Chinese trade brought people as well as goods to Manila. The Chinese quarter, the Parían, had been set aside by a late sixteenth-century governor of the Philippines as a sort of Chinese ghetto; the name was a corruption of the Chinese word for ‘organization’.46 This lay outside the walled area of Intramuros inhabited by the Spanish settlers, and it grew very rapidly, so that by 1600 there were more than 400 shops in the reserved area and the Chinese population of Manila is thought to have reached 12,000, mainly men, as they tended to arrive from China without women, though many took Filipino wives. The Spaniards were deeply suspicious of the inhabitants of the Parían. Some became Catholics, but on one occasion the ringleader of Chinese opposition to the Spaniards was a disillusioned Christian. King Philip III believed that they were a ‘great peril’.47 Tensions increased when Manila was under threat from Chinese ships, as occurred in 1574; that year Chinese pirates aboard seventy large junks commanded by Lin Feng, or Limahon, overran large parts of Manila, and were only beaten back with great difficulty after Spanish reinforcements arrived by sea under the able command of Juan de Salcedo, who was the grandson of the pioneer of the Philippines, Legázpi. Once Limahon and his men had been chased away from Manila, the Spanish ships caught up with the pirates and annihilated their fleet. But there was also trouble inside the colony. In 1593 the Spanish governor and Spanish members of his crew were assassinated by Chinese oarsmen aboard his galley. The governor’s son and successor sent out an appeal as far as Macau and Melaka in the hope of tracing the culprits and arresting them, and a few Chinese sailors were sent from Melaka to Manila for execution, though they may just have been scapegoats. Meanwhile (a Chinese account says) the Chinese, from love of trade, continued to live in Manila.48
Tension boiled over every fourteen years, on average, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. The most bizarre example of Chinese–Spanish tension took place in 1603, and even at the time the Spaniards wondered whether they were witnessing a farce or serious political negotiations. Three mandarins arrived in Manila, and were ceremonially carried to the governor’s palace, where they said that they were looking for the gold-bearing island of Cabit, which was not far off and belonged to no ruler. There was indeed a place called Cavite near Manila, a port that served as a gateway to the capital, and the mandarins were taken there and were shown that it was not full of gold.49 It did possess a naval shipyard, and that was surely what the mandarins hoped to inspect. The arrival of the mandarins set off rumours about their real intentions. The Spanish settlers became convinced that they were spies and that a large Chinese fleet was being prepared, bearing 100,000 soldiers who would flush the Spaniards out of the Philippines. On top of this, rumours spread that the Chinese in the Parían district were about to rise in revolt. The mistrust between Spaniards and Chinese was nothing new, but Chinese grievances mounted as Japanese mercenaries who formed part of the Manila garrison threatened to head off rebellion by massacring the Chinese. October 1603 saw a series of terrible events, as the Chinese rose in revolt, burned the outskirts of the city and killed the elite soldiers of Spain, including the governor; on another occasion they were able to scatter the formidable Japanese mercenaries. The rebels even massacred fellow Chinese who were not interested in joining the rebellion. The rebellion could only be put down when Spanish reinforcements arrived from elsewhere in the islands; they pursued and killed Chinese rebels everywhere they could find them, and a Chinese chronicle states that the death toll was as high as 25,000.50
Even the massacre of thousands of Chinese did not lead to a rupture with China: trade continued and 6,000 settlers came back to the Parían within the next two years. The new governor told King Philip III: ‘this country has been greatly consoled at seeing that the Chinese have chosen to continue their commerce, of which we were much in doubt.’ The Chinese view, not surprisingly, had a slightly different emphasis: ‘after that time the Chinese gradually flocked to Manila; and the savages [the Spaniards], seeing profit in the commerce with China, did not oppose them.’51
IV
King Philip had even grander plans, going far beyond a trading relationship with the Chinese. As early as 1573 the idea of a Spanish invasion of China had been mooted. The examples of Mexico and Peru seemed to prove that compact Spanish armies, well supplied with arms, could overwhelm mighty empires. The Japanese were known to hate the Ming and could be persuaded to join the invasion. The Ming Empire was dismissed as fragile and ill-defended. As with the other Iberian conquests, the mercenary and the spiritual were intertwined. One only needed to think of the great benefit to Christendom of conquering this heathen land and converting its inhabitants to the Catholic faith. An expedition set out from Manila in June 1575, and many of those on board imagined that they were conquistadores who would win control of the legendary wealth of China. However, the first priority was to persuade the Ming emperor that Spanish friars should be allowed to preach