Home Rula Repubalika, Volume I, Number 16, 15 March 1902 — TAPPA. [ARTICLE]

TAPPA.

Tapa is not a specially of Hawaii, or of Samoa, or Polynesia, as is commonly suppose. The lappa of Polynesians, made from the inner hark of the waukc or bronsoretia papynfern, has been made from time immemorial by the Javanese and other people of the Malay Archipelago The Javanese name of the wanke or lappa tree is "gluga," and the common name * for this paper cloth is "doluwang." It was very extensively manufactured in Java in ancient times, and some tappas preserved in stone tombs and in bronze vessels in great quantities throughout Java bear dates going as far back as the .fourteenth century The process of reducing the bark to pulp and beating it with corrugated mallets is the same in Java as in Hawaii, ami the

texture and colors n f ( )ccaiiican pa p\ lU' tiro tlio same in islands six thousand miles apart , but the Javanese show more skill m design than the 1 lawaiians, and the former were 111 one respect preeminent above the latter in the knowledge of a written character, so that the accurate history of Java has been preserved for centuries on long rolls of gluga or tappa