The river may be named after prince Tubagus Angke, from the Banten Sultanate, who was the ruler of Jayakarta in the 16th century. Another theory is that the name refers to the 1740 Batavia massacre in which 10,000 ethnic Chinese residents of the city were massacred by the Dutch East India Company, with many bodies dumped in the river. "Ang" means "red" in the Hokkien dialect, which could refer to the bloody event.