Created as a gift to honor King Kalakaua, this is the only book of Hawaiian poetic compositions published during the Hawaiian Monarchy period. This privately published collection of 48 chants was a commemorative gift to the King at the elaborate two-week celebration held to mark his fiftieth birthday in 1886. Only seven copies of the original are known to exist today including one copy at the Hawaiian Historical Society Library.

This facsimile reprint of the 1886 Honolulu publication is the first in the Society's Hawaiian Language Reprint Series and is available in softcover and clothbound editions (328 pages). The limited clothbound collectors edition is bound in midnight blue cloth with silver foil stamping on the front and spine.