The Islands Named 'Disappointment': Less Than 600 People, 1/3 with Chinese Ancestry
Follow your soul on a vacation, welcome to watch the latest episode. Tropical island scenery always makes people yearn for it. With blue seas, white beaches, and feeling fatigued and frustrated in urban life, everyone wants to take a vacation on a tropical island. Today, we'd like to introduce this very small and niche island group, with few inhabitants, low level of development, and still retaining a lot of original environment.
The name of this island group is very special, called Disappointment Islands, which can remind people how disappointed they are about this place. It is a French overseas territory composed of a group of small coral islands, with a total land area of only 17 square kilometers, smaller than a village in China.
From an aerial view, this island group looks very isolated in the vast Pacific Ocean. Its nearest neighbor is 1000 kilometers away, the French island of Grande Terre. Legend has it that Portuguese explorer Magellan arrived at this island in 1521. Due to long-term sea voyage and fatigue, Magellan was full of expectations for this island, but after landing, he didn't find fresh water resources and other living supplies, so he felt very disappointed, so he named this island 'Disappointment Islands'.
There is another account. British poet Byron and his father, Royal Navy officer John Byron, sailed in 1765. The crew of the ship suffered from blood poisoning and other diseases, accidentally passing by this island. John Byron was overjoyed when he saw the coconuts on the island could supplement the vitamin of the crew, but when they wanted to land, they were violently resisted by the indigenous residents. Finally, 23 crew members died, and Byron expressed his dissatisfaction in his diary, so he directly named it 'Disappointment Islands'.
In the mid-19th century, the French arrived at Disappointment Islands. In 1946, Disappointment Islands became part of France as part of French Polynesia. The French built simple infrastructure on the island, such as seawater desalination facilities and solar power grids.
However, the island's exploitable value is not high. Although the scenery is beautiful, the climate is very dry and not suitable for human habitation because the land area is too small and it is not easy to develop. There are only about 20,000 people visiting it every year, and the islanders are scattered, so France's expenditure on the place is greater than its income, and it doesn't manage it much in the end.
However, 500 people still live on the island. The islanders almost lead a self-sufficient life, with simple customs and similar living standards, without any wealth gap. There has been no record of crime on the island for 600 years, so it is also known as 'the world's safest island'. Even during the two World Wars, it was not affected at all, as if nothing had happened. Here, there is no need for police, everyone manages themselves, and they catch seafood to eat if they are hungry, and there is plenty of seafood here. The local people take the captured seafood to Grande Terre to exchange for living supplies.
In 2018, a French anthropologist visited the island to investigate. Through the ancient Chinese silver ingots excavated here and the 'Southern Island Y chromosome' evidence, it was inferred that a small number of Chinese people had sailed across the ocean in 800 years ago, passing by this island, and some of them were rescued by the locals. In that era, except for sea transport, there were no other transportation methods, so the Chinese who stayed here couldn't go to other places, and they had to survive and multiply here, and eventually 1/3 of the people on the island had Chinese blood.
The islands have beautiful scenery like this, and the Disappointment Islands are even purer and cleaner, but the transportation here is very inconvenient, with only a small plane returning from Grande Terre once a month. This means that if you want to come, you have to stay on the Disappointment Islands for a month. What do you think about this? Welcome to leave a comment.
