This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nauru, a single raised coral island of barely 21 square kilometers, is the world's smallest independent republic, its interior gouged into a lunar plateau by a century of phosphate strip mining that once made it, briefly, one of the richest countries on earth per capita and left it afterward reliant on foreign aid and, controversially, on hosting Australia's offshore asylum-processing center. About 93 per cent of Nauruans are Christian, split closely between the Nauru Congregational Church, descended from London Missionary Society work, and the Roman Catholic Church, with smaller Assemblies of God and Pacific Light House communities and a Confucian, Buddhist or Taoist minority among ethnic Chinese residents.
Independence from the joint Australian, New Zealand and United Kingdom trusteeship came on 31 January 1968, and Nauru joined the United Nations only in 1999, one of the last states to do so, a delayed step onto the world stage for a country whose phosphate wealth had already risen and substantially declined by the time it took that formal seat.