ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom (2026)

Stand on King Street in downtown Honolulu, look through the tall iron fence at the pale stone building set back on its green lawn, and you are looking at the only royal palace on American soil. Kings and queens actually reigned here. ʻIolani Palace is where the Hawaiian Kingdom entertained the world at its height, and it is where that kingdom was taken from its people. Both things happened behind the same walls, less than two years apart.

We grew up passing this place, and it still stops us every time. Plenty of visitors stroll the grounds for twenty minutes and head back to Waikīkī without ever going inside. We think that is a missed chance, because few spots in all of Hawaiʻi hold a heavier story. Here is the real history of ʻIolani Palace, the 1893 overthrow, and the queen who refused to let her people bleed for her throne.

Map showing the location of ʻIolani Palace in downtown Honolulu on the island of Oʻahu — ʻIolani Palace sits in the heart of downtown Honolulu, on the corner of King and Richards Streets.

A Royal Hawk and the House That Came Before

The name tells you who this place was built for. ʻIolani joins ʻio, the native Hawaiian hawk that flies higher than any other bird on the islands, with lani, meaning heavenly or royal. It was one of the given names of Kamehameha IV, and it carried the idea of a chief who soars above the rest.

An earlier building stood on this ground first. It was a wood and stone house called Hale Aliʻi, the House of the Chiefs, built by the high chief Kekūanaōʻa. During the reign of Kamehameha V, the Privy Council chose to rename it ʻIolani Palace in honor of the late king. When Kalākaua decided the kingdom needed something grander, that older house came down and the palace we see today rose in its place.

The Palace Kalākaua Built

King David Kalākaua, elected to the throne in 1874 and later nicknamed the Merrie Monarch for reviving hula and Hawaiian arts, had just become the first reigning monarch in the world to circle the globe in 1881, sitting with emperors, sultans, and presidents along the way. He wanted a home that would tell every visiting diplomat that Hawaiʻi was a modern nation among nations, not a colony waiting to happen. The cornerstone was laid on December 31, 1879 with full Masonic rites, and the building was finished in 1882 at a cost of more than $340,000, a staggering sum for a small kingdom. Three architects shaped the final design, in a style often called American Florentine.

On February 12, 1883, nine years after he took the throne, Kalākaua held a formal coronation and crowned himself and his queen, Kapiʻolani, at Keliʻiponi Hale, the octagonal Coronation Pavilion that still stands near the King Street gate. The palace he built was not only beautiful, it was ahead of its time. Kalākaua had visited Thomas Edison in 1881, and by June of 1887 ʻIolani Palace glowed with 325 electric lights, including 72 in the Throne Room alone. That was roughly four years before the White House had electric lighting. The palace also had a telephone and indoor plumbing with flush toilets and running hot water, while much of the world still lit its rooms with gas and whale oil.

For one bright decade this was the beating heart of a confident nation. The Hawaiian Kingdom kept treaties and diplomatic ties with countries around the world, and the palace hosted state dinners, grand balls, and long evenings of hula and Hawaiian music in rooms finished with native koa wood and imported chandeliers. Kalākaua filled the place with the culture an earlier generation had tried to stamp out, and for a while Honolulu received the world in style.

The Queen Who Would Not Bow

Kalākaua died in San Francisco on January 20, 1891. His sister took the throne later that month as Queen Liliʻuokalani, the first woman to rule the kingdom in her own right. She inherited a crown that had already been gutted. In 1887, a party of mostly American and European businessmen, backed by an armed militia, had forced Kalākaua to sign what Hawaiians call the Bayonet Constitution. It stripped the monarchy of most of its power and stripped the vote from the majority of Native Hawaiians and Asian residents.

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Liliʻuokalani meant to give that power back. Thousands of her people signed petitions asking for a new constitution, and on January 14, 1893, she moved to proclaim one that would restore the crown’s authority and the Hawaiian vote. Her own cabinet lost its nerve and refused to back her. Her opponents, who had been waiting for an opening, took it at once.

Three Days in January: The 1893 Overthrow

A group of thirteen men calling themselves the Committee of Safety, led by the lawyer Lorrin Thurston, organized to end the monarchy for good. The kingdom’s marshal, Charles Wilson, sensed the plot and asked permission to arrest them, but the shaken cabinet hesitated, and the moment slipped away.

On January 16, 1893, the United States Minister to Hawaiʻi, John L. Stevens, who openly favored annexation, ordered 162 armed sailors and Marines ashore from the USS Boston, anchored in Honolulu Harbor about half a mile (0.8 km) away. The troops took up positions near the palace. They never entered the grounds and never fired a shot, but everyone understood the message their rifles carried. Only one shot was fired in the whole affair, wounding a Hawaiian policeman during a struggle over a wagon of guns.

The next afternoon, January 17, 1893, Henry Cooper read a proclamation from the steps of the government building across the street, Aliʻiōlani Hale, abolishing the monarchy and declaring a Provisional Government led by Sanford B. Dole. To avoid the loss of her people’s lives against such odds, Liliʻuokalani yielded. She surrendered, in her own words, “to the superior force of the United States,” and signed a protest asking the American government to review the facts and set the wrong right. She believed it would.

A Prisoner in Her Own Palace

The wrong was not set right. In January 1895, royalists led by Robert Wilcox and Samuel Nowlein tried to overturn the new government and restore the queen. The uprising failed within days, and when guns were found buried in the garden at her Washington Place home, Liliʻuokalani was arrested.

