Sion Church, Jakarta

Sion Church is the oldest building in Jakarta still doing the job it was built for, and one of the oldest continuously functioning Protestant churches in Asia. Its congregation goes back to a temporary chapel of 1676 that held services in Portuguese for the Mardijkers, the freed slaves of Portuguese-Asian descent who lived outside the wall of Batavia; the church was known for two centuries as the Portugese Buitenkerk, the Outer Portuguese Church. As the congregation grew, the Dutch East India Company replaced the chapel with a permanent building between 1693 and 1695, to a design by Ewout Verhagen, head of the Company craft quarter, who died before it was consecrated. The form has scarcely changed since: one wide hall, rendered brick, a timber roof, tall round-arched windows. Renamed Gereja Sion in 1957, it still holds Company-era furniture, memorial boards and gravestones, among them that of Governor-General Henric Zwaardecroon.