Locals call Kawaiaha'o Church the Westminster Abbey of Hawaii, and you'll feel why. This is where Hawaiian royalty prayed, where royal funerals were held, where the coronations and state ceremonies of the Hawaiian Kingdom took place. The church you see today was completed in 1842 under the direction of Reverend Hiram Bingham, a New England Congregationalist missionary who arrived in Hawaii in 1820 as part of the first company of American missionaries.
What makes this building truly remarkable is its construction: every one of the fourteen thousand coral slabs used to build its walls was hand-cut by Hawaiian divers who descended up to twenty feet into the ocean reefs offshore. It took four years to quarry enough coral to complete the church. Services are still held here every Sunday, often partly in the Hawaiian language.
In the small cemetery beside the church you will find the graves of some of the first American missionaries and early Hawaiian converts, their tombstones a quiet record of the collision of two worlds that happened on this very ground beginning in 1820.