Tongans are very friendly people, will teach us all a thing or two about hospitality.

The difficulty is distinguishing between the tradition of the Tongan Kingship system and the current British imposter system of British royalty dressed up as Tongan. Coupled with that you have massive social experimentation bombarding such a small country with masses of immigrants in such a short period of time radically changing the face of Nuku 'alofa. With this comes all the emporiums (Chinese version of the warehouse chain) lots of cheap junk to get the people hooked on.

This is in part where you get those fervently opposed to any descent concerning the king coming from the royalists for whom the King can do no wrong, then there are those that can see the discrepancies now between the have's and the have not's, then there are those opposed to modernisation, and those opposed to capitalism......and added to that, those that want all foreigners out...and lastly those that are a combination of some or most of those above.

Add to that some petrol and matches and then it was only ever going to be a matter of time.