Indonesia Trivia
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This Indonesia trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers and covers the whole country, not just Bali. You will meet the geography (an archipelago of roughly 17,000 islands strung along the equator and the Ring of Fire, with Krakatoa, Tambora and Merapi among its volcanoes), the wildlife that lives nowhere else (Komodo dragons, orangutans, the corpse flower, and the invisible Wallace Line that splits Asian animals from Australian ones), and the history that runs from Srivijaya and Majapahit through three centuries of Dutch rule to Sukarno, Suharto and the new capital rising in Borneo. There are also questions on the food (rendang, nasi goreng, tempeh, civet coffee), the culture UNESCO has protected (batik, wayang, gamelan, Borobudur), badminton glory, the flag Indonesia shares with Monaco, and why the language of unity was deliberately not Javanese. Difficulty ranges from questions any well-travelled player can answer to expert-level details about 14th-century poets and 19th-century naturalists. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia or a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it, so you can settle the argument afterwards.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly how many islands does Indonesia consist of?
About 17,000
About 17,000 is the usual figure, but official counts have ranged from roughly 13,500 to 18,300, partly because some surveys counted sandbars and reefs that vanish at high tide.
Q 02As of 2025, India, China and which country have more people than Indonesia?
United States
The United States is third. More than half of Indonesia's roughly 280 million people live on a single island, and that crowding is one reason the government is building a new capital on another.
Q 03Which spice comes from a tree native to Indonesia's Banda Islands?
Nutmeg
Nutmeg once grew almost nowhere else, which made the Bandas so valuable that in the 1667 peace treaty the Dutch kept the tiny Banda island of Run and let England keep Manhattan.
Q 04In 2022 Indonesia went from 34 provinces to 38 by carving four new ones out of which region?
Papua
Papua, Indonesia's half of New Guinea, tripled its number of provinces that year; the last one created, Southwest Papua, actually sits at the island's northwestern tip.
Q 05Indonesia's highest peak, Puncak Jaya, is better known to climbers by which name honouring a Dutch explorer?
Carstensz Pyramid
Carstensz Pyramid is named for Jan Carstenszoon, who in 1623 reported ice on the peak, barely four degrees from the equator; those glaciers have shrunk so fast that scientists expect them to vanish in the 2020s.
Q 06Lake Toba, Indonesia's largest lake and the world's largest volcanic lake, lies on which island?
Sumatra
Sumatra's Lake Toba fills a crater left about 74,000 years ago by the largest eruption of the last two million years; Samosir, the big island in the lake, is old lake bed since pushed up hundreds of metres.
Q 07Which island does Indonesia share with Malaysia and Brunei?
Borneo
Borneo takes its name from Brunei, the sultanate that today holds only a sliver of the north coast, while Indonesia's part, Kalimantan, covers almost three-quarters of the island.
Q 08Which volcano, often called Indonesia's most active, killed over 300 people in 2010?
Merapi
Merapi's 2010 victims included Mbah Maridjan, the 83-year-old spiritual guardian of the volcano, who stayed in his village on its slopes after the evacuation order.
Q 09The volcano Krakatoa, which erupted catastrophically in 1883, sits in which body of water?
Sunda Strait
The Sunda Strait made the eruption deadly: most of the roughly 36,000 victims were killed not by the blast but by tsunamis, the worst over 30 m high, that swept the strait's coastal towns.
Q 10The explosions of Krakatoa in August 1883 were heard about 3,100 km away in which Australian city?
Perth
Perth and other Western Australian towns reported booms like the firing of heavy guns, and on Rodrigues island, some 4,800 km from the volcano, the police chief likened them to distant gunfire.
Q 11What does Anak Krakatau, the name of the island that rose from Krakatoa's drowned crater in the late 1920s, mean?
Child of Krakatoa
Child of Krakatoa is apt: the island grew up inside the crater its parent left in 1883, and in 2018 a collapse that cost it over two-thirds of its height sent a deadly tsunami onto nearby coasts.
Q 12Mount Tambora, whose 1815 eruption was the largest in recorded history, is on which island?
Sumbawa
Sumbawa lost at least 10,000 people to the blast and tens of thousands more to the famine that followed, and Tambora itself, once about 4,300 m high, was left a third shorter.
Q 13Because of Tambora's 1815 eruption, 1816 became known in Europe and North America as what?
The Year Without a Summer
Q 21Indonesia's Ujung Kulon National Park shelters the world's last wild population of which animal?
Javan rhinoceros
The Javan rhinoceros once ranged across Southeast Asia, but since Vietnam's last one was killed in 2010, apparently by poachers, the fewer than 100 animals in this single park are all that remain; no zoo holds any.
