Buying batik in Solo

At home in Scotland, I own one batik shirt. Well, I say batik; actually it is a kind of garish tourist model, short-sleeved polyester cotton with a big Garuda pattern printed on it, probably more suitable for an episode of Miami Vice than playing gamelan. Mags found it in a charity shop on Byre's Road, and lo and behold I found exactly the same shirt at a tourist stall in Ubud. Obvious what happened here, some West-ender on holiday in Ubud; 'Wow, that looks great!', then back to Scotland 'Hmm... maybe not'.

I really like the batik look, though. Around the South Bank Gamelan in London a lot of the players sport these as a kind of nonchalant 'yeah, I just picked this up in the market when I was studying in Solo' kind of look. So, one of my missions here had been to go to an actual batik market and actually haggle for an actual Javanese batik shirt.

Mission accomplished. Over the last week or so I've gradually worked my way down the price scale. At the top of the overpriced tourist scale is a shop like Batik Keris across the road from Cakra. Here you might easily be asked IDR 400,000 (£25) for a short sleeved shirt. A better prospect is a number of small boutiques in the Kauman area near Cakra. The one which was recommended by our Australian friend Melanie was Gunawan Setiawan. This is quite a well-known shop, and if you were to take up one of the five offers a day you get from taxi and becak drivers to take you to a batik shop, this is probably the one they would take you to. Very charming people, fixed prices.

Here I started to learn about the different qualities of batik. At the top end is purely hand-made batik, batik tulis, which means 'drawn', in other words the design is actually drawn by hand by an artisan in wax. Prices here can go way up! I went in with Mags to look at some kain sarong, basically just an oblong of material which men and women wrap around themselves to make a variety of skirt-like garments. Mags had picked out about eight or ten, but we got a bit of a shock when we went to the counter, somehow our order was north of £500! It turned out that one of these items alone, a beautiful detailed design in green and gold, was IDR 3,000,000 - £184 - entirely hand made. That one had to go back, unfortunately.

The only item I've bought in that shop so far was a shirt I picked out. This was still handmade, I think, probably a combination of 'tulis' and 'cap'. I think 'cap' again can mean a couple of different things; at the quality end of the marked it still means a hand-made garment, but one where some of the pattern has been applied using a sort of stamp rather than drawn. By luck the short-sleeved cotton shirt I picked out was 'sudah diskon', already discounted, down to IDR 100,000 (£6), normally shirts of this quality are between IDR 200,000 and 300,000 (£12 to £18). These are prices one would happily pay in the UK, I think, but are quite high by local standards.

Around the corner from Gunawan Setiawan are a number of other batik boutiques. Most of these seem to offer items even further down the quality scale. Here you get a kind of batik often sold to you as 'cap' or 'combination', but which I think is in fact entirely machine printed. But, these shirts look absolutely great; you will see a lot of Indonesian guys every day wearing batik shirts like this, where they count as formal wear, rather like a kilt; unless they are very upper class Javanese, they will usually be wearing this machine printed material.

The prices for a short-sleeved cotton shirt in this style are very reasonable indeed; at somewhere like Batik Soga or Mutiara Timun I was paying about 70,000 or less for one of these, about £4, which is an absolute steal really.

Can he go lower? Yes he can! Having got a sense of the quality and price, this morning I braved Pasar Klewer, which is I think one of the biggest clothing markets in Indonesia. It is about the size of the Savoy Centre in Glasgow, on two floors, but about four times as crowded. The batik stalls are about the size of two or three telephone kiosks, every one packed with a bewildering variety of patterns. However, as far as I could see, all of this was machine printed, none of the higher quality hand-made batik at all. Maybe I couldn't find it, but actually I suspect that this material is all cornered by the boutique shops.

So, at the first stall I picked out two cotton shirts. I lowered my voice when making the deal, as is done here, and initially I was told I think about 60,000 each. Although affordable, my previous experience made me think that by local standards these were not particularly high quality at all, and it was a rather inflated price. I offered half that, 30,000, she went to 40,000 and I settled on 35,000. At a second stall I paid the same price for a single shirt, again not the highest quality, but my favourite shirt I've bought so far, I'm wearing it now. I suspect if one wanted to be tough about it there might be quite a bit of room below that, but by the time you bargain someone down to £2.14 for a really unique garment which you're going to take home and treasure for years it's fine to call it evens, I think.