Translated into British English for this portfolio site. The Chinese original is linked in the header.
“Where did you say you were?” a colleague in Britain asked. “French Polynesia,” I replied. From the half-second pause that followed, I knew the place meant almost nothing to him.
When friends in China asked where I was, I increasingly did not know how to answer. Nuku Hiva, the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, Tahiti, the South Pacific: none of these names seemed to give anyone a concrete idea. According to official figures, only six Chinese visitors reached the Marquesas between January and September 2025.
Once, a friend and I opened our live locations on a map and kept zooming out. We could never make China and the Marquesas appear on the same screen. At the smallest scale, the nearest continent on the map was the edge of the Americas.
Nuku Hiva is the administrative capital of the Marquesas. The Marquesas are part of French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France in the South Pacific. This abstract geographical description did nothing to help anyone understand where I was. “Never mind,” I said at last, after sliding around a map filled almost entirely with blue. “I am on a very, very distant island.”
Nuku Hiva lies about 6,500 kilometres from the west coast of the United States and nearly 10,000 kilometres from Shanghai. On the vast, loose map of the South Pacific, it is a tiny point without an obvious coordinate. French Polynesia has 118 islands scattered across two million square kilometres of ocean. They are thousands of miles apart and yet secretly connected through language, myth, bodily memory and traditions of navigation.
Here, time does not move in a straight line. It circles, repeats and continues.
Water As Road
My crash course in the Marquesas came from Nicholas Thomas, director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. I read his book Voyagers and then went to Cambridge to visit him.
“Oceania is the only region of the world to have been settled by water,” he told me. The relationship between its people and the sea is wholly unlike that of continental people. “Water connects islanders rather than separating them.”
He spoke of the Marquesas: rugged islands, beaches, sheer cliffs, valleys, distinct communities. Europeans often imagine one island as one people, but that was never the case. One island may hold many groups, while kinship between valleys on different islands may be more important than proximity by land.
“Geographically the islands are separated by sea,” he said, “but socially the ties are continuous. If you are a navigator and can cross water, it may be far easier to visit kin by canoe than to climb over mountains by land.”
“You will feel it when you get there,” he added. I remembered that line: you will feel for yourself that seawater is not a barrier but a passage.
When I arrived in Nuku Hiva, I had only recently finished travelling the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. The bodily memory of mountains, new roads, old roads, washboard surfaces and bomb-crater potholes was still fresh. Naturally, I used that memory to understand the roads of this island.
Nuku Hiva is known for steep, rugged terrain and coastal cliffs. Deep valleys divide its villages. “The road from the airport to the sea is new,” said William, my driver and guide, as he changed gears in a manual seven-seater. “The old road took two and a half hours. This one saves a whole hour.”
Our ride was not exactly smooth. William was warm and cheerful, though, and knew the island intimately. Horses still wandered freely in the mountains, most of them feral. Sometimes, while trying to avoid them, the car stalled. No one minded. We got out and let the sea wind move around us with the gentle horses.
People easily misunderstand islands. To speak of an island is not usually to think of mountains, yet to reach the sea here we first had to cross mountains of about a thousand metres, descend into a river valley and only then arrive. The two sides of the mountain had different climates too. “The coast is much wetter,” William said. The other side was dry and hot.
Villages are mostly by the sea, with a few scattered in the mountains. People fish on the coast and grow bananas and other crops in the forest. The French not only built new roads here but planted pines across the hillsides. “Most of what you see now is pine, an introduced species,” William said, unhappy about it. “The forest should not look like this.”
Since the late 1970s, the government of French Polynesia has planted Caribbean pine in the Marquesas to establish a local timber industry, reduce import costs, stabilise unsuitable agricultural land and prevent erosion. The trees grew well, too well. They spread beyond plantations, squeezed out native plants, altered ecosystems and increased fire risk in dry areas with their resin and needles.
William thought the landscape we saw now was largely artificial. Born in 1973, he had just glimpsed the island before it changed. Nicholas was more neutral: Polynesian ancestors had also transformed the islands through burning, clearing, grazing and the introduction of goats, horses and pigs. Goats ate saplings and prevented forest recovery. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many highland forests had already become grass slopes, scrub and bare ridges.
Our car wound through pine forest and mountain bends, circle after circle.
Bodies As Archives
I knew the Marquesas were one source of traditional tattooing. Here, tradition is not an object preserved behind glass but an ongoing process. Tattoo is one of its most visible forms.
William’s body was covered in traditional tattoos. He told me that tattooing here is often less a matter of personal taste than a strict social language. The placement, density and structure of patterns correspond to family, identity, life stage and spiritual attributes. The body becomes a carrier of history, not a private canvas.
The crucial point is this: when a person dies, certain tattoos allow the ancestors to recognise them and grant them final belonging.
