THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER，AND THE CARPENTER:

CHINESE SOJOURNERS IN THE SPANISH PHILIPPINES

AND THEIR IMPACT ON SOUTHERN FUJIAN

(SIXTEENTH-EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES)*

BY

LUCILLE CHIA**

Abstract

This article considers the impact on southern Fujian of the trade with and migration to the Spanish Philippines by examining the links of the Chinese there with their native places, par- (icularly in the half century after the resumption of Chinese maritime trade in 1684. To understand the local history of Minnan. it is necessary to look both at (he extensive network of Minnanese in Southeast Asia (Nanyang) and China, and at (he important social and economic distinctions between Zhangzhou and Quanzhou prefectures in Fujian.

Cet article fait I'analyse des effets sur Ie sud du Fujian (Minnan) du commerce avee et la migration aux Philippines en examinant les liens des Chinois 1 厶 avec leur pays natal, partic- ulierement pendant les cinquant ans suivant la reprise du commerce maritime chinois en 1684. Pour comprendre Thistoire locale du Minnan il faut examiner a la fois le reseau ^tendu des naturels du Minnan qui se trouvaient en I'Asie du sud-est (Nanyang) et en Chine, et les dis­tinctions economiques el sociales entre les prefectures de Zhangzhou et Quanzhou au Fujian.

Keywords: Fujian: Philippines; Nanyang junk trade; Zhangzhou: Quanzhou

Introduction

On the night of May 28，1686 in the Chinese quarters (Parian) outside the

walls of Manila, a band of Chinese broke into the house of the constable in

charge of residence permits, killing him and another Spaniard, and then attacked

the house of the governor of the Parian, who managed to escape. The Spanish,

already nervous because that year brought more ships from China than any

other in the last quarter century, quickly caught, hanged, and quartered eleven

of the attackers, whose dismembered corpses were displayed along the Pasig

River. In addition, rumors quickly spread that the assault had been plotted in

* The author thanks the two reviewers for their thoughtful and useful suggestions and criticisms of (his article.

** Lucille Chia, Department of History, University of California, Riverside, lchia@ ucr.edu

◎ Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden. 2006 JESHO 49,4Also available online - www.brill.nl

the bakeries, where the Chinese employees had also been planning to put

ground glass and burnt bits of pottery into the bread they made. These devel­

opments strengthened the Spanish colonial government’s resolve to carry out the

royal decree to expel all non-Christian Chinese within two months. In the event,

the deportation only began in 1690, and lasted until 1700. As a result, the pop­

ulation of Chinese in the Philippines did decline to perhaps a few thousand for

a decade or so, although the junk trade continued largely unchanged, having

resumed after the Qing government lifted its maritime trade ban in 1684. The

events in Manila just described resemble earlier ones in the history of the

Spanish Philippines. But they occurred during the last two decades of the sev­

enteenth century, which also saw the beginnings of significant changes in the

maritime trade in East and Southeast Asia，as well as in the migration patterns

of Chinese, both domestic and overseas.

This study is a first attempt to examine these developments by looking at that

part of the story concerning the Chinese in the Philippines and their native

places in southern Fujian (Minnan). Although earlier studies have examined

Sino-Philippine and the related trans-Pacific trade, as well as the role of Chinese

settlers and their descendants in Philippine history, few have considered how

this early instance of the Chinese diaspora affected the region from which the

emigration originated. By considering the connections between the trade and

migration involving the Fujianese within China (including Taiwan) and in Southeast

Asia (the Nanyang), and by distinguishing between the different developments

in various parts of Minnan, we can more fully understand the history of

southern coastal China. For example, why (lid Zhangzhou revert largely to agri­

culture, while Quanzhou seemed to succeed in maintaining its mercantile tradi­

tions? And why did the natives of Zhangzhou first go the Philippines but later

changed their primary destinations to Taiwan and Java, and to be replaced in

the Philippines largely by natives of Quanzhou? By using a combination of

Chinese and Spanish sources, we can start to answer such questions.

Minnan migration to the Philippines in the early modem period—when nei­

ther “transnationalism” nor Chinese nationalism existed—differed from the

movements of today's migrants from various parts of China to Europe or the

Americas, or even of those of Chinese in Southeast Asia. Thus the issues I

address in this study resemble but ultimately differ from those pertaining to

modem migration phenomena.1

1 For example, Chirot and Reid 1997, Douw et al. 1999, Huang et al. 2000, McKeown 1999, Ong and Nonini 1997, Pieke ct al. 2004.

A N ot e o n the So u r c e s

The relative scarcity of sources explains in part why researchers have neg­

lected the earlier history of the Chinese in the Philippines. Until about the mid-

nineteenth century, the attitude of the Chinese stale was that emigration overseas

was officially “non-existent.” Those who permanently left China did so pre­

sumably because they were criminals or vagabonds and should be written off

from all records. Even sojourners abroad were deemed to be not much more

reputable, so that their activities also went largely unnoticed by the government.

