A modest monument marks the spot where, on 17 July 1957, President Sukarno drove the first pole into the ground to found Palangka Raya as a planned city. He intended it as the future capital of Indonesia — geographically central, far from colonial Jakarta.
It's a quick stop, but it explains why Palangka Raya looks the way it does: wide boulevards laid out by central planners, a rectangular grid, and a sense of space that no other Kalimantan city quite matches.
A story
On 17 July 1957 President Sukarno drove a ceremonial first pole into the swampy bank of the Kahayan, founding what he envisaged as a future capital of Indonesia — central, on Borneo, away from the colonial associations of Jakarta. The capital never moved; the city he founded did get built; and the modest concrete obelisk on the spot is one of the few places that records the original ambition. It also reads as an early echo of the much grander move to Nusantara that finally began in the 2020s.