Qualla: Ujung Water Palace: The Garden at the Edge

Ujung Water Palace: The Garden at the Edge: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manuae, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name says it plainly. Ujung means "edge" or "end," and Taman Ujung, the Garden at the Edge, sits exactly where the name promises: on the southeastern coast of Bali, where the island's volcanic slopes run out of land and meet the Indian Ocean. The last king of Karangasem built his pleasure palace here in 1921, at a moment when Balinese royalty still held enough power to dream on a grand scale but had already absorbed enough colonial influence to dream in concrete and white-washed facades. The result was a twelve-hectare estate of pools, pavilions, and gardens that belonged fully to neither Balinese nor Dutch tradition. In the center pool, connected to shore by a single bridge, the Gili Bale, the island pavilion, rose with walled rooms and a colonial exterior unlike any traditional Balinese bale. It was a building that declared its owner equally comfortable with European architecture and Hindu cosmology.

Read more: Ujung Water Palace on Qualla

Image: Manuae | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ujung Water Palace: The Garden at the Edge: Three Architects, Three Worlds

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Surya Edy Gautama, CC BY-SA 4.0. The palace was designed by an unlikely collaboration. The Dutch architect van Den Hentz brought European engineering and the use of concrete, then still considered a novel technology in Bali. A Chinese architect named Loto Ang contributed his own design traditions. And Balinese u...

Read more: Ujung Water Palace on Qualla

Image: Surya Edy Gautama | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ujung Water Palace: The Garden at the Edge: A Stele in Two Scripts

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manuae, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1937, the palace received a formal inauguration marked by the installation of a marble stele. The inscription was carved in two alphabets, Latin and Balinese script, and written in two languages, Malay and Balinese. The choice was political as much as ceremonial. Malay was the...

Read more: Ujung Water Palace on Qualla

Image: Manuae | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ujung Water Palace: The Garden at the Edge: What a Volcano and an Earthquake Leave Behind

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mrllmrll at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Mount Agung, visible from the palace on clear days, destroyed nearly everything in 1963. The eruption that killed more than a thousand people across eastern Bali buried Taman Ujung under volcanic debris. What the volcano spared, an earthquake finished in 1975. For over two decade...

Read more: Ujung Water Palace on Qualla

Image: Mrllmrll at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Ujung Water Palace: The Garden at the Edge: The Temple Beyond the Pools

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liné1, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between the palace and the sea stands the Pura Lingga Yoni, a temple whose origin story is as improbable as the palace's architecture. During the construction of a breakwall in 2012, workers discovered a two-meter phallic-shaped stone ten meters offshore. The stone was brought to...

Read more: Ujung Water Palace on Qualla

Image: Liné1 | CC BY-SA 3.0