There was the imperial decree of 1656 forbidding any maritime trade, at a time

when the outcome of the Qing government’s struggle with the Zheng family2

was far from certain. And even after the Qing government rescinded the order

for the coastal evacuation in 1681 and allowed the resumption of maritime trade

in 1684，it remained illegal for any Chinese to slay out of the country for over

two years) Between 1717 and 1727，trade from China to the Nanyang (includ­

ing Manila，Batavia, and ports in Siam) was forbidden. Although none of these

bans could stop trade from China, it meant that the merchants and emigrants，

their families，and associates were reluctant to report fully their overseas ven­

tures, even if their wealth and political and social power in Fujian were built

upon these activities. Thus, we must be especially imaginative in tapping the

sources that do exist.

The sources in Spanish libraries and archives consist of official documents

from the colonial government in Manila and from the various government

offices in Spain; private correspondence of individuals living or visiting the

Philippines; and a wealth of missionary documents, including correspondence

2 The Zheng family came from Nan.an on the coast of Quanzhou prefecture in southern Fujian. In the first half of the seventeenth century，Zheng Zhilong (1604-1661) and his son, Zheng Chenggong (1624-1662, also known as Koxinga) built up a fonnidable fleet of over a thousand vessels that they employed for both trade and piracy. Briefly, when the Manchus conquered China，at first both men and (hen Chenggong and his followers supported the fallen Ming dynasty, and the Zheng forces were able to retain control of southern coastal Fujian until 1661 when the Qing forces defeated them on land. Thereafter Zheng Chenggong took control of Taiwan, from where the Zheng fleet continued fighting the Qing until its defeat in 1683.z.neng L-nenggong uoz4-tooz, aiso Known as rwoxinga; oum up a ronmuaoic ncct oi over

a thousand vessels that they employed for both trade and piracy. Briefly, when the Manchus conquered China，at first both men and then Chenggong and his followers supported the fallen Ming dynasty, and the Zheng forces were able to retain control of southern coastal Fujian until 1661 when the Qing forces defeated them on land. Thereafter Zheng Chenggong took control of Taiwan, from where the Zheng fleet continued fighting the Qing until its defeat in 1683.

3 The Qing government was concerned that long-iime sojourners were particularly prone to be loyal to the fallen Ming dynasty and to engage in seditious activities. Those who over­stayed abroad had their property confiscated; other punishments varied depending on what

and local church records.4 Other researchers have already examined many of

these texts, but not with the intention of mining them primarily for information

on Chinese activities in the Philippines and their connections with Fujian.

Unlike the highly detailed records of the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.)，

especially from the very late seventeenth century onward, Spanish sources are

rather recalcitrant in yielding quantitative information about economic activities,

especially trade of any kind. Even Pierre Chaunu’s very useful compendium of

information on trade connected with the Philippines, culled from the materials

in the Archivo de Indias in Sevilla, suffer from flawed or missing data, and rely,

of course, only on official records.5 In other documents, such as accounts of the

Philippines, and official and private letters, their authors tend to describe

the Chinese as a dangerous group threatening the social order and stability in

the Philippines, apt to commit both violent and non-violent crimes, treacherous

in business dealings, and so successful in whatever trade or business they

engaged in that they deprived the Filipino natives of any chance or motivation

to work in these occupations. Perhaps one of the greatest frustrations with

squeezing information from the Spanish materials is that while some sources do

provide names of Chinese individuals, these are relatively few, and are prob­

lematic: names were transcribed by clerks who knew no Chinese. And both

government and church records often used the Christian names of Chinese

converts—names which often have no relation to the original Chinese ones: a

Christian Chinese who was the head Chinese official (gobernadorcillo) of the

Chinese quarters (Parian) in 1603, with a Chinese name transcribed as Encang,

had the Hispanic name of Juan Bautista de Vera.6 Nevertheless, useful slivers of

information emerge from sources such as the chronicles and letters of the

Spanish missionaries, baptismal registries, and the seemingly less exciting

official documents like judicial inquiries and account registers of the Manila

Royal Treasury (Caja).

Of the Chinese sources, we have mainly local histories or gazetteers, official

memorials and decrees, geographies, genealogies, and stone inscriptions. Since

other scholars have primarily relied on the first three types of documents, I will

restrict my comments here to genealogies and inscriptions.

4 The libraries and archives that I have so far found most useful in Spain are: Archivo de Indias (Sevilla), Archivo Historico Nacional, Biblioteca Nacional, Real Academia de la Historia，Museo Naval (all in Madrid), and the archives of the religious orders prominent in missionary and economic activities in the Philippines, such as the Archivo de la Provincia del Sto Rosario (APSR) at the Convento de Sto Tomds in Avila (Dominican archive).

5 Chaunu 1960.6 See, for example, Archivo General de Indias (henceforth AGI), Filipinas, (legajo) 27

N45, in which Encang ended up as one of the leaders of the 1603 “rebellion，，and massacre of the Chinese.

