Christmas Island – the next big thing in travel? Home to Chinese, Indians and Malays, it’s a fascinating mix of cultures

From the terrace of the Lucky Ho restaurant, in the Poon Saan district of The Settlement, Christmas Island’s only town, all looks well. The air-conditioned interior is busy with Chinese families and, across the road, a large crowd is watching a Disney film at an open-air cinema.

The menu features the Sichuan classic gong bao ji ding (spicy diced chicken with peanuts), though that Chinese province is several thousand kilometres away. Lucky Ho, one of only about half a dozen restaurants on the island, is run by members of China’s Hakka minority, whose ancestors mostly left their homeland through Guangdong ports. Just how authentically fiery could the dish be?

The waitress brings a sample of the locally grown peppers used, and offers to add more, but the numbing sensation that makes Sichuan cooking distinctive just isn’t there. Instead, the sauce has the pleasant sweetness of Hakka cooking. Meanwhile, changing demographics and economic uncertainty mean that the recipe for Christmas Island’s way of life, and the make-up of the society itself, may soon be altered.

This isolated speck in the Indian Ocean, an Australian possession that’s a four-hour flight northwest of Perth, was founded both economically and physically on phosphate. Repeated lifting of the sea floor over millions of years produced layers of dead coral that phosphatised into the world’s favourite ferti­liser, and induced Britain to annex the island – which had been named on Christmas Day, 1643, by Captain William Mynors – in 1888.

Exports of phosphate began in 1895, and the sale of about 700,000 tonnes annually is the mainstay of the economy today. The 1,200 residents are mostly descendants of Chinese and Malay labourers brought in to extract the mineral, and their temples dot the landscape much as their traditional festivals dot the calendar.