Close to one thousand gigantic stone statues stand on lonely Easter Island (Rapa Nui). The small, triangular speck in the ocean, with an area of only 66 square miles, lies over 1,200 miles from Pitcairn Island (the nearest island), 2,000 miles from Tahiti, and 2,500 miles from South America. Looking around, you see only the ocean surrounding the island. No wonder the local people call their island "the Navel of the World." These stone statues symbolize the spirit of the people, the glory of their ocean-crossing ancestors, and the mystery of Polynesian life.

apa Nui Island was still in total darkness at seven in the morning. I closed the door behind me, walked quietly out the hotel, and drove twenty kilometers to the volcano crater of Rano Kau. Half an hour later I was already standing at the crater, two hundred meters [660 ft] above sea level, waiting for the sunrise. At exactly 8:30, the sun appeared. The faraway world centers were still sleeping, but Rapa Nui was starting another day.

The island is 66 square miles in area, and it is completely isolated by the ocean around it. It is more than 1,200 miles from the closest land, thus making it the most remote place on earth. It took me two days to fly here from Taiwan, but that was only a blink of an eye compared to the amount of time taken by the ancient Polynesians who settled here.

"The Navel of the World"

Many readers may not have heard of "Rapa Nui," but they surely know the island by the name, "Easter Island."

The name, Easter Island, came accidentally: it was on Easter Sunday in 1722 that a Dutch explorer first set foot on the island. The Western adventurers who followed were overwhelmed by the gigantic stone statues on the island. Thus the island became one of the wonders of the world, with an accidental connection to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

However, this place is neither accidental nor miraculous to the islanders. When one looks around, the ocean is like a huge belly with the island in the middle, so the island is also called "the Navel of the World." The legend among the islanders is that their ancestors came from Rapa Island in the Austral Islands. The new island is larger, so it is called "Rapa Nui" or "Great Rapa," and the people are called "Rapanui."

I asked the hotel manager, Martin, how many Rapanui were on the island, and he replied, "Three thousand and one--a child was born yesterday."

I was rather doubtful of the figure, but I fully trusted his news about the newborn. After days spent in Hangaroa, the only town and home to most of the islanders, I realized that people know each other's families eight generations back.

When I said that I was staying at Martin's place, everyone knew who I was talking about; and Martin was able to tell the past and present stories of the other three thousand residents on the island. Such close relationships made the island quite safe, so I was able to enjoy the starry sky every night at the beach.

Archaeological evidence shows that humans were present on the island in the fifth century, but no one is sure where these people came from. Archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists all propose the "Western origin" theory, that these people came from Polynesia and that Easter Island was the easternmost point of their migration. But there is also a theory that the islanders came from the east: it is born out by the similarities between the construction of stone platforms on the island and that of stone walls in Cuzco, Peru, and between the reed rafts used by the islanders and ones used by residents near Lake Titicaca, also in Peru. Thus the first group of migrants may have been Incas from South America.

A tear of suffering on the fringe of the world

Martin laughed at this "Eastern origin" theory. He hunched his back and shrunk his neck and said, "Look at them like this!" Then he straightened his back and held his chin up and said, "We're tall and strong and we don't look like them!"

His words revealed his unspeakable resentment towards the South Americans, but there was a good reason behind it.

Three hundred years of contact with the outside world turned the Navel of the World into a teardrop of suffering at the fringe of the world. The Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, first discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, thus giving the island its name. Ships from other countries stopped by, but quickly left since the island had little wood, water or food.

In 1805, the crew of an American ship, Nancy, captured twelve men and ten women, intending to use them as slaves for seal hunting on the Juan Fernandez Islands. After three days of sailing, the islanders were allowed on deck, but they all threw themselves overboard and drowned. The captain of the Nancy went back to the island to capture more islanders.

In the 1860's, Peruvian slavers came to kidnap islanders and take them back to Peru to collect guano for the booming organic fertilizer industry. A total of 1,407 Rapanui, about a third of the island's population, were taken. Whaling ships also docked on the island, and the sailors enjoyed raping the women or shooting the locals.

In 1868, Jean-Baptiste Onexime Dutrou-Bornier, a French sea captain, arrived with plans to take over the island. He gradually bought up land, proclaimed himself lord of the island, and took a Rapanui wife. He warred with Catholic missionaries when they objected to his claim of authority over the islanders. After exporting most of the population to Tahiti and other islands to work on plantations, he turned the island into one vast sheep ranch. His autocratic reign ended when the remaining islanders killed him. The land was later annexed by the Chilean government in 1888, which still rules the island now.

In 1952, Chile set up a naval base on the island and sealed it off from outside contact. The islanders were not allowed to move around freely, and all were confined to Hangaroa every night. Stephanie Goldfuss, a German writer who has lived on the island for ten years, told me, "The islanders weren't even as good as their sheep: the sheep could move freely on the island, but the residents could only move within certain boundaries." It wasn't until 1966, when an elementary school teacher wrote an open letter protesting the Chilean government's inhumane policies, that the situation started to improve.

It is truly ironic that the modern history of the island named for Christ's resurrection was filled with events like these.

Currently, the island is part of the global economy. All the daily necessities are imported and the local economy depends largely on tourism. Animal husbandry is also a major source of income for the islanders. Sheepherding was once the most important industry and there were once more sheep than people, but now the sheep have been replaced by horses and cattle. The horses are exported to the American continent for racing and the islanders keep the cattle for food. Martin preferred imported beef because it tasted better. But not all imports--from poultry, computers, telephones and fax machines to drugs and AIDS--have been good.

