HISTORICAL PLACES (Descriptive Text)

 FORT ROTTERDAM

A descriptive text usually focuses on describing a single location, object, event, person, or place. It endeavors to engage all five of the reader's senses to evoke the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of the text's subject. purpose is to describe and reveal a particular person, place, or thing.

Structure : 

1. Identification

 This section in the first paragraph - the goal  is to identify something to be described or depicted. Explanation easy, Identification serves to introduce the reader about the object or something that we have described before we tell about its properties. The goal is not to get one of those readers.

 2. Description

This section in the second paragraph and so on - contains the properties inherent in something that you already introduced to the reader in the first paragraph.

Fort Rotterdam is a 17th century fort in Makassar on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. It is a Dutch fort built on top of an existing fort of the Gowa Kingdom. The first fort on the site was constructed by the a local sultan in around 1634, to counter Dutch encroachments. The site was ceded to the Dutch under the Treaty Of Bongaya, and they completely rebuilt it between 1673 and 1679. 

It had six bastions and was surrounded by a seven meter high rampart and a two meter deep moat.

Fort Rotterdam kept it function till 1937 after which it got other functions. In the 1970s the fort was restored and renamed to Fort (Benteng) Ujung Pandang. It is one of the best preserved Dutch buildings in Indonesia.

Fort Rotterdam consists of five towers, four on each corner and one at the main entrance. Inside are thirteen buildings, eleven made by the Dutch and two were built by the Japanese. The oldest building was built in 1686 and is called the Speelman's house, after the admiral who concurred the fort although he never actually lived in the house. The house was used by Dutch governors till mid-19th century. Currently a museum is housed here. Other structures were used as sleeping quarters for officers, prison or warehouses. One of the leaders of the Java war (1825-1830), the Indonesian National Hero Prince Diponegoro, was imprisoned here for 26 years till his death in 1855.

The fort was the Dutch regional military and governmental headquarters until the 1930s. It was extensively restored in the 1970s and is now a cultural and educational centre, a venue for music and dance events, and a tourist destination.