Palau

Palau was settled more than three thousand years ago by voyagers from island Southeast Asia, who built a society of matrilineal clans and chiefs, painted "bai" meeting houses, and a currency of foreign beads and bars still used in customary exchange today. Spain claimed the islands and sold them to Germany in 1899, and Japan took them in the First World War, making Koror the capital of its entire South Seas Mandate and settling so many Japanese that they came to outnumber Palauans.

In 1944 the islands saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Pacific war, above all the ten-week Battle of Peleliu, which left that small island's caves and bunkers full of wreckage that remains today. After the war Palau was administered by the United States as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

Palau chose to negotiate separately from the Federated States of Micronesia, and its path to independence was long and bitter: its 1979 constitution was the world's first to be nuclear-free, which clashed with US defence plans, and it took eight referendums — shadowed by the assassination of one president and the suicide of another — before the Compact of Free Association was approved and Palau became independent in 1994. Under the Compact, the United States is responsible for defence and is now building new military installations as US–China rivalry sharpens; Palau recognises Taiwan, and has felt economic pressure from Beijing as a result. It has also become a world leader in ocean conservation, from the first national shark sanctuary to a marine sanctuary covering most of its waters.

Palauan society is matrilineal: clan land, titles, and traditional money pass through women, and senior women choose and can remove the male chiefs. Customary obligation is elaborate and costly — funerals, first-birthday celebrations, and title ceremonies involve large exchanges of food, cash, and traditional money among clans. The "bai", with its painted gable telling legends and histories, is the emblem of that order, and storyboards carved with the same tales are now a signature craft.

Christianity is the majority faith, but the syncretic Modekngei religion, which blends Christian and indigenous elements, still has followers. The wartime and colonial past is everywhere — Japanese loanwords, Shinto shrine remains, battlefields — and modern Palauan identity is bound up with the reef: a fierce conservation ethic, high rates of service in the US military, and a small, closely related population where clan and family shape almost everything.

Nearly the entire population lives on Koror and the southern end of Babeldaob, the two joined by a bridge, with the tiny purpose-built capital of Ngerulmud standing almost alone in the Babeldaob hills. The economy runs on tourism — diving above all — together with US Compact funding, fishing-licence fees, and government jobs, which makes it very sensitive to shocks: a Chinese ban on tour groups in 2017 and then the pandemic border closure each hit hard.

A large share of the workforce is foreign, mainly Filipino. Traditional exchange obligations coexist with the cash economy, so a family may spend heavily on a customary ceremony one month and struggle the next. Imported food dominates the shops, and, as across the Pacific, diabetes and heart disease have risen with the move away from fish and taro. Rising seas, coral bleaching, and stronger storms are close, practical concerns.

Palauan food is built on the reef and the taro patch: reef and pelagic fish, mangrove crab, clams, fruit bat (a traditional delicacy served in a coconut-milk soup), and staples of taro — grown in freshwater patches tended by women — along with cassava, breadfruit, and sweet potato, with coconut running through the cooking.

Japanese influence is strong, in sashimi, bento, and clear soups, and the Filipino community has added adobo, pancit, and lumpia to the everyday menu. Koror has a spread of Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, and American restaurants, while village eating stays close to fish and taro. Coconut water is the common drink, and betel nut is chewed in the evening.

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, a mixed World Heritage Site, is Palau's centrepiece — hundreds of forested, undercut limestone islets across a turquoise lagoon, with hidden marine lakes, white sandbars, snorkelling gardens, and the remains of ancient villages. Jellyfish Lake, on one of the islands, lets snorkellers drift among millions of golden jellyfish that have lost most of their sting.

The diving is world-famous: the current-swept wall of Blue Corner, the manta cleaning station at German Channel, the shark-filled Ulong and Peleliu channels, and a lagoon full of Japanese and American shipwrecks and aircraft from 1944.

Peleliu itself is an open-air war museum of bunkers, guns, tanks, and cemeteries in regrown jungle, and Angaur adds more relics and a colony of introduced macaques. On Babeldaob, the Compact Road leads to the Badrulchau basalt monoliths, the Ngardmau waterfall, and the near-empty capital, and Koror has the Belau National Museum and a replica "bai".