Qualla: Delft

Delft: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. On July 10, 1584, a man with a pistol climbed the stairs of a former convent on the Oude Delft canal and shot William the Silent in the chest. The prince - leader of the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, founder of the royal house that still reigns in the Netherlands - died in the stairwell of the Prinsenhof, where the bullet holes can still be touched today. He had wanted to be buried in Breda, but Breda was in Spanish hands. So Delft took him in. Every Dutch monarch since has been laid to rest in the Nieuwe Kerk on the Markt, two blocks from where the assassin pulled the trigger.

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Delft: The Town That Dug Itself

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Natubes, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name says what the place is. Delft comes from the Dutch verb delven - to dig - and the Oude Delft, the city's oldest canal, was the first wound the residents opened in the peat. The town gathered itself along that ditch, then dug more: grachten branching out as lifelines, as ...

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Image: Natubes | CC BY-SA 3.0

Delft: Fire, Powder, Plague

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Normherr at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Delft has burned and exploded. In 1536, lightning struck the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk and the resulting fire destroyed 2,300 houses - most of the city. Just over a century later, on a Monday morning in October 1654, a municipal gunpowder magazine holding 36,000 kilograms of black...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Normherr at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Delft: The Painter Who Stayed Home

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ferditje, CC BY-SA 3.0. Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632 and died there in 1675, and in between he produced perhaps 35 paintings - quiet rooms, milkmaids, women reading letters, the famous girl with the pearl earring. He almost never left town. His View of Delft, painted from across the harbor...

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Image: Ferditje | CC BY-SA 3.0

Delft: Blue and White

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit piotr iłowiecki from POLAND, CC BY-SA 2.0. When Chinese porcelain arrived in Holland in the holds of Dutch East India Company ships - the VOC was headquartered partly in Delft - local potters tried to copy it. They could not match the white kaolin clay or the high firing temperatures, but they could glaze their earthenwar...

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Image: piotr iłowiecki from POLAND | CC BY-SA 2.0

Delft: Students and Engineers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Natubes, CC BY-SA 3.0. The other thing Delft makes is engineers. In 1842 a Royal Academy was founded here to train civil engineers for the colonial empire; it has grown into Delft University of Technology, with roughly 26,500 students filling the bars and bike racks and bringing the median age of the c...

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Image: Natubes | CC BY-SA 3.0