All Catholics

I saw young Enrique riding a horse on the beach. His long hair had been dyed to a golden color by the sunlight and the ocean. With a genuine smile, he tried to sell me some marijuana. When I asked him where the stuff came from, he turned his attention to two attractive girls coming out from a disco pub and completely ignored my presence. After making eye contact, he walked away with the girls and the horse.

"Hey, where are you going?" I asked.

Like other Rapanui, he could tell me where he came from, but not where he was heading.

When people find themselves isolated from the world on this island, they need to have strong faith to answer any question about where they came from.

There was a huge cross by the sea, and underneath it a woman named Mary knelt before a small shrine with a statuette of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross. This woman's husband went fishing every day, so she came to pray every day.

The residents devoutly believe in the Bible. Everyone, all 3,001 people, is Catholic, as Mary firmly told me.

Moai (the island's enormous carved statues) stared at a point not far away. They were the spiritual expression of the islanders when Rapa Nui was still the Navel of the World. In our time, they are also a great mystery and a deep lesson about the ecology.

The stone for the statues came from a dead volcano, Rano Raraku, on the southeastern corner of the island. The site looks like an open-air quarry, with several hundred finished and unfinished moai. The statues were carved out of the cliffs of the quarry. When almost finished, they were cut away and slid into a hole at the foot of the mountain, so that the sculptors could finish the backsides.

Among the 887 moai on the island, the smallest one is only around one meter [3.3 ft] tall, while the tallest is more than twenty meters [66 ft] tall and weighs more than twenty tons. The average moai is 4.5 meters [15 ft] tall and weighs thirteen or fourteen tons. It is incredible that these people could carve out such statues with the most primitive rock tools. What is more incredible is how the people moved these colossi to the seashore some ten kilometers [6.2 mi] away and pushed them onto ahu (stone platforms several meters tall). Many of the moai also bear giant red topknots (pukao) that were carved out from red scoria and weighed several tons each.

Building a jail

Nevertheless, 288 out of the 887 moai were incredibly transported and erected by the seashore. In other words, one third of them were moved with the manpower and the resources available on the island at that time. Another 92 statues look like they were in the process of being moved, said J. A. Van Tilburg, a long-time American researcher on the moai. He pointed out that 47 moai had never been moved at all.

So how did the people transport the statues?

Some say they used ropes to pull the statues, some say they rolled them on logs. Some people also say they used rafts to transport them by water. There are even people who claim that aliens moved them. The legends of the islanders claim the statues walked to the platforms by themselves. Anyway, there is no answer to this question. Another major question is why the moai exist at all. Even the Rapanui legends have no answers. Theories involving aliens are on the rise, but regular researchers believe the moai were produced for religious reasons.

Tilburg indicated that the statues were carved with little emphasis on individual expression, but they represented a group of people who had authority and occupied an important role, such as communicating between humans and gods, during religious ceremonies.

Actually, the moai have another deeper meaning: the interaction between humanity and ecology.

In the past, the islanders spent much of their manpower and resources on erecting these giant monuments to their tribal honor. Furthermore, the Polynesians had developed a strong sense of competition during their migrations, so they started exploiting their natural resources to produce and transport the moai. The most devastating effect was the deforestation of the island.

Records from the earliest European adventurers show that there were no trees on the island. Therefore, if most moai were produced between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, that would mean that all the trees were chopped down within a couple of hundred years to transport them.

No trees meant no material to build boats. The Rapanui were thus unable to build canoes to set off and find some other island. With the island’s ecology destroyed, the islanders had built a jail for themselves, instead of communicating with the gods through the moai.

Because of the need for a larger population to help produce the moai, the resources on the island also decreased dramatically. The natural resources on the island could support 3,000 people or at most 6,000. But a larger population than that could only lead to tribal wars over the limited remaining resources. The once glorious civilization on Rapa Nui had a very strict social caste to organize the increasing number of people, and its religious values pushed people to compete with each other in erecting giant stone statues. Unfortunately, the imbalance between humans and the natural environment led to the fall of their civilization. A powerful warrior class emerged which seized land, killed the nobles, toppled the moai, and established a new religion, the Birdman Cult. The survivors have no memory of their glorious past and the moai can only stare emptily into the sky.

Lessons from Rapa Nui are food for thought for us all. We must realize that our planet, like this island, is all we have and that our natural resources are limited. The competition created by modern industries and economies could destroy our modern civilization.

There are still more lessons we can learn from Rapa Nui.

Discovering the origin at the end of Polynesia

There are still people living on the island despite all the internal and external forces of destruction. One islander said it well: "If we were Indians from South America, we would starve to death!"

We can analyze this from two different angles. On one hand, we sense that the islanders' hostility toward the people on the continent has been going on for many generations. On a much deeper level, Rapa Nui wants to declare to the whole world the basic characteristics of its people--that no matter how the world changes, there will still be people on the island and they will never starve to death.

That's right, there is rebirth from destruction. The end is also the beginning. People are more like true human beings on this isolated island.

Therefore, I have hope for the "one" of the "3001" that Martin replied when I asked how many people lived on this island.

One--a new-born baby.