"More than just a meeting house ... The story of how Rauru came to the museum is a curious tale; after much painstaking research, Carl Triesch has, for the first time, been able to retrace almost every step of this journey. How Georg Thilenius, who would later become the director of our museum on his voyage to the South Seas as a young doctor in 1898 spontaneously fell in love with Rauru as a work of art on this first encounter, and how it then, against overwhelming odds, found its way to him in the museum