Sonsorol's colonial history reads like a relay race of empires. After the Trinidad's crew sighted the islands in 1522, a Spanish missionary expedition under Sargento Mayor Francisco Padilla arrived on November 30, 1710, aboard the patache Santisima Trinidad from Manila. The Jesuits who came with Padilla made Sonsorol likely the first of the Palau Islands visited by a European. In 1712, Spanish naval officer Bernardo de Egoy explored the chain further. Then in 1899, Spain sold the islands to the German Empire. Germany lost them in World War I, when Japan took control. The United States claimed them at the end of World War II and administered the territory until Palau's independence. Each transfer happened in distant capitals; the islanders, speaking their Chuukic language on their reef-fringed specks of land, adapted to each new flag.

In December 2012, Typhoon Bopha tore through the Southwest Islands with catastrophic force. The entire population -- 37 from Sonsorol, 19 from Pulo Anna, and two from Merir -- was evacuated to Arakabesang in Koror. When the Palau government assessed what it would take to rebuild, a harsh calculus emerged: resupplying and reconstructing all four inhabited islands was too expensive and too logistically difficult. Only Sonsorol, the most accessible of the group, was re-inhabited. Forty-two people returned to the island. Pulo Anna and Merir, which had sustained small communities for centuries, stood empty. As of 2014, Sonsorol Island was the only inhabited land in the entire state -- a government decision that effectively ended continuous human presence on islands people had called home for generations.

The state operates two elementary schools, both established in 1972. Pulo Anna Elementary School has one classroom, one teacher, and -- as of September 2018 -- five students, who must stay on the otherwise deserted island to attend class. Sonsorol Elementary School serves thirteen students who already live on the island. Beyond elementary school, options narrow sharply. In 1962, Palau opened its only public high school, Palau High School, in Koror City. For Sonsorol's children, continuing their education means leaving everything they know and crossing 300 kilometers of open Pacific to live in a city that might as well be another country. The traditional high chief, whose title is Nurap, presides over a state where education requires exile.

Sonsorol's four islands stretch from north to south through warm Pacific waters. Fanna, nearly circular with a diameter of 350 meters, sits 1.6 kilometers north of Sonsorol Island proper. Sonsorol itself is two kilometers long and up to 890 meters wide, its west coast holding the capital village of Dongosaru. Further south, elliptical Pulo Anna lies in the flow of the Equatorial Countercurrent year-round. Merir, the southernmost, extends 2.2 kilometers with reef reaching over a kilometer offshore in the south. All are thickly wooded with coconut palms. Coral reef fringes every shore, extending up to 460 meters from Pulo Anna and over a kilometer from Merir. The total land area is 3.12 square kilometers -- a state you could walk across in an afternoon, scattered across a stretch of ocean that takes days to cross by boat.