The last time a Javanese sultan stepped down was in 1921. It is part of the tradition that Indonesia's dictator has been living out that a ruler make no provision for his own succession. In President Suharto's view, Apres moi le deluge is an attitude to be proud of.
Gen Suharto (76) has already outlived his claims to power and greatness. He is a Cold War warrior no longer needed by the West. He came to power this time 30 years ago after the massacre of perhaps a million people, many of them Chinese entrepreneurs. The 1965 "anti-communist countercoup" is a folk memory whose lessons are concentrating minds in these unstable days.
Gen Suharto gave Indonesia Orde Baru, the Dutch for New Order. Gen Suharto has tried to personify order - but his political demise may show that he is its antithesis.
As Prof Benedict Anderson of Cornell University said yesterday: "New Order was built by him and for him. Without him it cannot survive. With him it is also doomed."
Mr Liem Soei Liong, a Chinese activist with the Indonesian Human Rights Association, points to "structural racism" under the "New Order". Indonesia is "the only place in the world where there is Chinatown but no Chinese calligraphy or schools". Because it is almost impossible for Chinese to enter the civil service they are forced to be entrepreneurs - "and endure the curse of being scapegoated" for it.
Today Gen Suharto's reputation as a Third World "Father of Development" lies in tatters on Southeast Asia's currency dealers' floors. His reputation as a Non-Aligned Movement leader and friend to small or yet unborn nations, such as Palestine or East Timor, doesn't match up to his authoritarian record. It has earned him the sobriquet of "an upmarket Pol Pot", according to Dr Peter Carey, the Oxford historian.
He is sometimes seen as an Asian Machiavelli whose true intentions have always been hard to divine - particularly for the West. But as long as he suited Cold War and business purposes he was left unmolested. Business boomed in the Suharto family fiefdom, and for foreigners who paid their 10 per cent to Indonesia's $30 billion sultan.
The son of landed peasants, he was never a man to put himself outside whatever system he found himself in. He was a soldier in the colonial Dutch army, then a servant of the occupying Japanese, and later a post-war nationalist hero.
In 1965 - "the year of living dangerously" - he was the last person publicly perceived as plotting to overthrow the disordered nation's founder, the then President Sukarno, whom he pretended to protect. Sukarno handed over executive power to him the following year, and Gen Suharto was confirmed as president in 1968. He was returned to this office by a rubber-stamp People's Consultative Assembly six more times, most recently last March, though last year's financial collapse had already indicated that his grip on power was slipping.
Gen Suharto seems to have bargained on ruling until he died. Now that that looks impossible, he is trying to reinvent himself as a Deng Xiaoping-type figure, says Helmy Fauzi, an Indonesian human rights lawyer. Mr Fauzi says that the anger towards him is so great that a peaceful retirement in Java is untenable.
Last weekend, Gen Suharto said, in high Javanese, that he would step down if the people no longer trusted him. But he would "rule from behind" as a monk-like intermediary between God and mammon, where - unlike Gen Pinochet in Chile - he would hold no mere temporal title.
It is as if Gen Suharto is acting out the last act in his very own Wayang (shadow-puppet) play. But it could be a long one, with populist and constitutional twists he has not anticipated.