Gear change, jolt, horse, stall. Neither humans nor horses cared much. William started the engine again and continued. “My tattoos combine modern and traditional forms. They let the ancestors recognise me, and they are also beautiful.” He said this with pride.
He said some tattooists still work in traditional ways, with bone needles and natural pigments, completing patterns within specific rituals. The process is slow and painful, but is regarded as a passage towards maturity and responsibility.
His tattooist was also a good friend. We later ran into him: a man with tattooed face, curved eyelashes and a bright smile. He was friendly and courteous. Tattoo, he said, was both responsibility and pleasure. Tradition continues like this on the islands, with its own ease, without grand declarations about cultural preservation or the heavy burden of rescuing a dying craft.
Only at the summit of a mountain road could we look down towards the bay. I had patience for winding roads, but water, I thought, looked so open.
A Sacred Place Still Alive
Le Nuku Hiva by Pearl Resorts sits in the coastal hills. Most guests, unsurprisingly, were French. Having come so far, I did not want to “return to France”, so I asked William to take me out.
At the foot of the mountain, Taiohae village still has a traditional ceremonial and gathering place, Koueva. It is now also a cultural heritage park, holding both identities at once.
When important visitors arrive, such as French officers, Koueva becomes a heritage site: traditional musicians, dancers and ritual practitioners perform grand ceremonies. Yet William told me that although people call it a cultural site, they still use it in daily life. It is ancestral sacred ground.
Dance is central to ceremony. William himself is an accomplished dancer. His steps are low and powerful, close to the earth, driven by drums and cries. Through movement he tells stories of hunting, migration, fertility and myth. The ancient past is continually re-performed through the body.
“But dancing in a sacred place feels different,” he said. “In performance, you are sharing culture. In ceremony on sacred ground, your body and mind suddenly open. You become one with everyone around you, with the land, the sea and the ancestors. They are all inside you, and you are part of them.”
William said it was difficult to describe and could only be felt. I had felt that connectedness before on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and in ceremonies among Indigenous communities elsewhere, so I understood.
We did not encounter a ceremony, but we saw children practising for one. Girls sat on the steps, their voices like wave after wave reaching the shore. Behind them, boys practised a war dance. Drums and harmony did not conflict; waves struck rocks. In the sunset, I forgot the way back.
Upeke
Hiva Oa, another island in the Marquesas, is where Paul Gauguin sought refuge, made a late burst of work and died. It has become shorthand for escaping European civilisation and modern society. That story makes the island too easy to read as the stage for a personal legend rather than as a complete cultural world of its own.
The spiritual centre of the island is not on canvas, nor in Gauguin’s house or beside his grave. It is hidden deep in an inland valley, scarcely marked and rarely explained: Upeke.
Upeke is a meʻae, a sacred site in Marquesan culture with religious, social and political meaning. It is not an isolated relic but a system of stone platforms embedded in the landscape. The stones are low and heavy, following the valley’s contours without any attempt at monumentality, yet the space holds a powerful order.
There are no fences and almost no signs. Moss covers the stones; plants grow from the cracks. Time here is not sealed away but absorbed. Upeke does not explain itself to visitors. Its existence is a worldview that needs no translation.
My guide Haianatea did not rush me to Gauguin’s house or grave. She brought me first to this ancestral sacred place. Before entering, she removed her flip-flops and walked barefoot over the volcanic stone. To me, the rough ground felt like a fierce foot massage. To her, it was respect for the ancestors: direct contact with the earth, with all the deities there, being nourished by them.
She stood in the ritual place and danced a welcome. Wind and birdsong accompanied her. “She is part of nature” was the only way I could describe it.
“A halo around the moon means we plant the next day,” Haianatea said as we walked deeper through the forest. “The moon is like an eye, watching from the sky to see whether people are working hard.”
In ancestral times, before Europeans arrived, this was a place for sacrifice, ceremony and social decision-making. It was also secret, and held great energy for islanders. “If an outsider came in without invitation, he would be killed and eaten,” she said. The pastoral beauty of the previous moment was abruptly interrupted by blood.
We passed altars of volcanic rock and tiki figures beneath century-old banyans. These were places of killing and cannibalism. After Europeans arrived, the ancestors risked their lives moving down the mountain to keep this secret hidden, even though it meant more conflict. The place became a ruin, but it was not destroyed. Haianatea still feels strong energy here, like goosebumps rising on the skin, as if drawn forward by a force.
Utukua
I was curious about tiki. Haianatea said they were guardians. One, made famous by French visitors as “the smiling tiki”, was better known than most. We got into the car and crossed the mountains to visit her.
“We have a tiki called Utukua,” Haianatea said. “She is known for her smile. But in the Marquesas there are no smiling tiki. There are female tiki here, of course, and male ones too.
