Who ruled Honolulu?

Honolulu lies on the southern shore of Oʻahu, one of the Hawaiian Islands, in the middle of the North Pacific. Its name means "sheltered bay" in Hawaiian, and its harbour, protected by a coral reef, is the best on the island. That harbour drew foreign ships from the 1790s and turned a cluster of villages into the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom; after the kingdom was overthrown, Honolulu became the centre of American power in the Pacific.

Voyagers from central Polynesia, using the star-guided techniques of Polynesian navigation, settled the Hawaiian Islands around a thousand years ago, though estimates of the date vary. On Oʻahu they built fishponds, irrigated taro terraces in the valleys and a society ruled by chiefs. Waikīkī, now a district of Honolulu, was for a time the seat of Oʻahu's ruling chiefs. In November 1794 the British captain William Brown became the first foreigner known to sail into Honolulu harbour.

The following year Kamehameha I, ruler of the island of Hawaiʻi, invaded Oʻahu and defeated its forces at the Battle of Nuʻuanu, where many defenders were driven over the cliffs of the Nuʻuanu Pali. He went on to unite the islands into the Hawaiian Kingdom, and from 1804 he kept his court on Oʻahu for several years, first at Waikīkī and then at Honolulu, where he could oversee the growing trade with visiting ships.

Honolulu prospered first on the sandalwood trade with China and then as a leading Pacific port of call for American whaling fleets. American Protestant missionaries arrived in 1820 and built the Kawaiahaʻo Church from blocks of coral. In 1845 Kamehameha III moved the kingdom's permanent capital from Lahaina on Maui to Honolulu. In the later 19th century sugar plantations, owned largely by Americans and worked by immigrant labourers from China, Japan, Portugal and elsewhere, came to dominate the economy. King Kalākaua built ʻIolani Palace, completed in 1882.

On 17 January 1893 a group of mostly American businessmen, supported by marines landed from an American warship, overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. They set up a provisional government and then the Republic of Hawaii, and in 1898 the United States annexed the islands. In 1993 the US Congress passed a resolution formally apologising for the American role in the overthrow.

Honolulu became the capital of the Territory of Hawaii in 1900, and the nearby naval base at Pearl Harbor grew into the main base of the US Pacific Fleet. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, carried out by the Empire of Japan, brought the United States into World War II, and the city spent the war under martial law as a military hub. Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959. Jet travel then made Honolulu, and Waikīkī in particular, a major tourist destination. The city proper has about 350,000 people, while the consolidated City and County of Honolulu, which covers all of Oʻahu, has about one million.