According to one story, Tu'i Malila was one of a pair of tortoises given by Captain Cook to the Tongan royal family upon his visit to Tonga in July 1777.

[3] Despite being kicked by a horse and run over several times, the tortoise continued its life, although it was left blind and with a badly wounded right-hand side.

[3] During Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Tour of Tonga in 1953, Tu'i Malila was one of the first animals shown to the monarch on her official visit to the island nation.

In 2022, Jonathan, a tortoise living on the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena exceeded Tu'i Malila's reported age and is still alive as of 2024.

A Reuters dispatch of the tortoise makes an appearance as an epigraph in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?