Mauna ʻAla Royal Mausoleum

Mauna ʻAla — 'fragrant mountain' — exists because of grief. King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma built it for their son Prince Albert, who died in 1862 at four years old; the king followed him fifteen months later, and the mausoleum in Nuʻuanu Valley became the royal family's resting place. On the night of October 30, 1865, the remains of twenty-one aliʻi were carried from the palace grounds to Mauna ʻAla in a torchlight procession — 'a never-to-be-forgotten night,' the Gazette called it, 'when the remains of the departed chiefs were removed to the Royal Mausoleum in the valley.'

The bones of Hawaiian royalty were not ordinary remains — they carried mana, spiritual power, and had to be protected from desecration even in death. Kamehameha I's iwi were hidden in a secret location in 1819 by his two most trusted retainers, and the location remains unknown to this day; the greatest king of Hawaiʻi is deliberately not at Mauna ʻAla. The mausoleum holds the rest — the Kamehameha crypt built by Charles Reed Bishop holds twenty-four members of the dynasty, and Queen Emma reportedly camped on the grounds and slept in the mausoleum beside her husband and son.

Queen Liliʻuokalani had the mausoleum converted to a chapel for commemorating the royal birthdays — the last sovereign's gesture toward the dynasty she was about to lose. The grounds are still guarded; the kapu on the aliʻi's bones has never been lifted.