The genealogies are problematic, because records of men who went to the

Philippines are quite few (in contrast to those going to Taiwan) and tend to be

quite laconic, partly because many men may not have returned home. In fact,

it takes a bit of detective work to find out if men did come back, and what they

contributed to the family’s wealth and property; this reticence has to do partly

with reluctance to mention men who went abroad when this was illegal and

partly with the mentality of the compilers, who, even if they themselves had

traveled, seem to assume that one traveled only when one must for the sake of

the family, and should always return home. In addition，many genealogies were

lost during the various turmoils in southern Fujian (the severe pirate depreda­

tions of the mid-sixteenth century, the turmoil during Ming-Qing transition,

especially during the period of the coastal evacuation (qianjie), and most

recently, the Cultural Revolution). Thus often only a small fraction of the infor­

mation lost with a genealogy can be retrieved, either by relying on the memory

of surviving members of the lineage, or copying an abbreviated account from

the genealogy of another branch of the lineage. For instance, in looking for the

actual genealogies mentioning overseas Chinese from the Jinjiang and Nan’an

areas in Quanzhou municipality that are listed in a modern collection (compiled

mostly in the 1950s and 1960s),7 I found that at least five of the sixty-six are

now lost. Moreover, subsequent editions of genealogies, especially modem ones,

often suffer from amnesia, not only because contents of earlier versions are no

longer extant, but also because of the compilers’ desire to sanitize earlier mate­

rials (e.g., eliminate stories about bickering over land between brothers, or drop­

ping biographical sketches of men whose unsavory activities defied any amount

of whitewashing). Finally, scholarly attention paid to genealogies differs from

area to area in Minnan: far more work has been done in Quanzhou, especially

in the coastal regions, while genealogies in Zhangzhou (other than for Hakka or

kejia groups) have not been collected in any systematic fashion.8

7 Zhuang et al. 1998. Fujian is one area of China where renewed interest in genealogies is particularly strong, but there are others. For a study of genealogies in Xuanwei munici­pality in Yunnan Province and a general discussion of modem Chinese genealogical compi­lation, see Pieke 2003.

* So far, I have examined about two hundred genealogies from the Quanzhou area and about fifty from Zhangzhou. The total number of genealogies in southern Fujian number somewhere in the tens of thousands, and my impression is that only a minority of them (orig­inals or copies) are in libraries. For the Minnan area, the main libraries are the Jinjiang Municipal Library, the Zhangzhou Municipal Library, the Quanzhou Municipal Library, and the Quanzhou Overseas Communication Museum. Xiamen University has several collections, with some duplicate holdings among them; the genealogies are primarily of Hakka lineages in western Fujian (Minxi). In Fuzhou, the Fujian Provincial Library and the Fujian Normal University have large collections of genealogies, though both holdings arc strongest in Minbei and Mindong, rather than Minnan genealogies.

Still，the lengthy task of combing through these genealogies has its rewards

since they contain information unavailable in other sources. For instance, we

can trace the migration patterns within a lineage: of men from Jinjiang county

in Quanzhou who went to the Philippines，while their cousins settled in nearby

Zhangzhou or Macau, and other relatives went to Batavia, and still others took

their entire families to Taiwan, all within the one or two decades starting in the

last years of the seventeenth century.

It may also be worthwhile to examine the genealogies of Filipino Chinese，

although these works nearly all pertain to families who trace their first ancestors

in the Philippines to the nineteenth century. But given that many Minnan fam­

ilies maintain the tradition of emigrating to the same place for generations, it

may be possible that earlier ancestors also went to the islands. If so, this would

provide leads to the corresponding genealogies in their native places in Minnan.

Finally, stone inscriptions, primarily those dealing with the establishment or

repair of ancestral temples, often reveal details about the contributions of lin­

eage members who returned from abroad and the vicissitudes of their family

histories. Moreover, in the last quarter-century prosperous overseas Chinese

(huaqiao) returning to the mainland to find their ancestral families often provide

donations for (re-)building the ancestral shrine and compiling a new genealogy

that would incorporate these long-lost relations. Consequently, we can identify

more families whose members emigrated, even if older editions of their

genealogies did not record this information or have been lost.

The C hinese in the Philippines , c a . 1686： Im m igran ts a n d Sojou rners

Chinese travel to the Philippines predated the arrival of the Spaniards by at

least seven hundred years，but it was after the founding of Manila by the

Spaniards in 1571 that the city became the single largest foreign port for

Chinese goods for the next two centuries and the place from which New World

silver flowed into China via the galleon trade.9 Of the Chinese junks going to

and from the Spanish Philippines, carrying silk, cotton cloth, ceramics， iron­

ware, sugar, oranges, and luxury goods in exchange for native produce, goods

from other Asian areas, and most of all, silver, nearly all came from various

ports in southern Fujian—first Quanzhou, then Yuegang (renamed Haicheng in

1567), and then Xiamen (Amoy). This trade saw its final decline around the end

of the eighteenth century, when Manila became a free port (1789) open to all

9 As explained earlier, few secondary works have focused on the Chinese in the Philippines prior to the nineteenth century. Some of the standard works (of varying quality) include Chen 1968. Liu 1955. LU 1956，Felix 1966，Cheong 1971.

ships, including the increasingly successful Europeans. Then in 1815 the last Manila-

Acapulco galleon came into port, signaling the end of two and a half centuries

of trade that brought so much New World silver to the Chinese and so much Chinese

silk and porcelain to Spanish America and to Spain.

