Inside the Bishop Museum waits the greatest collection of Polynesian and Hawaiian cultural artifacts in the world, and the story of how it came to be is itself a piece of Hawaiian history. Charles Reed Bishop was an American banker who came to Hawaii in 1846 and married Princess Bernice Pauahi Paki, the last lineal descendant of the Kamehameha dynasty. When Princess Bernice died in 1884, she left her vast estate — including her extraordinary collection of Hawaiian royal objects — to the public.
Her husband founded the museum in 1889 as a memorial to her. What you can see here is extraordinary: feather cloaks of crimson and gold made from hundreds of thousands of tiny feathers, each gathered one by one; carved wooden ki'i akua temple images that once stood in sacred heiau; ancient navigational tools; royal regalia of the Hawaiian monarchy. The museum also houses the world's largest collection of natural history specimens from Hawaii and the Pacific.
In more recent decades, the Bishop Museum has become a center for the Hawaiian language revitalization movement and for Native Hawaiian cultural practice. It is simultaneously a monument to what was nearly lost and a celebration of what has survived.