the faith in China. Another topic for discussion was the creation of a Spanish trading base on the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan, which the Chinese were quite happy to permit, especially if the Spanish fleet would help clear the waters between the Philippines and China of pirates – one troublemaker, Limahon, was as much of a nuisance to the Chinese as he was to the Spaniards.52 Over the next few years schemes to invade China were presented again and again at Philip’s court, and – though they looked attractive – the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English navy in 1588 brought Philip down to earth. Hugh Thomas wondered whether these schemes might have been brought to fruition had Philip not lost his fleet that year, while the increasingly bitter rebellion in Philip’s north European possessions, the Netherlands, was another drain on resources.53
Philip understood that his priority would have to be the promotion of Spain’s commercial interests in the western Pacific, rather than dreams of conquering another exotic empire. His Spanish subjects, not just in Manila but in Mexico, Peru and even Europe, were fascinated by Chinese goods.54 Behind their commercial ambitions lay the old question of rivalry not with Chinese merchants but with Portuguese ones. The Spaniards were aware that their Portuguese rivals had managed to camp on the very edge of China, where, at the mouth of the Pearl River, which leads to Guangzhou (Canton), they had created the outpost of Macau, whose foundation will be examined in the next chapter.55 After 1580, and Philip’s accession to the throne of Portugal as well as Castile, opportunities seemed to beckon for Spanish trade through Macau. The king was not keen, however, banning Spanish visits to Macau in 1593. A few years later he did permit the Spaniards to visit the coast of China, and they tried to copy the Portuguese by setting up their own base at a place they called El Piñal, which also lay close to the Pearl River; it probably stood somewhere in the territory of modern Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, the Portuguese complained vociferously, while a Spanish official who had to endure a freezing winter in El Piñal in 1598 grumbled that not just the Portuguese but the Chinese were an endless source of trouble – rather than robbing the Spaniards by violence they found more subtle means of robbing them ‘by other and worse methods’, in other words clever trading practices.56 El Piñal did not survive much longer. Over time, contact between Macau and Manila grew; Manila learned to look westwards as well as eastwards, and the value of goods sent from Macau to Manila reached 1,500,000 pesos by 1630.57 From the perspective of the Manila settlers, what counted was that the Chinese junks kept coming, accompanied by Filipino outrigger craft, Portuguese ships and, importantly, Japanese junks.
V
The Japanese connections of Manila were not as important to the city’s prosperity as its Chinese connections, but they were nonetheless significant. It would be wrong to think that Japan always cut itself off from contact with Europeans, once the Portuguese, Spaniards and finally the Dutch had penetrated into their waters. The closure of trade to European merchants for more than two centuries, except through Nagasaki (where the Dutch established a small trading station in 1641), followed a period of close but wary engagem
ent with these visitors from the other side of the world, who were as puzzled by the Japanese as the Japanese were by them. Until 1639 the Portuguese enjoyed an active trade in Japanese silk; problems arose, however, when Jesuit missionaries, also Portuguese, began to proselytize actively in southern Japan, and the shoguns decided that not just they but converted Japanese were a political threat. A Spanish pilot who reached Japan had brought with him a world map on which the many lands of the Spanish Empire were marked. The Japanese were curious to know how these conquests had come about.
‘Nothing is easier,’ the pilot answered. ‘Our kings begin by sending into countries which they desire to conquer some friars, who engage in the work of converting the people to our religion. When they have made considerable progress, troops are sent in who are joined by the new Christians. They then have little difficulty in settling the rest.’58
News of this tactless conversation is said to have prompted the regent, Hideyoshi, to begin the first of a series of persecutions of Christians in Japan.
In the late sixteenth century, as the example of Manila has already shown, Japanese mercenaries were a familiar and frightening sight, and the high quality of their training and armaments, as well as their reputation for ferocity, made them the prime choice of anyone looking for paid military help. Japanese mercenaries were readily available, following the unification of much of Japan by the regent and chancellor, Hideyoshi, ten years earlier, capped by the success of Tokugawa Ieyasu in defeating his enemies in 1600. There was not much for them to do in Japan itself, so foreign opportunities beckoned. Occasionally, this admiration for the Japanese could take an awkward turn. Maybe they were such skilled soldiers that they would be tempted to launch an invasion of the Philippines? After all, there were plenty of Japanese merchants in Manila by the 1590s.