Not only traders but Chinese emigrants flocked to Manila, so that their num­

bers in the island of Luzon jumped to approximately 20,000 by the beginning

of the seventeenth century, while the Spanish population never exceeded two

thousand in that century. Nearly all of the Chinese came from the coastal areas

of southern Fujian in Quanzhou and Zhangzhou prefectures10—a trickle in the

late sixteenth century, increasing to several tens of thousands in the seventeenth

century. Works such as Zhang Xie’s Dongx't yangkao and Li Guangjin’s Jing hi

j i also discuss the Chinese residing in the Philippines, not only in Luzon, but

the other islands in the archipelago, including Sulu, an Islamic sultanate finally

conquered by the Spanish colonial government in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Spanish began very quickly to rely on the Chinese, or Sangleyes, not

only for goods from China, but for all kinds of services in the colony. All the

craftsmen, storekeepers，unskilled laborers，and most farmers, fishermen, and

domestic servants were Chinese. The anecdote about a Chinese carpenter and

his Spanish customer underlines many importani aspects of the Sino-Spanish

relationship in early colonial Manila.

. . . The Chinese merchants are so eager for profit that if a kind of merchandise has suc­ceeded well one year, they take a great deal of it the following year. A Spaniard who had lost his nose through a duel ordered for a Chinese to make him one of wood in order to hide the deformity. The workman made him so good a nose that the Spaniard, in great delight, paid him munificently, giving him twenty escudos. The Chinese, attracted by the ease with which he had made that gain, laded u fine boatload of wooden noses Uie following year, and returned to Manila. But he found himself very far from his hopes, and quite left out in the cold: for in order to have a sale for that new merchandise、he found that he would have to cut olf the noses of all the Spaniards in the country.11

10 There are no statistics for the places of origin for Filipino Chinese prior to the end of the nineteenth century. According to the last capitan of the Chinese, Carlos Palanca (Chen Qianshan/Zuiliang), in 1898, of the forty thousand Chinese in the Philippines, about Iwenty- two to twenty-three thousand lived in Manila, with the majority from the Xiamen region, and there were only about three thousand Cantonese in the Philippines. See Amyot 1973: 11 and Wickberg 2000: 172，n. 12. Immigrants from Canton did not start reaching the Philippines until Che second decade of the nineteenth century, when they set sail from Macao on European ships and were called macanistas (Wickberg: 22).

" Relations de divers voyages curieux 1696: 122. Apparently only this French translation and not the Spanish original has survived. This work does not give an author, but scholars have attributed it to Diego de Bobadilla. S. J. (1590-1648). I have slightly modified the trans­lation of this passage in Blair and Robertson 1903-7: vol. 29, 307-8 [henceforth B&R].

By 1581, the colonial governor decided it was prudent to confine the Chinese

to an area of their own, called the Paridn,12 and forbade them from staying

overnight within the city walls of Manila. Tensions arising from Spanish dis­

trust and resentment of their reliance on the Chinese，the colonial government’s

financial exactions on the Sangleyes (who paid a tribute double that of the

natives), their occasional forced relocations, as well as real or perceived threats

of invasion by ships from China (e.g., by Zheng Chenggong in 1662) led to

periodic “uprisings” by the Chinese and their subsequent massacres一 the chief

ones occurring in 1603, 1639, 1662, 1686，and 1762-1764. Demands for expul­

sion of most of the Chinese (leaving a necessary minimum of several thousand

for the services they provided) were constant, particularly following each of the

unrests. These deportations’ however, were usually carried out ineffectively, because

most Spaniards realized how much they needed the Chinese.

Thus the events in 1686 summarized above13 quite likely inspired a feeling

of deja vu among those in the Philippines who knew something about the his­

tory of the Chinese since the founding of Manila. Although the number of

Chinese killed that year was few compared to those in earlier uprisings, the

deeply ambivalent feelings of the Spanish government and residents toward

these Sangleyes had not changed. On the one hand, everyone recognized how

necessary the Chinese were for supplying daily necessities and services to the

colony’s residents. Indeed, after a judicial inquiry, the judge threw out the case

against the Chinese bakers for lack of evidence, and they were promptly sent

back to work, since the bread made by the Spanish stand-ins was inedible. On

the other hand, this very dependence on the Chinese, the Spaniards’ distrust of

the Chinese and their alleged bad influence on the native Filipinos, and the fact

that their numbers always exceeded the six thousand legally allowed14 made

expulsion desirable.

12 The Parian was relocated a number of times until it was finally razed in I860, but wher­ever it was moved, it remained within cannon range from the citadels on the city walls of Manila.

13 The primary sources for the events of 1686 are contained in AGI, FHipinas, 67. 69, and 202: the first for the “attempted uprising'* of Tingco, the second for the case against the bakers, and the third primarily for the two expulsions of the Chinese from the Philippines_ the first in accordance with the royal decree of 1686 and completed only in 1700，and the second in 1744. Another useful set of primary sources are found in the Real Academia de la Historia (RAH), sig. 9/2668 and 9/2669. Nearly a)i subsequent accounts of what happened in 1686 seem to rely on the description in Diaz 1890, which has been partially translated in several volumes of B&R，with the 1686 incidents in vol. 42，248-251. Some factual mistakes in Diaz, such as dating Tingco's attack to August rather than May. and confusing the names of the Spaniards killed, have been carried over to later accounts.

14 Recopiiacion las leyes de los reynos de las Indias, iibro 6. t(tulo 18. ley 1. The royal decree {real ceduia) that sets this limit for the first time is dated June 4, 1620 (AGI, Filipinas

The royal decree for the expulsion of non-Christian Chinese reached Manila

in September of 1686, and not surprisingly, a flurry of conversions followed.

