Tahiti is the largest island of the Society Islands, in the South Pacific territory that France governs as French Polynesia. A high volcanic island settled by Polynesian voyagers about a thousand years ago, it became, after European ships arrived in the 1760s, the West's defining image of a tropical paradise, and later a French colony at the center of the twentieth-century Pacific. Home to a living Polynesian society, it remains far more complicated than the postcard the world made of it.
In 1768 a French navigator sailed away from Tahiti convinced he had found the birthplace of the goddess of love, and christened it New Cythera. Europe believed him. For the next two centuries the island became the West's favorite daydream: painted by Gauguin, promised to honeymooners, printed on a million posters. The daydream was always someone else's home. Beneath it lay a Polynesian kingdom, a mission church, a colony, and, in the same French territory two hundred years later, a nuclear testing range. Paradise was the one thing Tahiti was never allowed to be.