For this reason the Spanish governor decided that the Japanese, like the Chinese, needed their own quarter, known as the Dilao: ‘to relieve our anxiety regarding so many Xaponese traders in the city, it would be advisable to assign them a settlement located outside the city, after first taking away all their weapons’. By 1606 there were more than 3,000 Japanese living in the Dilao; later, it attracted large numbers of Japanese Christians, for whom life in Japan was becoming increasingly difficult; it was the largest Japanese settlement outside the homeland. Only in the 1630s, with the decline of direct trade between the Philippines and Japan, did this community pack its bags and leave. The governor was also worried by the large number of Japanese servants living in Manila, who had free entry into houses within the city and might set fire to Manila. Antonio de Morga, who has been met already in his capacity as president of the high court, wrote in 1609 that the Japanese are ‘of good disposition and courageous … of noble bearing and carriage, and much given to ceremony and courtesies’, and he insisted that ‘the maintenance of friendly relations between the islands and Japan is advisable’.59
Admiration was, then, combined with fear. This meant that Japanese ships were by and large untouchable. In 1610 a Japanese trading ship that carried the ‘vermilion seal’, guaranteeing the shogun’s protection, reached Manila just as the Spanish and Dutch fleets engaged in battle with one another offshore. The Europeans suspended action while this ship serenely passed through their ranks, and no attempt was made by either side to come on board. This was not because anyone was afraid of Japanese firepower; trading vessels of this sort would not have carried guns. Both the Spaniards and the Dutch knew that the Japanese were under orders to report any interference to the shogun’s court, where reprisals would be launched against the nation that had insulted the empire’s subjects. The seizure by a Spanish captain of a Japanese ship off Siam in 1629 showed how things could go wrong if the government, or bakufu, was offended. The Japanese seized a Portuguese ship at Nagasaki in retaliation, drawing the Portuguese (then still subjects of King Philip) into the quarrel. An embassy from Japan to Manila, two years after the incident, failed to soothe either side, and contact with Japan withered, while the Christians in Japan underwent further persecution. The Spanish and Portuguese attempts to spread Christianity in Japan did nothing to help the situation. The governor of the Philippines complained in 1636 that ‘the trade with Japan has been spoiled by the indiscretion of certain religious’.60
Japan was attractive for other reasons than its formidable mercenaries. The sixteenth century saw the extension of silkworm cultivation, and new centres of silk-weaving also emerged, with the encouragement of the feudal lords who dominated during the age of the shoguns, and who saw good opportunities for profit in the silk industry, as well as wanting to clothe themselves in magnificent fabrics. They encouraged the creation of markets. The regent Hideyoshi cleared the land of bandits and cleared the sea of pirates, as well as encouraging the free movement of goods by abolishing internal customs stations. He also tried to take control of the production of silver and gold wherever he could. Hideyoshi also supported foreign trade, encouraging a trading expedition to Korea and taking charge of the key port of Nagasaki. He snapped up (for honest payment) all the raw silk on board when what was described as a foreign ‘black ship’ reached his coast, and acted much the same way when a Spanish ship came in from the Philippines loaded with ceramics, or when Portuguese ships arrived bearing gold. His successor, Ieyasu, was so keen to promote good relations with the Spaniards that in 1604 the governor of the Philippines felt able to tell King Philip III that ‘peace and friendship with the king of Japan goes on continuing’ (though the shogun was not in fact king).
VI
Ieyasu was thoughtful and observant, and he realized how important to Manila was the link to Acapulco. He too wanted a stake in trade with Mexico. He wanted Japanese merchants to have rights of access in New Spain, and he wanted the Manila galleons to make a short detour and put in at a Japanese port en route to Acapulco. The Spaniards prevaricated, but Ieyasu was able to seize his opportunity in 1609 when the San Francisco, bearing the ex-governor of the Philippines, foundered on his shores. This official made a treaty with Ieyasu, although his authority to do so was very doubtful; and Ieyasu even promised to permit missionaries to preach in his islands.61 In 1610 the ex-governor was ferried back to Mexico on a ship provided (partly thanks to a loan from the shogun) that had been built in Japan but according to European standards. Ieyasu was well aware that Japanese navigational skills lagged behind those of the Europeans, and would dearly have liked to create a shipyard on the European model. However, this ship was built under the direction of an English shipwright and merchant, or perhaps one should say pirate, who had managed to reach Japan, William Adams, known in Japan as Miura Anjin. Adams’s story was another tale of shipwreck, this time aboard a Dutch vessel out of Rotterdam, De Liefde (‘The Beloved’), that had ambitiously set out in 1598, taking an elaborate route by way of the Cape Verde Islands, west Africa and the Strait of Magellan before the ship was washed up on the shore of Japan. The expedition was better at marauding than at trading. In the Cape Verde Islands, where the crew hoped to take on food and water, they occupied Praia, on the main island, Santiago; the unsurprising result was that the Portuguese governor sent them packing without new supplies, after telling them that he would have sent supplies but for their awful behaviour (memories of Francis Drake’s sacking of the then capital, Ribeira Grande, in 1585 were still powerful). They reached Patagonia, and there were altercations with Patagonian Indians, supposedly eleven feet tall. Passing through the Strait of Magellan, they decided that it was too difficult to return the way they had come, and settled on Japan as a destination, since they were carrying heavy Dutch broadcloth which they realized, belatedly, was not the sort of cloth anyone in the tropical East Indies would want to buy.62
Ieyasu met Adams and took a liking to him; but he was suspicious about the intentions of the Dutch and English visitors, and for a time clapped him in prison. These suspicions were justified, since the Dutch crew had probably been more interested in finding Spanish treasure ships, as Sir Francis Drake had managed t
o do several years earlier, than in creating a new route to the Spice Islands or indeed Japan. Fortunately, Ieyasu concluded that Adams possessed the skill needed to build a ship in the Western style. Adams protested that he did not know a great deal about shipbuilding, but even so he and his colleagues put together a seaworthy vessel.63 The ship set sail along with an official ambassador and Japanese merchants, and it returned in 1611 bearing a Spanish ambassador, who, however, was as discouraging as he dared to be. Ieyasu was, in any case, having doubts about Spanish ambitions. All the same, a few attempts were then made to set up a Japan–Acapulco route, manned by Japanese ships, but mutual hostility made sure that direct contact soon came to an end; a final voyage to Acapulco took place in 1616.
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