Q 22The tiny extinct human nicknamed the 'Hobbit', unearthed in Liang Bua cave, lived on which Indonesian island?
Flores
Flores gave the species its name, Homo floresiensis; adults stood only about 1.1 m tall, which is thought to be because animals cut off on an island can evolve smaller bodies over time.
Q 23Which maritime empire, based near modern Palembang, dominated western Maritime Southeast Asia from the 600s?
Srivijaya
The Year Without a Summer brought snow and killing frosts to New England and western Europe through June, July and August, and its endless rain kept Mary Shelley indoors by Lake Geneva, where she began Frankenstein.
Q 14A 1926 expedition that brought live Komodo dragons to New York helped inspire which monster film?
King Kong
King Kong's co-creator Merian Cooper took the idea from his friend Douglas Burden, who led the trip and coined the name 'Komodo dragon'; Cooper first pictured a giant gorilla fighting the lizards.
Q 15Kopi luwak, one of the world's priciest coffees, is made from beans that have passed through which animal?
Palm civet
The palm civet eats ripe coffee cherries and excretes the beans; demand grew so large that a 2013 BBC investigation found civets held in battery cages on farms whose coffee was sold as wild.
Q 16The Wallace Line runs through the deep strait separating Bali from which neighbouring island?
Lombok
Lombok is only about 35 km from Bali, but the strait between them is so deep that it stayed open water even when ice-age seas fell, stopping the Asian animals that had walked as far as Bali.
Q 17As of 2024, the oldest known figurative cave painting, a pig with human-like figures, was found on which Indonesian island?
Sulawesi
Sulawesi's Karampuang cave scene is at least 51,200 years old, and because its figures seem to act together around the pig, researchers call it the oldest known evidence of storytelling.
Q 18The name 'orangutan' comes from the words 'orang hutan', which mean what?
Person of the forest
Person of the forest: 'orang' means person and 'hutan' forest. The phrase may first have described forest-dwelling people, with European visitors applying it to the ape by mistake.
Q 19A third orangutan species, described in 2017 near Lake Toba, is named after which region?
Tapanuli
Tapanuli orangutans, fewer than 800 in all, were told apart after scientists studied the skeleton of a male fatally wounded by villagers in 2013 and found its skull unlike other orangutans'.
Q 20Rafflesia arnoldii, the Indonesian plant with the largest single bloom on Earth, goes by what nickname?
Corpse flower
Corpse flower: the bloom reeks of rotting meat to lure the carrion flies that pollinate it, and the plant has no leaves, stems or roots, living as a parasite inside a jungle vine.
Srivijaya grew rich by controlling the Strait of Malacca, the sea lane between China and India, and Chinese monks sailing to India broke their journey there for months to study.
Q 24Indonesia's red and white flag is said to derive from the banner of which 13th-century Javanese empire?
Majapahit
Majapahit, founded in the 1290s, is where the red-and-white pairing is usually traced; in 1945 youths in Surabaya made the flag on the spot by tearing the blue stripe off a Dutch tricolour flying over a hotel.
Q 25Which prime minister's conquests took Hayam Wuruk's Javanese empire to its peak?
Gajah Mada
Gajah Mada swore the Palapa oath, vowing to give up 'palapa', read by some as spices and by others as the perks of office, until he had conquered the whole archipelago; modern Indonesia named its first satellite Palapa.
Q 26Indonesia's national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, is usually translated as what?
Unity in Diversity
Unity in Diversity comes from a 14th-century Javanese poem, where the line argued that two rival faiths were at heart one; modern Indonesia stretched it to cover hundreds of ethnic groups.
Q 27Which Indonesian city hosted the 1955 conference where 29 Asian and African countries met without the Western powers?
Bandung
Bandung drew delegates speaking for more than half the world's people; its sponsors called the meeting because they were tired of Western powers deciding Asia's affairs without consulting them.
Q 28Under colonial rule before 1942, present-day Jakarta was known by what name?
Batavia
Batavia was named for the Batavi, an ancient tribe the Dutch claimed as ancestors, and was built on the ruins of Jayakarta, a port they destroyed in 1619; today's name is a short form of that older one.
Q 29Which US president spent part of his childhood living in Jakarta?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama lived in Jakarta from age six to ten with his mother and Indonesian stepfather; returning as president in 2010, he began a speech there in Indonesian by saying 'Indonesia is a part of me'.
Q 30Indonesia declared independence in 1945, just two days after which country announced its surrender?
Japan
Japan had occupied the islands since 1942, and when it gave up, impatient young activists kidnapped the two leading nationalists to make them declare independence at once.