 In Europe , the technique was described for the first time in the History of Java , published in London in 1817 by Stamford Raffles , who had been a British governor for the island . In 1873 the Dutch merchant Van Rijckevorsel gave the pieces he collected during a trip to Indonesia to the ethnographic museum in Rotterdam . Today the Tropenmuseum houses the biggest collection of Indonesian batik in the Netherlands . The Dutch and Chinese colonists were active in developing batik , particularly coastal batik , in the late colonial era . They introduced new patterns as well as the use of the cap ( copper block stamps ) to mass @-@ produce batiks . Displayed at the Exposition Universelle at Paris in 1900 , the Indonesian batik impressed the public and artists . 
