Kiribati

The Gilbert Islands were settled around three thousand years ago by Austronesian voyagers, with later contacts from Samoa that left traces in legend and custom. Life on the atolls meant working with scarce soil and water: babai, a giant swamp taro, grows in pits dug down to the freshwater lens and is tended for years, and owning a good babai pit is a mark of standing.

The heart of each village is the maneaba, a great open-sided meeting house with a steep thatched roof resting on low posts, so that anyone entering must bow. Inside, each family and clan has its boti, a fixed sitting place along the edge. Decisions, feasts, dances and disputes all happen here, led by the unimane, the council of old men.

Custom is built around sharing and reciprocity. The bubuti custom lets a relative or neighbour ask for something that is hard to refuse, and generosity is a matter of honour. Dance is a serious art, with standing and sitting dances performed in competitions, the dancers' arms held like frigatebird wings. Visitors who are invited to a botaki, a feast, will sit through long speeches before the food.

Christianity reached the islands from the 1850s through Hawaiian-trained Protestant missionaries and later Catholic missions, and today churches share village life with the maneaba. Sunday is quiet, and choirs and church groups organise much of the social calendar.

Britain declared a protectorate over the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892 and made it a colony in 1916. Colonial officers such as Arthur Grimble, whose memoir A Pattern of Islands remains widely read, ran the islands with a light and often paternal hand. The real prize was Banaba (Ocean Island), a raised island covered in phosphate, mined from 1900 by the Pacific Phosphate Company and later the British Phosphate Commissioners.

Mining stripped Banaba of most of its soil and vegetation. After the Japanese occupation, during which many Banabans were deported or killed, the British resettled the community on Rabi Island in Fiji in 1945. Banabans still seek recognition and compensation, and their story is one of the region's clearest cases of an island consumed for someone else's farms.

Japan occupied Tarawa and Butaritari in 1941–42 and fortified Betio, a tiny islet at Tarawa's south-west corner, with bunkers, coastal guns and an airstrip. On 20 November 1943 US Marines landed there. Their boats grounded on the reef at low tide, and many men waded hundreds of metres under fire. In about 76 hours, around 1,000 Marines and nearly all of some 4,500 Japanese and Korean defenders were killed.

Betio today is one of the most crowded places in the Pacific, and the battlefield is woven into daily life: rusting guns point out to sea, bunkers sit beside homes, and memorials mark Red Beach. Remains of the missing are still being found and repatriated. Visitors should treat every site as a grave and take nothing.

Kiritimati, named Christmas Island by James Cook who arrived there on Christmas Eve 1777, has the largest land area of any coral atoll in the world. It had no permanent population when Europeans arrived. Coconut plantations brought workers from the Gilberts, and villages called London, Paris, Banana and Tabwakea grew around the lagoon.

In 1957 and 1958 Britain tested its first hydrogen bombs near Kiritimati and Malden Island in Operation Grapple, and in 1962 the United States carried out more than twenty atmospheric tests nearby. Soldiers, sailors and islanders were exposed with little protection; veterans in Britain, New Zealand and Fiji, and families on Kiritimati, have campaigned for recognition of health effects ever since.

Today Kiritimati is known for its vast sand flats, which draw fly-fishers from around the world for bonefish and giant trevally, and for seabird colonies numbering in the millions. Fishing lodges run most visitor trips, and catch-and-release rules protect the fishery.

In 1995 Kiribati moved the International Date Line so that the whole country shares the same calendar day. The Line Islands now sit at UTC+14, the first inhabited place to greet each new day, while the Gilberts are two hours behind and the Phoenix Islands one. Between them lies the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, declared in 2008 and listed by UNESCO in 2010; the government reopened it to commercial fishing in 2021.

The Ellice Islands separated to become Tuvalu in 1978, and the Gilberts, with Banaba, the Phoenix and Line Islands, became independent as Kiribati on 12 July 1979. The name is the local rendering of Gilberts. Fishing licences for foreign tuna fleets now provide much of the government's income, alongside remittances from I-Kiribati seafarers and workers in Australia and New Zealand.

South Tarawa holds about half the population on a strip of land that is often only a few hundred metres wide. Crowding strains water supplies and sanitation, which is why visitors are warned about water and lagoon swimming near settlements. Causeways link the islets, and the main road runs from Bonriki airport to Betio.

Climate change is the defining national issue. Most of Kiribati is less than three metres above sea level; king tides flood homes and graves, and saltwater spoils babai pits and wells. President Anote Tong made the issue global in the 2000s and 2010s, and in 2014 Kiribati bought land on Vanua Levu in Fiji as a food-security and possible resettlement option. Later governments have stressed adapting and raising land rather than leaving.

Kiribati switched recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019, and Chinese-funded projects have followed. For visitors, the country feels less like a tourist destination than a place where people are getting on with life under pressure, and time in a village maneaba explains more than any museum.