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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
Only a fraction of them are inhabited, and the total stretches more than 5,000 km from Sumatra in the west to New Guinea in the east.
Q 02Where does Indonesia rank among the world's countries by population?
Fourth
Only India, China and the United States have more people, and no country has more Muslims.
Q 03More than half of all Indonesians live on which single island?
Java
It packs roughly 56% of the country's population into about 7% of its land area, making it the most crowded large island on Earth.
Q 04How many provinces did Indonesia have after the 2022 split of the Papua region?
38
The count jumped from 34 in 2022 when four new provinces were carved out of the Papua region.
Q 05Indonesia's highest peak, Puncak Jaya, is better known to mountaineers by what name?
Carstensz Pyramid
At 4,884 m it is the tallest island peak on Earth and the Oceania entry on most Seven Summits lists, and it still carries a shrinking equatorial glacier.
Q 06Lake Toba, Indonesia's largest lake and the world's largest volcanic lake, lies on which island?
Sumatra
The lake fills the caldera of a supervolcano whose eruption roughly 74,000 years ago briefly altered the planet's climate.
Q 07Which island, the third-largest in the world, does Indonesia share with Malaysia and Brunei?
Borneo
Indonesians call their portion Kalimantan, a name said to come from what locals told a Portuguese explorer in the 16th century.
Q 08Which is Indonesia's most active volcano, having erupted regularly since 1548?
Merapi
Its name means "Fire Mountain" in Javanese, and it looms over one of the country's most densely populated regions.
Q 09The volcano Krakatoa, which erupted catastrophically in 1883, sits in which body of water?
Sunda Strait
The blast destroyed most of the original island, and a 2018 collapse of its offspring volcano sent another deadly tsunami across the same waters.
Q 10The explosions of Krakatoa in August 1883 were heard about 3,100 km away in which Australian city?
Perth
The sound also reached the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, roughly 4,800 km away, and the pressure wave rounded the globe three and a half times.
Q 11What does Anak Krakatau, the name of the island that rose from the caldera in 1927, mean?
Child of Krakatoa
The 'child' had grown to more than 400 m tall by 2017, then lost most of that height in the December 2018 collapse.
Q 12Mount Tambora, whose 1815 eruption was the largest in recorded history, is on which island?
Sumbawa
The eruption threw out up to 150 cubic kilometres of material, earning a rare 7 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index.
Q 13Because of Tambora's 1815 eruption, 1816 became known in Europe and North America as what?
The Year Without a Summer
Crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere, and the gloomy weather kept Mary Shelley indoors in Switzerland writing Frankenstein.
Q 21In which national park at Java's western tip does the only wild Javan rhinoceros population survive?
Ujung Kulon
Around 74 animals remain there, none are kept in captivity anywhere, and the park sits in the shadow of the Krakatoa volcano.
Q 22The tiny extinct human 'Hobbit', found in 2003 in Liang Bua cave, lived on which Indonesian island?
Flores
The adult skeleton stood only about 1.1 m tall, and the species survived until modern humans arrived roughly 50,000 years ago.
Q 23Which maritime empire, based near modern Palembang, dominated western Maritime Southeast Asia from the 600s?
Srivijaya
Modern Indonesians had largely forgotten it until the French scholar George Coedès pieced its history together in the 1920s.
Q 14Which animal, the largest living species of lizard, is native to a handful of small Indonesian islands?
Komodo dragon
Males can reach 3 m long and 150 kg, and a 1993 presidential decree made it one of the country's official national animals.
Q 15In 2008 Wichita's Sedgwick County Zoo was the first in the Americas to document what in Komodo dragons?
Parthenogenesis
A female can lay viable eggs with no male involved, and because of the lizard's sex-chromosome system those offspring are all male.
Q 16The Wallace Line runs through the deep strait separating Bali from which neighbouring island?
Lombok
Though the two islands are close neighbours, Asian-type mammals dominate one side and Australian-type marsupials and cockatoos appear on the other.
Q 17Which English biologist actually named the 'Wallace Line' after Alfred Russel Wallace drew it?
Thomas Henry Huxley
Huxley, nicknamed 'Darwin's Bulldog', coined the name in 1868, nearly a decade after Wallace first drew the boundary.
Q 18The word 'orangutan' comes from Malay words meaning what?
Person of the forest
The apes now survive only on Borneo and Sumatra, though in the Pleistocene they ranged across Southeast Asia and into southern China.
Q 19A third orangutan species, described in 2017 near Lake Toba, is named after which region?
Tapanuli
With fewer than 800 individuals it is the rarest great ape, and oddly it is more closely related to the Bornean species than to its Sumatran neighbours.
Q 20Rafflesia arnoldii, the Indonesian plant with the largest single bloom on Earth, is nicknamed what for its stench?
Corpse flower
It has no leaves, stems or roots of its own and lives as a parasite inside a jungle vine, revealing itself only when it blooms.
Q 24Indonesia's red and white flag is said to derive from the banner of which 13th-century Javanese empire?
Majapahit
The empire, founded by Raden Wijaya after he turned on the Mongol invaders of 1293, is treated as the ancestor of the modern state.
Q 25Which prime minister's conquests took Hayam Wuruk's Javanese empire to its peak?
Gajah Mada
He is remembered for the Palapa oath, a vow to enjoy no spiced food until he had united the archipelago, and Indonesia's first satellite was named Palapa after it.
Q 26Indonesia's national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, is usually translated as what?
Unity in Diversity
The phrase is Old Javanese and appears on the scroll gripped in the claws of the Garuda on the national emblem.
Q 27The national motto quotes the Kakawin Sutasoma, a 14th-century poem by which Javanese poet?
Mpu Tantular
The poem was written under King Hayam Wuruk and, strikingly for a national slogan, argues that Buddhism and Shaivism are ultimately one truth.
Q 28Under colonial rule before 1942, present-day Jakarta was known by what name?
Batavia
The name honoured the Batavi, an ancient tribe the colonisers regarded as their ancestors; the Japanese occupiers dropped it in 1942.
Q 29Most of what is now Indonesia spent about three and a half centuries under which country's colonial rule?
Netherlands
The Portuguese and British both held parts of the archipelago at times, but it was the Dutch East Indies that became modern Indonesia.
Q 30On what date did Indonesia proclaim its independence?
17 August 1945
The proclamation came two days after Japan's surrender; sovereignty was not formally transferred until December 1949.