“Utukua means a woman who heals her people with traditional plant medicine. In French they call her a healer. She looks as if she is smiling because of the tattoo beneath her lip. If you cover it, the smile disappears. She also looks as if she is wearing sunglasses, but that too is tattooing around the eyes. Women here did not use make-up; tattoos were make-up. In our ancestors’ time, men thought tattooed women were more beautiful.
“In the Marquesas, people wear sunglasses. Tiki do not.”
Haianatea shifted gears smoothly and took bends at speed while continuing the story. “U” is an onomatopoeic sound, like the call of a conch shell, used to summon people. Those far away respond with song; drums sound: tu-tu-tu. “Kua” refers to the feather of a red-and-black bird used in chiefs’ headdresses, and by extension carries honour.
Together, the name means: the woman who heals her people with traditional medicine has come; we will hold a ceremony to welcome her.
These women knew the properties of plants. Fruits, leaves and bark all had uses. They knew what to gather for fever and what to prepare for other illnesses. In ancestral times, treatment was not paid for. It was mutual help. In exchange, people helped them grow medicinal plants.
“Women herbalists were important people. When they came, we blew conch shells, sang loudly, beat drums hard and held a great ceremony to welcome them,” Haianatea repeated, as though a distant fact needed retelling in order to be made certain again.
Haianatea herself has tattooed arms: family patterns, her partner’s family patterns, and designs that trace her personal journey through Polynesia, even as far as Hawaiʻi. Each place she travelled left a traditional tattoo on her body.
“There is another reason you came here, besides curiosity about Polynesian culture, isn’t there?” she asked, as if seeing through me.
“If you had to guess?” I said.
“There is a part of you that is not ready to face certain decisions in the outside world.” She was right. I had been delaying a decision about whether to continue another project or part ways with my companion. The feeling of being bound made me breathless.
Haianatea said she could feel people’s bodily and emotional energy. “The French call it energy. Here we usually call it mana.” Mana is a supernatural spiritual force in Polynesian culture, moving through people, gods, ancestors and nature. It can be felt, transmitted and nourished.
“You want freedom,” she told me. “You cannot be tied down, whether by people or by things.”
Before I could respond, she moved on to something else she felt obliged to explain. “If you see me turn left and then suddenly right, it is to avoid falling rocks. Some are quite large. You will see them. It is not because I am drunk!” She laughed.
I had just travelled roads like this in Tibet and Sichuan. But why not install nets against falling stones? Her answer surprised me. Many goats live on the island and move along the cliffs. Nets would stop rocks, but they would hurt the goats.
On a long stretch of washboard road, I learnt that many roads in the Marquesas remain unpaved so that feral horses without nailed shoes have enough ground on which to run. These decisions had been discussed collectively.
My body was going numb from the jolts, yet I secretly admired people willing to make everyday roads more difficult for the sake of animals. For them, these were commuting routes, not adventurous stretches of wilderness.
At last we reached Utukua. After hearing her story for so long, meeting her felt like meeting a wise elder. Haianatea covered the tattoo beneath the tiki’s lip and the smile vanished. The tattoos around her eyes made her not only more beautiful but more perceptive: she recognised herbs, healed through knowledge and was indeed a guardian.
Only Utukua lives downstream in the mountains, Haianatea said. This is not a fortress and could easily be attacked, but no one attacks a herbalist. Other tiki stand higher and deeper in the mountains.
Sometimes, listening to Haianatea speak of Utukua, I could not tell whether she was talking about an ancestor or a tiki. I did not mind. Nicholas had told me that although many aspects of these islands were changed by Europeans and Christianity replaced traditional religion, islanders still have their own values and live by them. Mana, taboo, sacred ground: these continue to shape life.
At another sacred site, Haianatea said, “They are sacred and cannot be touched. Only people from powerful families may touch them.” Then she gently touched the tiki.
“It looks as if you come from a powerful family,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied. “There are many powerful families here. Many people want to touch the tiki and be nourished by their energy, but we do not do it casually. I touch them because I have something to tell them, emotions to release. Not with language, but with thought and heart.”
The Directness of Sea Routes
After so much winding through mysterious mountains, one has to go out to sea. At the harbour I found Maria and her husband Mai. Their village lies in a valley called Hakaui, reachable only by sea, a half-hour by speedboat. It was exactly what I wanted.
Mai steered. The wind hit my face with force and pleasure. The couple showed me cliffs like abstract paintings, searched for manta rays and sea urchins, and just as we were about to speed off again, Mai suddenly stopped and pointed to the rock wall: goats running across the cliff.
Finally, cutting through wind and waves, we reached the valley. Smoke rose from their small house. Everyone in the village was related. They travelled by boat between the village and the main island. Making coconut oil was their main livelihood.
“The sea route really is direct,” I said. After all those repeated mountain detours, this required no explanation.
Mountain roads wind. The sea is direct. Both are roads.