London will showcase Hawaiʻi starting next week. The British Museum opens its doors to a new exhibit titled “Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans” that explores the relationship between Hawaiʻi and Great Britain.
It will feature 150 treasures, among them gifts from Hawaiʻi’s aliʻi over the years, and it will catalogue its inventory of Hawaiʻi artifacts — said to be close to a thousand pieces.
The show will feature a feather cape presented by King Kamehameha II, known as Liholiho, on a visit 200 years ago. Tragically, Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu died from measles on that trip.
A key link to making this show happen is a former Bishop Museum curator who is now the curator and head of Oceania at the British Museum, Alice Christophe. The Conversation spoke to Christophe about what it took to mount the show.
“The process of putting together the exhibition, 'Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans,' began around two years ago now, and it's been go, go, go since,” Christophe said. “The idea of an exhibition about Hawaiʻi in collaboration with people in the community, that's something that started in 2023, but truly, the exhibition process itself began two years ago. So it's been a long journey.”
Christophe explained that the core part of the show tells the story of Liholiho and Kamāmalu’s journey to the U.K. to seek alliance and protection from the British Crown.
“This is really a story that we wanted to tell and honor and mark in that space,” she said. “It's a story that's been very seldom told here in the U.K. and in Europe in general, and we felt that with that marker, the 200 years since the journey, and the events that followed, this was really the right time to do this exhibition. So we organized the exhibition with this story as the core, as the sort of the main piko (center), and then we grew the story in concentric circles from that piko to think about that relationship before the time of Liholiho.”
The exhibit will bring together borrowed pieces from the Bishop Museum, displaying objects from the Hawaiian Royal Delegation and the British Crown side by side. It will also feature a large ʻahuʻula (feathered cape) sent from Kamehameha I.
Christophe told HPR that it was a great privilege to work with community members, cultural practitioners, artists, scholars, and linguists on this exhibition, and she is excited for this to display an existing bridge between Hawaiʻi and the U.K.
“Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans” opens to the public in London on Jan. 15 and will be on display until May 25.
This story aired on The Conversation on Jan. 7, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