But the Chinese community resorted to a number of other delaying tactics. First,

they wrote a brief, cogent letter15 to the Governor arguing that many of them

had to collect debts owed them by Spanish or by Chinese who did business with

the Spanish，and they could not pay until the Manila Galleon came in.

Moreover the expulsion in general was a bad idea, since Chinese were exclu­

sively in charge of provisioning the city (viz. the bakers)—something that nei­

ther the Spanish nor the natives could handle. Nor could the Chinese be

replaced as craftsmen, since there were not even enough Spaniards to defend

the colony and the natives did not want to learn these trades. Furthermore，the

total tax of 81 reales per non-Christian Chinese staying in the islands consti­

tuted one of the chief sources of income for the colonial government.16 And

loans by the Chinese regularly tied the government over until the Royal Subsidy

{situado) arrived on the galleon from New Spain.17 Finally, the Chinese pointed

340 L3 fols 272r-272v), but from the late sixteenth century on, both the Governor of the Philippines and the Audiencia of Manila, as well as private Spanish residents in the islands would constantly argue for limiting the number of Chinese there to no more than several thousand, and expelling the excess population. Accurate estimates of the Chinese population in the Philippines at any given time before the mid-nineteenth century do not exist, while (wildly) impressionistic numbers abound. For example, for the massacre of 1603，guesses for the total number of Chinese killed range from 10,000 to 30,000. For 1686, before the next round of expulsion, my guess is that the Chinese population in the Manila area was around six thousand. An Italian traveler visiting Manila in 1696, when the expulsion had been under­way for six years, thought there were three thousand in the Parian and another thousand in the rest of the islands. But he also added that the junks coming annually to Manila each hid many immigrants who evaded the Spanish authoriiies. See Gemelli Careri 1699-1670: vol. 5’ 16-18.

15 AGI, Mapas y Pianos: Escrirura y Cifra, 59 (formerly in Fitipinas, 67). The letter is undated but probably no later than the early part of 1689，since the royal decree {ceduia) mandating the expulsion finally reached Manila in the fall of 1688 and the protests of the Spanish residents of the city against the expulsion were recorded in the City Council on January 丨 8, 1689 (AGI, FVipinas' 202).

16 The 81 reales included 8 pesos (* 64 reales) for a residence permit. 5 reales for a poll tax, and 12 reales for a donation to the Chinese community chest.

17 The letter discreetly omitted mention of the taxes on the licences and winnings {baratos) from gambling games organized by the Chinese (juegos de los sattgleyes、、a rich and steady source of government revenues, despite the misgivings of both the civilian and religious authorities over the social and moral pwoblems that arose from the gambling. There seems to be no systematic records of the taxes collected from the licences for the gambling games and for the winnings. There are, however, a wcallh of other AGI documents (e.g., official decrees from the Governor-General and the Audiencia of Manila) that describe how this money is to allocated~to repairs of the city walls, as contributions to orphanages and hospitals, etc. and suggest that the annua丨 amount might well have been a thousand or more pesos. The Manila government's constant money troubles rendered unsuccessful periodic attempts to ban these games, despite arguments about the deleterious moral and financial effects on the gamesters,

out that if they were expelled, they could easily go back to China and conduct

their trade with other peoples from there，implying that the Spanish would be

the real losers. Even the Spanish vecinos protested against the expulsion to the

City Council since “it was well-known that all the supplies of the City are

brought in by non-Christian Chinese who reside in these islands. There are no

others who would practice the requisite trades except the barbers, so that we

will suffer great damages and will be short of supplies.”18 Nevertheless, the Governor

was determined to follow through with the deportation, especially since the

Chinese apparently were trying to ship out as much silver as possible while they

remained in the Philippines.19

As a result of both the delayed arrival of the next galleon from Acapulco,

and insufficient junks to carry away the Chinese, the expulsion did not begin

until 1690.20 In reality, it was probably far from complete. A census taken in

April, 1700 showed some 2,000 Sangleyes living in the Parian and nearby dis­

tricts around Manila, with non-Christians outnumbering Christians by nearly

two to one. A roll taken over half a century later, in 1755，just before the

Governor-General executed another expulsion order, to deport all non-Christian

who included the Spanish, Filipinos, mestizos, and Chinese. In any case, it may be worth estimating these funds, which would make a significant addition to the tribute and the cus­toms duties paid by the Chinese listed in Chaunu 1960.

18 Vecinos referred to Spanish residents of Manila who had a right to ship merchandise on the galleon as well as participate in the municipal government. The protest is reported in a document by officers of ihe City Council (AGI, Filipinas， 69).

19 AGI, Filipinas, 25 R1 N!0 contains a letter of the Audicncia of Manila (May 28，1689) in response to a royal decree on how it was proceeding in preventing the Chinese from taking silver out of the Philippines.

