Candi Brahu rises from flat, open ground at Trowulan in East Java, a tall mass of red brick with a stepped base, a projecting entrance and a body that tapers upward. It is among the largest brick temples in this part of the island, and its isolation in the fields gives it unusual presence. Trowulan is the area long identified by archaeologists with the capital of Majapahit, the kingdom that dominated the Indonesian archipelago in the later medieval period, and the ground here is dense with brick foundations, water structures, gateways and workshop debris spread over a wide zone. Brahu is one of its most conspicuous survivals. The film examines the temple's construction - the precision of the brick jointing, the mouldings, the erosion of exposed surfaces - and places it within the wider archaeological landscape of Trowulan, where a capital city has to be read from foundations rather than standing walls. Aerial photography makes the scale of that buried city legible.
