Lawang Sewu

The name means a thousand doors. The building has about 600 large windows, and that is the smaller surprise here.

Lawang Sewu stands on one of Semarang's busiest traffic circles in Central Java, facing the Tugu Muda monument to fallen heroes and the Diponegoro military museum. It was built as the head office of the Dutch East Indies Railway Company, the Nederlandsch-Indische Spoorweg Maatschappij, and it is now owned by the national railway company Kereta Api Indonesia, whose predecessor Djawatan Kereta Api took over every rail office and installation from the Dutch. Today it is a museum and heritage railway gallery run by KAI's Heritage Unit and its subsidiary KAI Wisata.

The nickname comes from the design: numerous doors and arcs, hence a thousand of them. The complex holds two main buildings, A and B, and two smaller ones on Pemuda Street. The L-shaped A building faces the roundabout and carries two identical towers that originally stored water, 7,000 litres each. Inside are large stained-glass windows and a grand staircase at the centre. A tunnel once connected A building to several other places in the city, including the governor's mansion and the harbour. B building stands behind it, three storeys, offices on the first two and a ballroom on the third.

Writing in Inside Indonesia in 2013, the historian Michael G. Vann described what visitors actually encounter here as competing narratives of history, memory and popular culture. The architecture evokes an ambiguous colonial past. The site saw a revolutionary skirmish and took its own part in Indonesia's complicated and internecine revolution. And it is famous nationally as a haunted house, which is the narrative most likely to be sold to you at the door.

Indonesians recognise photographs of this building instantly. Go for all three stories at once.