Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV
Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV was King of Tonga for forty-one years, from his mother Queen Salote's death in December 1965 to his own in September 2006, the first Tongan to take a university degree, who took the kingdom out of its British protectorate in 1970 while keeping the constitution of 1875 that gave the king and the nobles the parliament, and who spent the reign looking for money for an island of a hundred thousand people with nothing to sell. There was a scheme to sell Tongan passports to Hong Kong Chinese that raised twenty-six million dollars, which the court jester he had appointed then lost on the American insurance market. There was a plan to make the country a tax haven, another to import Iranian oil, another to burn tyres for power, another to make Tonga a satellite nation by claiming orbital slots, which worked. He was born in 1918, educated in Sydney, took an arts degree and a law degree there, and was his mother's prime minister from 1949 to 1965, the years of the schools he built, the college that bears his name and the shipping line. He weighed, at his heaviest, over two hundred kilograms, held the Guinness record for the heaviest monarch. In the 1990s he took to the gym and lost seventy of them, with the whole island invited to follow. The reign was the reign of the nobles' parliament and the church, and of an emigration that put more Tongans in Auckland and Salt Lake City than in Tonga and sent home the remittances the economy lived on. From the 1990s it was the reign of a pro-democracy movement led by the commoner Akilisi Pohiva that wanted the king to give up the government and that he declined to hear. The riots that burned Nukualofa's centre came two months after his death, and it was his son George Tupou V who conceded the reforms of 2010. He died in Auckland in September 2006 at eighty-eight, and the funeral in Nukualofa, with the royal undertakers of the hereditary Haatufunga clan and the kava ceremonies, lasted a month.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: Tongan
- Roles: king, monarch
