Dyeing: Communicating Colour

While Driessen was Dutch, his entries for the illustration were written in English. Communication stretched across Empires to exchange practices and ideas taken from the colonies for both academia and trade.

Cocheneal or today, Cochineal, is the precious insect used for many derivations of red dye. Driessen begins to refer to the dyes first in Latin and after in their Malay names: coccus cacti and coccus lacca. Yellow is identified by Driessen as curcuma longa, and its Malay name as kunir. He calls blue dye indigofera tinctoria in Latin and refers to its Malay name as nila. Knowing and tracking these name variations would have been helpful in Driessens attempts to recreate the colours outside of Indonesia.

Understanding the roots of a language was essential in order to understand the cross-cultural exchanges between people and provenances. Indonesian names for red such as nopal, amballo or simply ballo, are terms that Driessen claims are “imported from China”. Tie dye was practised in China as early as the 5th century and its influence was felt in 19th century Java in the form of dyes and dialect.