Ewout Verhagen came from Rotterdam to Batavia, the Dutch East India Company capital on Java, and rose to head the ambachtskwartier, the walled craft quarter where the Company kept its carpenters, masons and shipwrights. In that role he drew the permanent Portuguese Outer Church, approved by the Company on 11 July 1692 and built over the following three years for the Mardijker congregation living outside the city wall. The design is a plain Dutch Protestant preaching box translated into the tropics: a single wide hall under a timber roof, brick walls rendered white, round-arched windows tall enough to move air. Verhagen died in 1694, a year before the church was consecrated. It is the oldest building in Jakarta still doing the job it was built for.
