Kretek Museum

Kudus, about 50 km east of Semarang, is the heartland of kretek, the Indonesian cigarette blended with cloves. A local story, retold by the Central Java provincial government, credits its invention to Haji Djamhari, who rubbed clove oil on his chest to ease his breathing and then experimented with ground cloves mixed into tobacco and rolled in corn husk (klobot). The crackling sound it made as it burned, 'kemretek', gave kretek its name. The industry that followed made Kudus Indonesia's largest kretek-producing area, and the museum was created to show how closely the town and the cigarette are linked.

The idea came from Soepardjo Rustam, who saw on a visit to Kudus how the kretek business drove the local economy. The Kudus Cigarette Manufacturers' Association (Persatuan Pengusaha Rokok Kudus, PPRK) paid for its construction from 1985, and the museum was inaugurated on 3 October 1986. Asosiasi Museum Indonesia describes it as the only cigarette museum in the country. It is owned by Kudus Regency and run by the regency's culture and tourism office, and its grounds of about 2.5 hectares also hold a traditional Kudus house (rumah adat Kudus) and a building in the style of a Kudus prayer house (surau).

Inside, the displays follow kretek from field to packet: dioramas of growing and processing tobacco, cloves and corn-husk wrappers, samples of tobacco and cloves, traditional rolling and tobacco-shredding tools, and the shift from hand-rolling to modern machinery. Statues made by Kudus artists, many of them teachers, show workers at each stage. Photographs introduce the founders of the big kretek firms, and the Nitisemito Corner keeps belongings of the 'King of Kretek', founder of the Bal Tiga company and regarded as Indonesia's first large-scale cigarette entrepreneur. The national museum registry names old kretek promotional materials as the collection's prized pieces.

A visit is short and inexpensive: the museum opens every day from 8 AM to 3 PM, and tickets cost Rp4,000 from Monday to Saturday and Rp5,000 on Sundays and public holidays. Its displays record the Kudus kretek industry from its beginnings to the 1990s. The grounds also have a mini cinema and a swimming pool and water-play area, which is charged separately. The museum was also one of the filming locations of the drama series Gadis Kretek (Cigarette Girl).