Prince Diponegoro was arrested at peace talks in 1830, and the kris the Dutch returned in 2020 had been missing for decades

Diponegoro was the eldest son of Sultan Hamengkubuwono III of Yogyakarta by a concubine. He was passed over for the throne in favour of a younger half-brother and later a child sultan. In 1825 the Dutch built a road across the graves of his ancestors at Tegalrejo, and he went to war. The Java War lasted five years. In March 1830 the Dutch commander De Kock invited him to Magelang to negotiate, then declared him a prisoner on 28 March. The Dutch said he surrendered; he called it betrayal. He was shipped to Manado on 3 May 1830 and in 1833 to Fort Rotterdam in Makassar, where he wrote his autobiography, the Babad Diponegoro, and died in 1855. His heirlooms went to the Netherlands. Under a 1968 cultural agreement the Dutch returned his saddle and spear in the 1970s. His kris was not included because it could not be found. Researchers later identified it in the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. On 3 March 2020 the Dutch culture minister handed it to Indonesia's ambassador, a week before King Willem-Alexander's state visit. Some Indonesian experts doubted that it is the original kris^†. It is in the National Museum of Indonesia. A fourth-generation descendant guards his grave in Makassar.