They wanted rice.

One hundred-and-twenty-five years later, Islanders are still serious about rice.

Our love of rice — steamed, white, short-grain rice; long-grain jasmine rice; but also rice noodles and rice flour — is at the core of local culture.

Ann Kondo Corum, author of several books on Island foodways, boggles for a minute when she's asked about the importance of rice in local culture. It's a question almost too obvious to answer.

"Rice is the most important staple to the Island people. It appears in the diets of almost all the ethnic groups that came to Hawai'i, except the Portuguese," she said. (And the Hawaiians who got here first, of course.)

Hers was a 3-cup-a-day family. Every day. And Corum's dearest rice memory is watching her mother make musubi in preparation for a family outing to the beach — perfectly formed little triangles of rice with the salty pickled plum adding a bright spot of scarlet. "When I would try to make them, they'd come out like baseballs and she'd scold me," said Corum, who grew up in Bingham Tract in Honolulu.

Today, regardless of our ethnicity, we carry rice cookers to Mainland colleges, teach our children to cook rice before they know how to operate the toaster, start the rice while we're thinking about what else to make for dinner. We eat plate lunch, sushi, musubi, fried rice, gau, mochi cake, butter mochi, mochiko chicken, bibingka, phô, bun, phad Thai, rice roll, sticky rice, jook, rice wrapped in lotus leaf and, increasingly, brown or hapa rice.

As the Honolulu Academy of Arts readies to open a long-running "Art of Rice" exhibit on Feb. 17, about rice and its cultural and spiritual importance in Asia, the questions arise: How did rice come to occupy the center of Island plates? And what are the traditions associated with rice here? The Advertiser is conducting an essay contest to explore the latter question (see entry information accompanying this story).

As to how rice became a staple in a taro- and sweet potato-eating place, many factors played a role.

The devastating effects of imported illnesses on Hawaiians meant that many taro lo'i were lying fallow at the same time that rice-hungry contract workers from China were flooding into Hawai'i (the first contract workers arrived in 1852).

Rice was one of a wide range of crops researched by government and private enterprise eager to realize Hawai'i's commercial potential. Horticulturist M. Holstein, who worked for the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society, is credited with identifying a variety of rice that would prosper here, with the first commercial harvest occurring in 1862.

Karol Haraguchi, whose husband's family operated a rice mill that has now been restored in Hanalei Valley on Kaua'i, reports in her bibliography, "Rice in Hawai'i" (1987), that King Kamehameha IV encouraged rice plantings by offering land grants to prospective farmers.

Douglas D. L. Chong, whose history of the Chinese in Waipahu, "Ancestral Reflections" (1998), includes a detailed chapter on rice growing, said it was the "empathetic and symbiotic" relationship between Hawaiians and Chinese that launched the Hawai'i rice industry. Chinese plantation workers in great numbers completed their contracts and turned to rice farming, familiar to them from home.

They leased land (or just borrowed it), secured financing from Chinatown merchants, and eventually built rice mills. Leasing out land provided income for many Hawaiians, who would typically retain their homelot but turn over the unused remainder of their kuleana. Soon, Hawaiians were eating rice, Chong said, while Chinese were planting taro. Taro is used in some Chinese dishes, but Chinese farmers also helped to assure a steady poi supply by making pa'i ai — hard pounded taro that had a long shelf life but could be made into poi by mashing with water, Chong said.

Rice also crept into the diets of other ethnicities.

Chong, whose great-grandparents farmed rice in Punalu'u, says people barely believe him when he tells them that rice farms once occupied more than 25 percent of the usable agricultural lands in Hawai'i, so completely have most traces of that industry been erased.

Emmie Hironaka Shigezawa, 82, author of a 2003 novel called "Pake Patch," recalls rice paddies stretching from the Ke'eaumoku area all the way into Waikiki. The area diamondhead of where she lived on Sheridan Street was called "Pake Patch" because of the rice farms operated by Chinese there.

She recalls that her male schoolmates would take shortcuts through the paddies, zig-zagging along the raised dikes. She remembers people catching shrimp, frogs and fish in muddy water.

Chong's research tells of years punctuated by the rhythm of planting, harvest and threshing (the growers got two crops a year); celebrations of the autumn harvest festival replete with ritual, ceremony and special foods. Children played ball in the drained paddies at harvest time, and caught o'opu (goby fish), shrimp, frogs and even mice and rice birds for the family table.

A huge demand for rice prompted by interruption of rice production in the South during the Civil War (1861-65) assured a ready market for the premium long-grain rice the Chinese raised, Chong said.

In 1890, the Islands exported more than 10 million pounds of rice and more than 5,000 laborers worked in rice fields on all the major islands. In 1899, Hawai'i was the third-largest producer of rice in the United States, behind Louisiana and South Carolina. In 1907, rice plantings covered 9,400 watery acres, 42 million pounds of rice was produced, and rice was second only to what would come to be called King Sugar. Ironically, in a 1912 article, "The Story of Rice in Hawaii," in Mid-Pacific Magazine, W. A. Cross stated bluntly that "Rice is king in Hawaii."

But it was a short reign. A precipitate decline in rice production occurred in the 1920s and '30s; most rice farmers left the business before World War II. The last rice mill in Hawai'i, Haraguchi Mill, closed in 1960.

Politics played a role in building the rice industry, and also in killing it. A reciprocity treaty that allowed Hawai'i rice to be shipped to the U.S. Mainland without tariff or duties helped build the business. Later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped the flow of cheap labor from China; bachelor Chinese men had been the backbone of the rice industry.

In a sense, too, the Chinese growers put themselves out of business, Chong said. Many moved on to easier lives as merchants and shopkeepers; many used their earnings to educate the next generation so they wouldn't have to live the hardscrabble farming life.

Japanese farmers entered the rice industry in its latter years, growing the fat-grain varieties they preferred, but, by that time, market forces such as higher land costs and the need to invest in new technology, and the arrival of the rice weevil spelled doom for Island-grown rice.

Chong said that, toward the end of Hawai'i's rice era, Chinese farms turned to growing sweet rice, the kind used for making rice flour. Chinese demanded fresh rice flour for the favored New Year's treat, gau, a sweet rice pudding. When he was a boy in the 1950s, his popo would buy Kaua'i-grown rice in Chinatown, and he would spend hours on her porch, helping her smash the grains into a fine flour using heavy metal mallets.

"Hard work," he recalled. "But the gau tasted much better, much better. It was straight from the rice, so fresh, and sometimes the flour we get now is diluted with other flours. This was so sweet and had such a beautiful, beautiful taste."

But fresh rice flour, like the rice paddies that once ringed our islands, is a fading memory now.

As to the future of rice on the plate, Harrison Wong of Rainbow Sales & Marketing, broker here for California-grown Diamond-G brand rice, said the low-carb trend wasn't even a blip on his sales charts. White rice sales continue to grow steadily. Interestingly, brown rice sales are growing even more rapidly. And premium rice — he sells Kashu, a kohishikari variety grown in California — has found a market, too, particularly among sushi-makers, because the grains don't fall apart in the sushi-zu.