20 Generally, one ship a year crossed the Pacific in each direction, though occasionally two or three made the voyage. Natural disasters or attacks by the English or Dutch at times led to destruction of galleons. A ship's failure to arrive in Manila caused great economic hard­ship for both the colonial government and the Spanish and Chinese merchants. The San Telmo did arrive in 1686 but had to be escorted safely to harbor by another nao, the Santo Nino, because of rumors of pirates. Since the latter galleon had to be heavily modified to carry cannons, it could not be remodified in time to sail That year. In 1687, when it did set sail for Acapulco, it had (o turn back with half of its cargo rotted and wintered in the Philippines before setting out again. No galleon came from Mexico in 1687. See Diaz 1899, translated in B&R. vol. 42，244-246 and Schurz 1959: 193-195, 214, and 261.

My tabulations show a rough correlation between the vicissitudes of the Manila galleon voyages and the number of junks arriving in Manila. For instance, the Spanish customs recorded 27 junks from China in 1686. but only 13 in 1687 and 7 in 1688. Although these figures indicate ihe junks which did pay customs duties (almojarifazgo), it is likely that knowing about the troubles of the naos dispatched to Acapulco in 1687 and 1688, both the legally arriving junks and those involved in smuggling would both have been fewer in these two years. Vessels from China in 1689 may have remained relatively few (the Spanish records are missing), but in 1690, the 14 ships apparently sufficed to start transporting the deportees back to China. See Chaunu 1960: 172-175.

Chinese, gave a count of 3,413 Christians and 406 non-Christians, the latter

group ostensibly declining to zero after the deportations.21 Although these

official figures almost certainly underestimate the Chinese population, it is likely

that the number did decline to perhaps three thousand or so in the first decade

of the eighteenth century, not counting those who arrived on the junks and

stayed on board while in port and left again the same year. This decreased population

did not last, nor was the expulsion “completed” by 1700 by any means the last

one. By around 1740，however, one English observer suggested a figure of forty

thousand Chinese in the islands,22 and another round of deportations began in

1755. Even the British capture and occupation of Manila from 1762-1764, the

support of many Chinese for the British, and the predictably harsh Spanish

retaliation (massacres, execution, and another wholesale deportation in 1766

before the revocation of the decree in 1768)23 seem like variations on themes

played on for nearly two centuries. These apparent cycles and continuities in the

Philippines, however, must be considered in the broader context of the impor­

tant economic and political changes in East and Southeast Asia.

We can begin looking at these changes staying in the Philippines and con­

sidering the Sangleyes. These Chinese—nearly exclusively Minnanese—ranged

from visiting merchants who arrived and left within a few months to sojourn­

ers remaining for a few years to those who ended up staying for most of their

remaining lifetimes. The first two groups tended to be traders involved directly

or indirectly in the junk trade while the long-term immigrants consisted mainly

of those who worked as unskilled laborers, craftsmen, farmers’ fishermen, boat­

men, and servants.

The periodic expulsions from the Philippines affected the last group more for

several reasons. First, if they were legally living in one of the Chinese quarters

21 Count from 1700: AGI. Filipinas, 539; cited in Diaz-Trechuelo 1966: 190-191. The actual numbers (690 Christian and 1,312 non-Christian Chinese) almost certainly represent undercoums, but that even an official count that yielded so many more non-Christians argues that the expulsion was not very successful. For the counts of 1755 (AGI. Filipinas. 481). see ibid.，pp. 206-208. Diaz-Trechuelo naively states that immediately after the expulsion, “we may affirm that at this moment, there was not a single non-Christian Chinese in the country. But of the 1,181 sloreowners and craftsmen, 491 were catechumens, supposedly studying to become Christians so that they could stay in the Philippines.

22 Anson 1748: 237，cited in Guerrero 1966: n. 74, There appear to be almost no estimates of the Chinese population in the Philippines in (he early decades of the eighteenth century. Forty thousand seems far too high a number; my own guess is that there were at least five to six thousand Chinese throughoul the Philippines in the early eighteenth century,

23 The primary sources for the British occupation of Manila、1762-1764 are found in AGI， Filipinas, 713-720, with documents concerning the Sangleyes in legajos 713-716. See B&R, vols. 49-50 for translations of some of these materials.

around Manila24 and paying the tributary tax of 81 reales per year，the Spanish

authorities could more easily keep track of them than the Chinese who stayed

aboard their vessels. Second, these poorer immigrants, especially when they first

arrived, had far fewer social and economic connections with the more estab­

lished and influential Chinese in the Manila community, so that if they became

embroiled in any trouble and caught the eyes of the Spanish, they had the least

protection of any in the Chinese communities. Indeed, the Spanish government

was most wary of these men—single, pagan, and newly arrived from China—

who were most apt to take part in the insurrections that occurred periodically.

For example, when the unrests of 1639 and 1662 reached Manila，official

reports mentioned Chinese butchers as one of the first groups to take up arms

against the Spaniards. Some among this group had rather more freedom of

movement than many other pagan Chinese because they were permitted to go

into the countryside near Manila to gather animals for butchering. In addition,

their importance to the provisioning of Manila made the colonial authorities

keep careful attention to the butchers * business practices，as indicated by the

report of a judge of the Manila Audiencia on fraudulent weights in I682.25

The Chinese bakers were equally suspect in the eyes of the colonial govern­

ment, which had a long tradition of trying to control them. There were bakeries

throughout the Manila area, both inside and outside the city, and apparently

most of the bakers (and much of the wheat flour) came from China. Because

of the bread-making schedule, it was tempting for the bakers to stay overnight

where they worked, something that the Manila government repeatedly discouraged一

probably with indifferent success—by issuing decrees insisting that no Chinese

baker could sleep in the city, so that they could not be plotting seditious activ­

