Flag of Hawaii

What the Hawaii state flag looks like

The state flag of Hawaii is a rectangle in a 1:2 ratio. Its field is made of eight horizontal stripes that repeat in the order white, red, blue. Counting from the top, the stripes run white, red, blue, white, red, blue, white, red, so the bottom stripe is red. In the upper hoist corner sits a canton showing the Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom, with the red cross of St. George, the white diagonal cross of St. Andrew and the red diagonal cross of St. Patrick on a blue ground.

There is no coat of arms, seal or lettering on the flag. The design is among the simplest of the fifty states, and it stays recognizable at a distance because the stripes and the canton are all it uses. Unlike most state flags, it is not a seal on a blue field, so it is easy to tell apart from the others at a glance.

Hawaii flag meaning and symbolism

The eight stripes are usually said to stand for the eight main islands of the archipelago: Hawaiʻi, Maui, Kahoʻolawe, Lānaʻi, Molokaʻi, Oʻahu, Kauaʻi and Niʻihau. This is the explanation most often given, though no law spells out the symbolism of the individual colors, which are best described as the traditional red, white and blue of the design.

The Union Jack is the part that surprises most visitors. Hawaii was never a British colony. The canton is generally traced to the close ties between the Hawaiian kings and Great Britain in the early 1800s, when Kamehameha I valued British friendship and protection. A common story links it to the British Royal Navy ships and captains who visited the islands, and another notes that Hawaii used it to avoid favoring either the United States or Britain during the War of 1812. Historians do not agree on a single origin, so the flag is better read as a record of that diplomatic balancing act than as a sign of British rule.

For many Hawaiians the flag also represents the Hawaiian Kingdom and its independence. Some sovereignty activists fly it upside down as a signal of distress, a practice that echoes the traditional use of an inverted flag at sea.

History of the Hawaii flag

The earliest versions of a Hawaiian flag date to the reign of Kamehameha I, who unified the islands by 1810. Accounts from the 1810s describe a flag with stripes and a British canton, and the design is often dated to about 1816. In these early years the number of stripes varied, with sources describing seven, eight or nine, and the colors were not fully standardized.

The design was fixed with eight stripes in 1845, under Kamehameha III, and it served as the flag of the Kingdom of Hawaii for decades. One brief interruption came in 1843, during the Paulet Affair, when a British naval officer took control of the islands and raised the Union Jack for about five months. The kingdom's sovereignty was restored on July 31, 1843, a date now remembered in Hawaii as Lā Hae Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiian Flag Day. The motto on the state seal, Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono, which means "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness," comes from that restoration.

After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, the Republic of Hawaii kept the same flag in 1894. The U.S. annexed the islands in 1898, and the flag continued as the flag of the Territory of Hawaii. When Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, the design stayed in use as the official state flag. A separate sovereignty flag, sometimes called the Kanaka Maoli flag, is flown by some Hawaiians as a political emblem and is not an official symbol.

Flag etiquette in Hawaii

The Hawaii flag is flown with the U.S. flag at government buildings and schools, and the U.S. flag takes the place of honor. When the governor orders flags lowered to half-staff after the death of a public figure or in remembrance of an event, the state flag is lowered along with the national flag. Learn more about how the states compare on our list of U.S. state flags, or see the national flag on the page for the United States.