His coffin carried aloft by 1,000 pallbearers dressed in grass mats, Tongan King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV was buried on Tuesday in a ceremony combining Christian hymn-singing and ancient Polynesian ritual.
The streets of Nuku’alofa, the capital of the South Pacific’s last monarchy, were draped in the mourning colors of black and purple as thousands of tearful Tongans gathered to pay their respects to the man who had ruled them for 41 years.
Mourners will later feast on pigs roasted in umu, or open pits, dug in the grounds of villages around the nation of 170 coral and volcanic islands before a month of mourning during which dancing and loud music will be banned.
Tupou IV died in a New Zealand hospital on Sept. 10 after a long illness.
The 88-year-old king, who entered the record books in the 1970s as the world’s heaviest monarch, is succeeded by his son, George Tupou V, a 58-year-old bachelor known for his penchant for military uniforms and for driving around in a London taxi.
One thousand pallbearers, dressed in black and wrapped in traditional ta’ovala grass mats, carried Tupou IV’s huge wooden catafalque in relays of 150 from the palace where he had lain in state to the Mala’e Kula, the site of Tongan royal tombs.
A 21-gun artillery salute boomed across Nuku’alofa as the black-and-gold topped catafalque made its way down the kilometer-long Road of the King flanked by hundreds of schoolgirls.
Foreign dignitaries including Japanese Crown Prince Naruhito, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Australian Governor-General Michael Jeffery joined up to 10,000 ordinary Tongans in a Wesleyan Christian funeral service.
Tupou IV’s mahogany and lead-lined coffin was then lowered into his tomb and covered with woven mats before the nima tapu, the royal undertakers called “sacred hands”, began to fill the grave with sand carried in woven baskets.
He was buried next to the tomb of his mother, Queen Salote Tupou III, who he succeeded to the throne in 1965.
Deep esteem
The Polynesian nation, dubbed the Friendly Islands by British explorer James Cook, holds its royal family in deep esteem.
Praised in official biographies for leaving a “towering legacy”, Tupou IV was the first Tongan to gain a university degree and placed great emphasis on education.
As Minister for Education, he toured the country with a movie projector and charged a small fee at film showings to raise money for the impoverished nation’s first high school.
The royal family controls a semi-feudal political system in the nation of some 105,000 people about 1,250 miles north of New Zealand.
Tonga witnessed unprecedented demonstrations in May 2005, when an estimated 10,000 people took to the streets to demand democracy and public ownership of assets.
The royal family announced last week that Tupou V, educated at Oxford and Sandhurst military academy, would give up all his business interests in Tonga’s power company, brewery, a telecommunications company and an airline.
The May 2005 protests were prompted in part by steep price rises proposed by the power company.
Tonga’s economy depends on subsistence farming, remittances from expatriates, tourism and fishing.