ities.26 Of bakers who were questioned in 1686, many apparently were recent

arrivals in Manila, perhaps as recently as that year in one of the 27 junks from

China.27 Indeed，the Spanish were worried because they suspected that the

24 In addition to the Parian, there were Chinese living in settlements in Binondo, Tondo, Santa Cruz, Quiapo, etc., all situated on the north bank of the Pasig River, opposite the walled city proper of Manila (“Intramuros”>. After 1581, neither Christian nor pagan Chinese were allowed to live within the city, but violations abounded: domestic servants of the Spaniards，for instance. Moreover，by the seventeenth century, Binondo and Santa Cruz became areas for married Christian Chinese and their families and Chinese mestizos, and fre­quent orders insisted that non-Christian Chinese should only live in (he Paridn.

23 AGI, Fiiipinas、24 R3 N22.26 See, for example, the orders issued in 1609 in AGI, FVipinas、 27 N73.v Thirteen of these were definitely from Xiamen. In 1685，only 16 Chinese vessels arrived

in Manila (1 from Canton、13 from Xiamen, and 2 from “China”). For the number of ves­sels arriving and registering at the port of Manila, see Chaunu I960: 147-198. Chaunu's data for his entire work come from the accounts for the Royal Treasury of the Philippines (Caja

Chinese authorities were taking advantage of the reopening of maritime trade to

send many undesirable elements to the Philippines, as the events that year

seemed to bear out.

The judicial interrogation in 1686 provides certain kinds of information about

the bakers that is quite rare for individual Chinese in the Spanish Philippines

prior to the nineteenth century, such as the ages and places of origin of these

men. My preliminary tabulations show that the great majority of them were

under the age of thirty-five_ not surprising for men desperate and hardy enough

to seek a livelihood overseas一 and that they were from the Zhangzhou area or

“Xiamen.” None mentioned any part of Quanzhou (other than Xiamen) as their

home.28 For those from Zhangzhou, many were from Haicheng，or even more

specifically from Sandu，located very close to the seashore in Haicheng district

(now part of Longhai Municipality).29 In addition, it is not surprising to find that

the bakers seem to have been grouped roughly according to their native places.

That is, a head baker from a village in Sandu would have working under him

others from the same village, some of them probably having been brought over

to the Philippines by him or associates in Sandu.

It is also worth looking at a larger set of records—the baptismal registries

for the parish in the Parian for 1626-1700.w In addition to the names of the

baptized, we also have their place of origin, (heir age, their occupation, the

names (often mangled) of their parents, distinct physical marks, and the names

of their godfathers (compadres). From these records, my preliminary enumera­

tions show that the majority of these Christian Chinese were laborers, skilled

craftsmen (e.g., silversmiths，carpenters, weavers, chair makers, tailors, stone­

masons), boatmen, fishermen，shopkeepers, cooks, etc. Nearly all those whose

place of origin could be determined came from “Xiamen” or some part of

Zhangzhou. Very occasionally there would be men involved in business, such

de Filipinas) in the Contaduna section of the AGI. Chaunu also reports available information on the ports of origin and the kind of vessel, but the original records are quite unsystematic on these points.

28 Since most of those who left from southern Fujian probably boarded a ship from Xiamen, it is impossible to say more precisely where they came from. Xiamen was admin­istratively part of Tongan district, which in turn was part of Quanzhou prefecture.

29 Judicial inquiry of the bakers: AGI, Filipinas’ 69. The bizarre and inconsistent Spanish transcriptions of Chinese place names often tax the imagination of a reader frying to deci­pher them, even if one knows Minnanese. Some of the better-known names, however, are quite obvious: Emuy/Emui for Xiamen; Chincheo/Chengchiu for Zhangzhou, Hayteng/ Haytang/Haychung, etc. for Haicheng: Samtou/Santou/Santon> etc. for Sandu. Vahay and Hanay for Anhai; Tangva/Tangoa/Tengua for Tongan. and Tio Toa for Changtai district in Zhangzhou. 1 have yel to figure out，for example, whai or where “Bagai，,’ “Ousu•” and “Sialy” were. For Sandu. see Haicheng xianzhi 1762: 1.2b.

w APSR (Dominican archive), Seccion Parian. Torno 1. Libro de Bautizos, 1626-1700.

as brokers (corredor\ all of whom in these records were noted as being from

Anhai in Quanzhou prefecture. Furthermore, as time passed, more children

appear in the records (often baptized and given extreme unction since they died

soon after birth), and for them, Chinese mestizos figure increasingly as godpar­

ents, suggesting that these Christian Chinese were becoming more settled in the

Philippines, making permanent connections to their Filipino marriage relatives.

Of course, these baptismal registries are only for the Parian, and we may find

quite different patterns in corresponding records (if they have survived) in other

settlements with predominantly Chinese parishioners, such as Binondo,31 where

many of the wealthier Chinese lived— and more of these might have been mer­

chants and businessmen and come from Quanzhou. The Christian Chinese and

Chinese mestizos in Binondo whose Gremio de Chinos formally organized in

1687 apparently enjoyed a fair amount of influence with the Manila govern­

ment, since in the previous year they successfully won a land dispute with the

Jesuits in the district.32 In general, the Christian Chinese in Binondo and other

settlements were treated with somewhat more consideration than the Chinese in

the Parian, where the non-Christians lived and many of whom were poorer.

