Most popular Maldives Culture article: Rosset in Male, 1885

Young man, Male, Maldives 1885

Carl Wilhelm Rosset, a doctor and explorer born in Freiburg, Wurttemberg, Germany, took photographs and collected artefacts and specimens while staying in Male' from 29 October until 21 December 1885.

Most of Rosset's photos were probably destroyed in Berlin in 1945 at the end of World War II.

The Rosset article is the most viewed page on the Maldives Culture website. Rosset's full English account of his visit published by The Graphic in 1886 (appearing on the Internet with complete text for the first time), plus coloured additions from a shorter but more frank and revealing German language article by Rosset in Illustrierte Zeitung in 1887, translated by the Swedish Maldivian history researcher Lars Vilgon.

Rosset's acquisitions, collected with the help of the leading minister Atireege Ibrahim Didi (Abrahim Deedee in the article), formed the major part of displays of Maldivian products, manufactures and cultural items at exhibitions in London, Berlin and Chicago.

Rosset also published articles about Maldives with the Zoological Society of London and the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.