away the most important manufacturing activity in the city. Batik is a traditional textile working process involving the use of wax to cover the cloth in patterns and thus control the areas affected by dying. In the traditional process, batik tulis ("written batik") hot wax is applied with incredible patience and skill with an instrument that looks like a pipe but is used like a pen. The women and girls sit circled around an often smoky little burner that heats the wax.

Batik tulis is a kind of physical manifestation of the Javanese character, and is actually seen as such in Solo: a batik has an inside and an outside; the outside is for the world and naturally should be as beautiful as possible; the inside is for you and this should be equally fine. With this in mind, batik is always waxed and finished on both sides. Of course this means twice the work, but it is perceived as being somehow immoral to do it any other way. This activity used to be performed by a family's women as an expression of their devotion and skill. The process requires at least three months and is largely governed by tradition: the patterns, the colors and even the size of the cloth are all long established. In addition, the details of the technique are virtually inviolable. For example, the requisite rich brown color for fine batik comes from a dye produced by boiling down a special tree bark until it reaches the right intensity. This dye is then applied to the waxed cloth at least 26 times, with a day between dippings for the cloth to dry, before the cloth reaches the desired chestnut shade.

A more recent innovation is the use of a cap, a metal mold used to apply the wax. Finely detailed batik is still done by hand, but batik cap has progressed to the point where an untrained eye would be unlikely to notice any difference from batik tulis.
Many of the larger houses participate in the batik industry, with an area set aside for a covey of from 10 to 30 women and girls, who usually come from the village. Really skilled workers are generally old, and the present level of batik production is not likely to continue in economically developing Java as alternative, less demanding activities absorb more of this cheap labor.