The first sugar to be made in Hawai‘i is credited to a man from China. The newspaper Polynesian, in its issue of January 31, 1852, carried this item attributed to a prominent sugar planter on Maui, L. L. Torbert: “Mr. John White, who came to these islands in 1797, and is now living with me, says that in 1802, sugar was first made at these islands by a native of China, on the island of Lana‘i. He came here in one of the vessels trading for sandalwood, and brought a stone mill and boilers, and after grinding off one small crop and making it into sugar, went back the next year with his fixtures, to China.” Itinerant sugar millers were the custom in China in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, so the account is plausible. Undoubtedly, an adventurous sugar miller embarked on a sandalwood trading vessel to pursue wealth in the Sandalwood Isles.

Native Hawaiians planted sugar cane on the banks of taro patches as a part of their food supply. As an itinerant sugar maker, the sugar miller set up his works, ground cane, made sugar from the juice, and divided the products, sugar and molasses, equally with the suppliers of cane.

From this elemental beginning, the Hawaiian sugar industry came into being, expanded to become the dominant segment of the Hawaiian economy by the time of the Civil War in the United States, and maintained that position until supplanted by the tourist industry in the 1960s.

By Robert H. Hughes