Lampung (: ; : ), officially the Province of Lampung (; ), is a province of Indonesia. It is located on the southern tip of the island of Sumatra. It has a short border with the province of Bengkulu to the northwest, and a longer border with the province of South Sumatra to the north, as well as a maritime border with the provinces of Banten and Jakarta to the east. It is the home of the Lampung people, who speak their own language and possess their own written script. Its capital city is Bandar Lampung.
The province covers a land area of 33,570.26 km<sup>2</sup> and had a population of 7,608,405 at the 2010 census, 9,007,848 at the 2020 census, and 9,419,580 (comprising 4,809,540 males and 4,610,040 females) according to the official estimates for mid-2024, with three-quarters of that being descendants of Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese migrants from Java and Bali islands. These migrants came from more densely populated islands in search of available land, as well as being part of the national government's Indonesian transmigration program, of which Lampung was one of the earliest and most significant transmigration destinations. The provincial population continues to rise by over 100,000 per year.
In 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa, located on an island in the Sunda Strait, erupted into becoming one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in recorded history, with disastrous consequences for the area and elsewhere, including estimates of human fatalities in the tens of thousands and worldwide temperature and other weather effects for years.
Etymology
The etymology of Lampung is unknown. Early Chinese sources mention kingdoms and locations in insular Southeast Asia that have been equated to Lampung. In the mid-5th century CE, a Southeast Asian kingdom named P'o-Huang sent missions to the Chinese Song emperors. While its location is uncertain, by the 10th century, the geographical treatise Taiping Huanyu Ji mentions a place name of To-Lang-P'u-Huang. Gabriel Ferrand and O.W. Wolters posited it may refer to the same place rendered as Tulang Bawang in modern-day Indonesian, being the present-day name of a river and two regencies in Lampung province.
J.V.G. Mills of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society equated Lampung with a kingdom he transliterated as Lan-Pang that is mentioned in the Yingya Shenglan, a 1451 Chinese travelogue describing Zheng He's voyages in Southeast Asia.
All these interpretations indicate that both Lampung and Tulang Bawang may ultimately derive from the same ancient root and have been in use since at least the 5th century CE. Both the terms lampung and tulang bawang have a distinct meaning in modern Indonesian, with the term lampung meaning "to float", while the term "tulang bawang" means "onion bone", but it is highly probable their etymological origin is entirely unrelated to these modern-day renditions.
Folk etymology connects the name Lampung to the Batak language word lappung, meaning 'big' or 'large', and tells the anecdotal myth of an volcanic eruption of Mount Marapi so enormous that it could be seen from the top of Mount Pesagi, where a witness loudly proclaimed "lappung, lappung, lappung". The region surrounding Mount Pesagi was then named Lappung after this exclamation, eventually becoming Lampung.