Nauru is the world's smallest island nation, with an area of only 21 square kilometers, which is smaller than Weizhou Island in the Northwest Sea of Guangxi, with a total population of 9,200 people, the official language is English, and the currency used is the Australian dollar.
Such an inconspicuous island in the Pacific Ocean was once one of the richest countries in the world!
The location is very special, there are no other islands in the surrounding hundreds of square kilometers, so Nauru is the home of many seabirds in the surrounding seas.
The arrival of many seabirds has made Nauru's guano pile up like a mountain, and after tens of millions of years of accumulation, these bird droppings have finally become ten meters thick phosphate!
Nauru's phosphate was first discovered by the British in 1900, when more than half of Nauru's land had phosphate.
Nauru then went from being a small island that no one cared about to a territory in which Australia, Germany, Britain and other powers competed with each other.
For the indigenous people of Nauru, the mountain of gold in front of them was plundered at will, which must be very unhappy.
It wasn't until 1968 that Nauru finally broke free from Australian control, and the aborigines established their own country and took back the phosphate mining rights from the British!
Nauru, which has just established a new country, in order to get rid of poverty, frantically mined phosphate ore, and achieved "overnight wealth" by exporting phosphate resources!
At that time, Nauruans could be said to have no worries about food and clothing, not only eating, going to school, medical care for free, even the house was sent by the state for free, and even the water and electricity bills did not have to be paid by themselves!
In this comfortable environment, Nauru has become the country with the highest obesity rate in the world and the highest proportion of diabetes.
In 1975, during the high-speed development period in Nauru, the per capita GDP was four times that of the United States in the same period!
Nauru, which has a lot of wealth, began to build airports, set up its own airlines, and opened routes to more than a dozen countries, but for Nauru, which has a population of only a few thousand people, airlines are operating at a loss!
But the Nauruans also understand a truth, unrestrained export of phosphate, sooner or later a day will sit in the mountains and eat the sky.
Nauruans began to buy overseas properties for investment, and even the Nauruan government built a Nauru building in Melbourne, Australia, with plans to move into the building as soon as the phosphate was dug up.
In the early 1990s, Nauru had sold out phosphate, the economy began to fall into difficult times, and the Nauruan government began to sell overseas assets!
If Nauru had been able to rationally mine phosphate and develop its own suitable industries, it would not have become as poor as it is now!