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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Any Jewelry, post: 313170, member: 2844&quot;]Beautiful, Debora. The term royalty in the description needs some explanation.</p><p>During the time the parasol was made, most royalty and officials in Indonesia followed the Javanese system of &#039;colour-coding&#039;.</p><p>A red parasol would have been for a government minister, who would be an aristocrat. Possibly of royal descent, but not royalty as such.</p><p><br /></p><p>The colour-coding for umbrellas/parasols for &#039;proper&#039; royalty are as follows:</p><p>Gold is only for the ruler himself. The two gents above (my distant relatives<img src="styles/default/xenforo/smilies/wink.png" class="mceSmilie" alt=";)" unselectable="on" />) had the right to a gold-coloured parasol.</p><p>The Javanese/Madurese, being the charming people they are<img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie84" alt=":smuggrin:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />, granted the Dutch governor general and the resident governors the same right to the use of the colour gold.</p><p>The queen and her children had the right to a yellow parasol, the &#039;lesser&#039; wives and their children a white one.</p><p>Lesser royalty, often regents with a native rank below the former supreme king (in the case of Madura, the ruler of Bangkalan), had a green parasol with gold embroidery.</p><p><br /></p><p>Complicated? This is the easy part of the highly formalized Indonesian hierarchical culture.</p><p>When I meet another person of Indonesian descent here in the Netherlands, it is considered good manners to establish each other&#039;s hierarchical origin in polite conversation. We would never do that with a Dutch-Dutch person, so it shouldn&#039;t still be important, but it is. It does not affect friendship or anything, it is just symbolic.</p><p>It is all part of &#039;adat&#039;, Indonesian traditional law, which overrules any other kind of law or custom. The conflict between adat and Islamic law is one of the reasons Islamic fundamentalists target Indonesia, but that is a whole other story.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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