Jakarta's Glodok in Ghost Month: Joss Smoke, Old Coffee, and Bakso After Dark

The first thing you smell in Glodok during Ghost Month is not food. It's joss paper burning in oil drums outside shophouses, the smoke curling into air already thick with diesel and somebody's laundry. August in Jakarta's old Chinatown means the Hungry Ghost Festival, and the neighbourhood treats it less like a cultural event and more like weather — something you accommodate.

I came back this year in mid-August, partly because I'd been craving a specific bowl of bakso and partly because Glodok in Ghost Month has a mood no other time of year replicates. The offerings on the sidewalks — oranges, rice, whole roast chickens set on paper plates at the base of telephone poles — rearrange the geography. You walk differently. You step around things. The neighbourhood asks you to slow down, and for once, you do.

1. Getting there without paying tourist tax

TransJakarta Corridor 1 to Glodok station drops you right at the edge of the neighbourhood. Rp 3,500 flat fare. That's it. That's the move.

Grab drivers will quote you 40,000–60,000 from Thamrin during afternoon traffic for a ride that takes forty-five minutes and could have taken twelve by bus. The TransJakarta bus lane doesn't care about Jakarta gridlock — it sails past it. The Glodok stop spills you onto Jalan Pancoran, and you're already in the thick of it.

If you're coming from Kota Tua, just walk. It's 800 metres south along Jalan Kemenangan. No shade, motorbikes on the sidewalk — but ten minutes and free.

2. Kopi Es Tak Kie, or: the correct coffee

Kopi Es Tak Kie at Jalan Pintu Besar Selatan 92 has been open since 1927 and looks like it hasn't replaced a single ceiling fan since then. Good. The kopi tubruk is brewed thick in an enamel pot and poured over ice in a tall glass. Rp 18,000.

People will tell you the place is best at 7 a.m. I disagree. Come at 3 p.m. on a weekday, when the lunchtime crowd has cleared and the owner's cat is asleep on the bench by the door. The afternoon light through the shophouse transom does something to the room. You can actually hear the ceiling fans.

Skip the toast. It's fine, but you're about to eat your way through three blocks of street food — don't fill up on white bread and kaya.

3. The joss paper economy

During Ghost Month, the paper goods shops along Jalan Pancoran shift inventory. Normally they sell red envelopes and incense for everyday temple use. In August, the shelves fill with elaborate joss paper offerings — paper iPhones, paper Louis Vuitton bags, paper Mercedes sedans, all meant to be burned for ancestors in the afterlife. The craftsmanship is real. The irony is optional.

One shop near the corner of Pancoran and Gang Gloria had a paper laptop open to a paper spreadsheet. I didn't ask the price. I just stood there for a minute.

The burning happens mostly after dark, in metal drums or directly on the pavement outside shopfronts. If you have asthma, this is worth knowing — some blocks get legitimately smoky between 7 and 10 p.m. It's not decorative smoke. It accumulates.

4. Petak Sembilan market before it gets hot

Petak Sembilan is the old market street — Jalan Kemenangan III, running parallel to the Vihara Dharma Bhakti temple. Before 9 a.m. it functions as a wet market: pork sellers, vegetable vendors, live frogs in plastic tubs. After 9 a.m. it becomes a tourist-friendly food street with prices that reflect the shift.

Come early. Buy a bag of choi pan (vegetable dumplings) from the woman with the steamer cart near the temple entrance — Rp 15,000 for five. Eat them standing up. They're better than the ones at the sit-down restaurants further along the street, which charge 25,000 for four and serve them on a plate like that changes something.

5. Vihara Dharma Bhakti during the festival

The temple burned down in 2015 and was rebuilt. The new structure is cleaner and less atmospheric than what it replaced, which is the kind of thing you feel guilty noticing but notice anyway. During Ghost Month, though, it fills with smoke and light and intent in a way that overrides the architecture. Incense coils the size of bicycle wheels hang from the ceiling. Devotees bring full meals as offerings.

You can enter. Remove your shoes. Don't use flash photography. If someone is praying in front of you, wait — don't edge around them for a better angle.

Last time I was there in August 2023, a woman was burning a paper house roughly the size of a microwave oven in the courtyard furnace. It had paper furniture inside. A paper television. She watched it go without expression, which felt more sacred than any ceremony I've seen with an audience.

6. What to do with the afternoon dead zone

Glodok between 1 and 4 p.m. is brutal. The heat flattens everything. Most of the interesting food stalls close after the morning rush, and the evening ones haven't started yet.

Your options: go back to Tak Kie for iced coffee (see above), duck into the air-conditioned chaos of Harco Glodok electronics mall on Jalan Pintu Besar Selatan, or leave and come back. Harco is worth twenty minutes if you need a phone cable or want to see what a six-storey electronics market smells like (solder and ambition). It's a mall. But the AC works.

Don't bother with the "heritage walks" sold on booking platforms for 300,000–500,000 Rp. You're walking the heritage right now. A guide will give you dates you'll forget and stop you from wandering into the alleys where the actual texture is.

7. Bakso Akiaw 99, after dark

This is what I came back for. Bakso Akiaw 99 on Jalan Mangga Besar I Nomor 68A opens at 5 p.m. and runs until late. The bakso here is pork and prawn, which already sets it apart from the beef bakso you find everywhere else in Jakarta. The broth is clear and has depth — somebody's grandmother's recipe, maintained.

Order the bakso campur (mixed, Rp 35,000) with extra pangsit goreng. The fried wontons arrive with a sweet chili sauce that you won't think about until two weeks later when you're home and you can't stop thinking about it.

The queue at 7 p.m. on weekends is real — twenty to thirty minutes. Go at 5:30 on a Tuesday.

Glodok after dark during Ghost Month has a different pulse. The joss fires are going. The smoke softens the streetlights. Motorbikes thread between offerings on the pavement. The bakso place sits in the middle of all this, fluorescent-lit and indifferent to atmosphere, which is exactly why it works.

Stay in Jakarta

Top-rated hotels near Jakarta

Best locations · Verified reviews · Free cancellation

View deals

Expedia →

8. The alleys off Gang Gloria

Most visitors stick to Petak Sembilan and the main temple. The alleys branching off Gang Gloria, one block west, are narrower and residential. During Ghost Month, families set up small altars outside their doors — red candles, fruit, sometimes a portable speaker playing Buddhist sutras at low volume into the street.

Nobody is performing for you here.

If you walk quietly and nod when someone makes eye contact, you're fine. If you walk in with a gimbal and a ring light, you deserve whatever look you get. One alley dead-ends at a tiny shrine with a fig tree growing through the roof. I won't give the exact location because part of the point is wandering until you find it.

9. How late can you stay?

Glodok doesn't have much nightlife in the bar sense. By 10 p.m. the food stalls along Petak Sembilan are shut. Mangga Besar, the parallel street to the east, runs later — some of the restaurants and bars stay open past midnight, though the vibe shifts toward karaoke and beer gardens.

The joss fires burn until they burn out. Some of the larger ones, fed by shopkeepers burning inventory-quantities of paper offerings, are still smouldering at midnight. Walking Glodok at that hour is quiet in a way Jakarta almost never is. Smoke at knee height.

TransJakarta runs until about 10 p.m. on most corridors. After that, you're looking at Grab or Gojek — a ride to Thamrin or Menteng will run Rp 25,000–40,000 depending on surge. Late-night Glodok to Kemang is closer to 50,000.

Stay in Jakarta

Top-rated hotels near Jakarta

Best locations · Verified reviews · Free cancellation

View deals

Expedia →