She was tried by a military tribunal in her own Throne Room in February 1895 for misprision of treason, meaning she knew of a plot and failed to report it. The court fined her $5,000 and sentenced her to five years of hard labor, then commuted that to imprisonment upstairs in the palace. For about eight months she lived in a single corner room on the second floor, the windows draped, one companion allowed during daylight. Cut off from newspapers and from her people, she wrote. She stitched a remarkable quilt that recorded the overthrow, her trial, and her imprisonment, and she composed music, including The Queen’s Prayer, Ke Aloha o Ka Haku, written for the lāhui she could no longer walk among. Her most beloved song, Aloha ʻOe, she had written years earlier, around 1878, and the myth that it came from her prison cell is just that, a myth.

Under threat that her jailed supporters would be put to death, the queen signed a formal abdication on January 24, 1895. She was released to house arrest at Washington Place that September and granted a full pardon in 1896. Liliʻuokalani never stopped pressing her people’s case. In 1898 she published her own account, Hawaiʻi’s Story by Hawaiʻi’s Queen, and she lived at Washington Place until her death in 1917, still regarded by countless Hawaiians as their rightful queen.

From Kingdom to Territory

The Provisional Government did not wait long. On July 4, 1894, it declared itself the Republic of Hawaiʻi, with Sanford Dole as its first and only president. In Washington, President Grover Cleveland sent his own investigator, James Blount, to learn what had happened. Blount reported plainly that the overthrow had been wrong and that the American minister had helped it along, and Cleveland called for the queen to be restored. Dole refused to step down, and a president cannot easily force a government he has chosen not to recognize.

What rarely makes the textbooks is how hard Hawaiians fought it on paper. In the fall of 1897, with an annexation treaty sitting in front of the U.S. Senate, members of Hui Aloha ʻĀina traveled by horseback, by canoe, and on foot to public meetings on every major island to gather signatures against it. They collected 21,269 of them, more than half of the roughly 39,000 Native Hawaiians counted at the time, and four delegates carried the 556-page document to Washington that December. The treaty never got the votes. Those are the Kūʻē Petitions, and they sat largely forgotten in the National Archives until the historian Noenoe Silva brought them back to light in the 1990s. Families here still go looking for their great-great-grandparents’ names on those pages.

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Then the politics shifted. With William McKinley in the White House and the Spanish-American War making Pearl Harbor look strategically priceless, Congress annexed Hawaiʻi by joint resolution, the Newlands Resolution, in the summer of 1898. On August 12, 1898, the Hawaiian flag was lowered on the palace steps as the Royal Hawaiian Band played Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī, the anthem Kalākaua himself had written, and the American flag rose in its place. Many Hawaiians could not bear to watch, and some who helped lower the flag kept pieces of it as heirlooms. One small footnote of the era: the pineapple magnate James Dole, whose name still hangs over the Dole Plantation up in Wahiawā, was a cousin of Sanford Dole.

Eighty Years as a Capitol, Then Home Again

For the next eight decades the palace was not a museum but an office. It served as the working capitol for the Provisional Government, the Republic, the Territory of Hawaiʻi, and finally the State of Hawaiʻi after statehood on August 21, 1959. Lawmakers held sessions where royalty had once dined and danced, and over the years the palace’s original furnishings, sold off at auction after the overthrow, were slowly hunted down and brought back.

Government finally moved out in 1969, into the new State Capitol built right behind it. The Friends of ʻIolani Palace, formed in 1966, led a careful restoration, and the palace reopened as a museum in 1978. It had been named a National Historic Landmark in 1962. On January 17, 1993, the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow, tens of thousands of people, by most counts between 20,000 and 30,000, marched to these grounds. That November, President Bill Clinton signed the Apology Resolution, Public Law 103-150, in which the United States formally apologized for its role in overthrowing the kingdom. The palace today is a living place, not a relic. The Hawaiian flag still flies over it, the Royal Hawaiian Band still plays free concerts on the grounds, and for many Native Hawaiians this remains sacred ground and the center of a conversation about sovereignty that has never ended.

Visiting ʻIolani Palace With Respect

The palace stands in downtown Honolulu at 364 South King Street, Honolulu, HI 96813, on the corner of King and Richards Streets, with the ticket office in the old barracks, Hale Koa, just inside the grounds. It is open Tuesday through Saturday, roughly 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and closed Sunday and Monday. As of 2026 you can choose a docent-led guided tour or a self-led audio tour, and both walk you through the first and second floors before ending in the basement galleries, where the crown jewels and royal orders are kept. Recent pricing runs about $28 for adults and $13 for keiki on the audio tour, and about $34 for adults on the guided tour, with children four and under free. Days, times, and prices shift with the season, so book ahead and confirm the current details through the official site.

Tickets are sold online only, with no walk-ups, so reserve before you go at iolanipalace.org or by calling 808-522-0832. You can read more about the grounds through Hawaiʻi State Parks at dlnr.hawaii.gov. Inside, you will slip cloth booties over your shoes to protect the original floors, and photography is limited in the state rooms, so plan to simply take it in. On the grounds, notice the raised mound ringed by a low fence near the palace. That is Pohukaina, once a royal tomb, and it is treated as sacred, so please walk around it rather than on it. The grounds are free to wander, and on select Kamaʻāina Sundays the palace opens its doors to the community.

If you can time it, the Royal Hawaiian Band plays a free concert on the palace lawn most Fridays at noon. The band was founded in 1836 by Kamehameha III, it is the oldest municipal band in the country and the only full-time one, and hearing Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī played on that lawn, by that band, in front of that building, lands differently than reading about it.

However you visit, come the way you would to any family’s most treasured home, quietly and with aloha.

Walk the grounds slowly. Stand at the front steps where a flag came down and a queen said goodbye to her kingdom, and the history stops feeling like something in a book. It is right there under your feet, and in Hawaiʻi, it is still being written.