The history of Palau

Palau is an archipelago of several hundred islands at the western end of the Caroline Islands, between the Philippines and New Guinea. Settled about 3,000 years ago by Austronesian voyagers, it developed a society of matrilineal clans, chiefly villages and two rival confederations long before outsiders arrived. Spain, Germany, Japan and the United States ruled it in turn between 1885 and 1994, and the Japanese period and the battle of Peleliu in 1944 transformed the islands. Since 1994 Palau has been an independent republic in free association with the United States, known for its nuclear-free constitution and its protection of the ocean.

The first people reached Palau around 1000 BCE, probably from the Philippines or eastern Indonesia; Palauan is an Austronesian language, but an unusual one with no close relatives in the Pacific, and genetic studies point towards island Southeast Asia, perhaps the northern Moluccas. Early settlers lived from fishing, shellfish and gardening, and middens on the limestone Rock Islands show intensive use of the reefs by the seventh century CE.

On the large volcanic island of Babeldaob, people sculpted whole hillsides into terraces, most of them built or enlarged between about 900 and 1200, perhaps for farming, defence and ceremony. At about the same time compact villages of stone platforms and paved paths grew up in the Rock Islands. These were abandoned rather suddenly in the early fifteenth century, perhaps because of storms, war or the strain of feeding people on small islands, and their inhabitants moved to coastal villages on the larger islands. By the sixteenth century the village pattern later recorded by Europeans was in place, and the rows of carved basalt pillars at Badrulchau, in northern Babeldaob, are among the most striking remains of earlier times.

Traditional Palauan society was built on matrilineal clans. Land, titles and the valuables known as Palauan money, pieces of glass and ceramic beads and beaten turtle shell that changed hands at marriages, deaths and other exchanges, passed through the female line. Each village was led by a council of titled men, the heads of its ranked clans, alongside a parallel council of titled women, who chose and could remove the male chiefs. Men's and women's clubs organised labour, fishing and defence, and each village had a bai, a tall meeting house with a steep gable decorated with painted and carved stories from Palauan legend.

By the time of European contact, villages were grouped into two great rival alliances, one led by the Ibedul, the paramount chief of Koror in the south, and the other by the Reklai of Melekeok on Babeldaob. Warfare between them was common, often in the form of head-taking raids. Palau also had links with its neighbours: islanders from Yap sailed south to quarry the great limestone discs of their stone money in Palau's Rock Islands and carry them home by canoe and raft.

Ships of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition may have sighted Palau's southern outliers in the 1520s, but Europe knew almost nothing of the islands until December 1696, when Palauans driven by a storm to the island of Samar in the Philippines described their homeland to the Jesuit Paul Klein, who drew a map from pebbles they laid on the beach. Jesuit missions in 1710 failed, and the two priests left on Sonsorol were killed. In 1783 the East India Company packet Antelope was wrecked off Ulong. The Ibedul of Koror helped Captain Henry Wilson's crew build a new ship, used their firearms in his wars against Melekeok, and sent his son Lee Boo with them to London, where the young prince died of smallpox in 1784. British and other traders followed, buying bêche-de-mer and supplying guns, and introduced diseases cut the population sharply in the nineteenth century.

Spain claimed the Carolines as part of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific, and when Germany challenged the claim in 1885 Pope Leo XIII arbitrated in Spain's favour. Spanish rule was light, leaving little more than Catholic missions in Koror and Melekeok. After its defeat by the United States in 1898, Spain sold Palau and the rest of the Carolines to the German Empire in 1899. The Germans ran Palau from German New Guinea, planted coconuts, mined phosphate on Angaur with forced Palauan labour, and suppressed traditional practices they considered harmful, such as warfare and the men's clubs.

At the start of World War I the Japanese navy took Palau, and in 1920 the League of Nations granted it to Japan as part of the South Seas Mandate. The Empire of Japan treated the islands as a colony for settlement. Koror became the capital of the whole mandate, with paved streets, shops, shrines and schools, and immigrants from Japan, Okinawa and Korea poured in to work on plantations, fisheries and mines. By 1938 there were about 15,000 Japanese in Palau against about 6,000 Palauans. Palauan children were taught in Japanese, private land ownership weakened clan land, and Palauans were treated as second-class subjects. A new religious movement, Modekngei, founded around 1915, combined Palauan tradition with Christian belief and gained political weight between the wars.

In World War II Palau became a fortified base. Palauans were conscripted for labour and moved from Koror and Peleliu to villages on Babeldaob. In September 1944 US Marines and soldiers landed on Peleliu, where some 10,000 Japanese defenders had dug into a maze of caves and tunnels in the limestone ridges. The battle, from 15 September to 27 November, lasted more than two months and killed about 2,000 Americans and almost all the Japanese garrison, and Angaur was taken at the same time. The rest of Palau was bypassed and bombed, and its garrison and people suffered hunger and disease until Japan surrendered in 1945.

In 1947 Palau became one of the districts of the UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, administered by the United States. For years Washington invested little, a policy critics called a "zoo policy", before spending rose from the 1960s. When the Trust Territory districts voted on a joint constitution in 1978, Palau, like the Marshall Islands, chose to go its own way rather than join the Federated States of Micronesia.

Palau's constitution, which took effect on 1 January 1981, was the first in the world to ban nuclear weapons and materials unless approved by 75 percent of voters in a referendum. That clause collided with the Compact of Free Association negotiated with the United States, which wanted the right to bring nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships into Palauan waters. Seven referendums between 1983 and 1990 produced majorities for the Compact but not the 75 percent required. The struggle was violent at times: the first president, Haruo Remeliik, was assassinated in 1985, and his successor Lazarus Salii died of a gunshot wound in 1988. After voters amended the constitution to lower the threshold, an eighth referendum in 1993 approved the Compact with 68 percent. Palau became independent on 1 October 1994, the last part of the Trust Territory to do so, and joined the United Nations that December.

Under the Compact the United States is responsible for Palau's defence and provides substantial funding, and Palauans can live and work in the United States. Tourism, especially diving on the reefs and wartime wrecks, became the mainstay of the economy, and the capital moved from Koror to a new government complex at Ngerulmud on Babeldaob, built partly with a loan from Taiwan and opened in October 2006. Palau has been one of the few states to recognise Taiwan rather than the People's Republic of China, and it has kept close ties with Japan, which funded the bridge linking Koror and Babeldaob. Emperor Akihito visited Peleliu in 2015 to mark the anniversary of the battle.

Palau has made its name in conservation. Building on the old chiefly practice of bul, temporary bans on fishing, it declared the world's first shark sanctuary in 2009, and in 2012 the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Surangel Whipps Jr. was elected president in 2020 and was re-elected in November 2024, defeating Tommy Remengesau Jr., in a campaign that turned partly on closer security ties with the United States, including a large US radar installation.