People seldom pay attention to demography, even less appreciate its importance and social implication. From a newly acquired rare book, Our Island Empire by Charles Morris (1899), we came to know that in 1855, “among 525 Chinamen in the fortress of Manila (apparently, Intramuros—Ed), there were only two women and the 5,055 Chinamen in Binondo […]
There is a Chinese saying, “Kaijuan youyi (開卷有益).” It means reading is always profitable. Another, “Shali taojin (沙裡淘金),” means there are gold grains to be found in sand or the essential from a large mass of materials. The two sayings have long been our motto in our research on the Chinese in the Philippines. To […]
John Pomfret’s The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (2017) contains a lot of historical material about the Philippines, although it is mainly a history of America and China. America in Chinese is 美國, which literally means beautiful country (美 mei in Mandarin, bi in Hokkien; 國 guo […]
Among the influences and contributions of the Chinese in the Philippines, especially during the Spanish and American periods, painting is seldom mentioned, except, of course, the art works done by Chinese artisans. Recently, we were happy and fortunate to discover the Chinese influence and contributions on the famous 14 paintings of the basi warriors of […]
When you hear of a person named Antonio Arsenio in the Philippines, what would you think is his nationality? Most probably Filipino. Well, Arsenio was Chinese. He was a staunch supporter of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo who owned a big house in Cavite, once a naval storehouse of the Spaniard. When the American troops under Brig. […]
In 2017, we commemorated the 600th year of the historical visit of Sulu Sultan Paduka Batara to Peking. By next year, 2020, it will be the 600th anniversary of another historical visit to Peking by another Filipino king, the Sultan of Kumalarang in Basilan. Sultan Batara’s visit to Peking in 1417 and his death and […]
This is a continuation of my last Gems of History column on “Parian in Cebu” to complete the story of what happened to the Chinese in Cebu at the turn of the 20th century. Our narration will again be based mainly on National Artist Resil B. Mojares’ Casa Gerordo in Cebu.From 1850 onwards, the Chinese […]
The Parian of Manila is by far the most known district the Spanish colonizers had restricted the Chinese in the Philippines to during their four-century rule. Outside of the city, however, were other thriving, albeit less known parians. Several of them were home to not only the Chinese but also Chinese mestizos.Two parians I came […]
In Domingo De Salazar, OP (UST, 2001), author Lucio Gutierrez devotes a section to “The Cutting of Pigtail or the Danger of Apostasy of the Sangleys” in Chapter IV, “Missionary and Evangelical Labors of Domingo de Salazar in the Philippines, 1581-1591.” People might wonder what the “pigtail” had to do with the Catholic faith among […]
The Chinatown in Manila is said to be the first Chinatown in the world. But it’s apparently not the present Chinatown that is synonymous to the famous Ongpin Street. The street, formerly Calle Sacristia, only got its name in 1915 in honor of Roman Ongpin, the famous Chinese-Filipino financier of the Philippine revolution. To be […]