Fourteen provinces, one strand
Cultivation runs from Sumatra to Papua, following the water that is still clean. The order is west to east, the way a strand is threaded along the equator.
Cultivation sites recorded by ASBUMI, 2023 · ordered west to east
Why the map looks like this
Pearl cultivation demands clean, warm water with a gentle current, so the sites tend to sit away from centres of economic activity. Most are now in central and eastern Indonesia. In the west, cultivation survives at only a few points, with far fewer operations.
provinces
members recorded
The regions
One of the areas where pearl oyster cultivation was first developed in the early twentieth century.
The waters off Banyuwangi and Madura.
Buleleng, Karangasem, and Negara.
The most productive South Sea Pearl waters in the country. Lombok is known as the Pearl Island.
Labuan Bajo, Maumere, Larantuka, Alor, and Kupang.
The Banggai Islands.
The waters off Manado and Bitung.
Buton Island, where the first pearl cultivation trial outside Japan was run around 1928.
Halmahera and Morotai.
The Aru, Seram, and Banda islands. Dobo in Aru has been a pearl trading centre since the nineteenth century.
The Raja Ampat islands, the most biodiverse seas on earth.
Provinces without a note appear on ASBUMI's distribution map, but the sources carry no detail about the sites themselves. We would rather leave that blank than invent it.