Based on ihese bits of information, I would venture to guess that among the

Minnanese who came to the Philippines through the seventeenth century, there

was a distinction between those from the Zhangzhou area, who were poorer,

more apt to get work other than as traders, and more likely to stay in the

islands. In contrast, the Quanzhou area natives were more involved in the junk

trade, directly or indirectly, and many of them were short-term sojourners. They

could come on the junks soon after the Chinese New Year, stay on board or in

the Parian for a few months while waiting for the nao to arrive, and then hope

to leave after having finished their business (or arranged to leave it in the hands

of brokers) when the southwest monsoon started blowing, at around the same

time when another nao set sail for Acapulco.

At the least, the genealogies from various Minnan areas that I have exam­

ined do not disprove this suggestion. In the genealogies from the Quanzhou area

(mainly from Jinjiang, Nan’an, Anhai, and Shishi)33 that list men who went to

31 In the late seventeenth century, the Paridn was located approximately east of the city proper of Manila, while settlements for Christian Chinese, such as Binondo、Tondo, and Santa Cruz were situated across the Pasig River on its north bank.

32 See Wickberg 2000: 19-20. Gremios often were organized along according to occupa­tions, but according to Wickberg, the Binondo gremio apparently functioned as “a kind of combined municipal governing corporation and religious sodality.”

Shishi was part of Jinjiang district (xian) in the Ming and Qing but is now a separate municipality. Two important ports of the Quanzhou area, Hanjiang and Yongning are located in Shishi.

the Philippines, almost all show that two to four successive generations did so,

sometimes several men in each generation. In the genealogy of the Feiqian

Chen family of Anhai (Anhai Feiqian Chen shi zupu), men were going to

Southeast Asia as early as the fifteenth century, to what is now Cambodia or

Vietnam (“Zhenia guo”）and later to Luzon, where eight of them died in the

1603 and another two in the 1639 massacres.34 That such men were recorded in

their genealogies suggests that they did return home, even if to set off on their

travels again. Two other points are worth mentioning about the Quanzhou area

genealogies. First, they also record family members moving (short- or long-term

sojourning) to other parts of China_ as nearby as Xiamen or Zhangzhou, or

across the straits to Taiwan, or farther off，to Guangzhou, Macau, Ningbo, and

Beijing, and such moves, not surprisingly, increased starting in the last decade

of the seventeenth century, a development we will discuss later. Second, men

did not stop going to the Philippines; in fact, they increased in the nineteenth

century, when the Spanish attitude and policy toward Chinese immigration

changed drastically.

The Zhangzhou genealogies that I have seen are less informative, simply because

extremely few of them mention overseas travel prior to the mid-eighteenth cen­

tury. It may simply be that the Zhangzhou emigrants belonged to families who

did not compile genealogies, or that these men went abroad and were never

heard of again~out of sight，out of mind, out of the genealogy. Beginning in

the early eighteenth century, however，the Zhangzhou genealogies begin to yield

interesting information about emigration either to Taiwan or to Southeast Asia.

Claudine Salmon (1991). for instance, has been able to study the Han family's

history in Java, where several members were Kapitan in the eighteenth century.

For later periods, from the nineteenth century onward, there are more records

of men (or in the case of Taiwan, entire families) emigrating. Even so, for rea­

sons I have yet to understand, the Zhangzhou genealogies are generally more

reticent than those of Quanzhou about such matters.

Southern Fujianese in C hina a n d A b ro a d

By the 1690s, the depression of the earlier Kangxi period (1662-1722) was

ending, and China’s overseas junk trade had resumed after the Qing government

lifted its ban on this commerce in 1684. Chinese trade to the Philippines recov­

ered to a certain extent，although it never re-attained the profitable heights of

34 The genealogy was in the family's possession but was lost during the Cultural Revolution. The information given above comes from Zhuang Weiji et al. 1998: 689-690.

the early seventeenth century. It continued because it was sufficiently profitable;

with the steep decrease in silver import from Japan, there was excellent reason

for traders to acquire as much New World silver as they could through the

Manila galleon and junk trade.35 Rivaling the trade between China and the

Philippines was the junk trade to Batavia. Although estimate of the number of

vessels arriving in Manila and Batavia derived from the official records tells

only part of the story, a comparison between the recorded voyages of Chinese

junks going from China to Manila and to Batavia from the last decades of the

seventeenth through the end of the eighteenth century show no pronounced

long-term dominance of one port over the other. Whatever the problems

between the Chinese and Spanish in the Philippines, the importance of the

Manila junk trade held its own with that of Batavia, despite Leonard Blusse's

assertion that the period between 1690-1740 was the “heyday of the junk trade,”

when the V.O.C. had decided to rely on Chinese ships coming to Batavia rather

than sending Dutch ships to China.36

Ships from China, Macau, and Taiwan going to Manila and Batavia,

ten-year periods, 1681-1790

Period Average number of vessels per year

China Macau Taiwan Total

Manila 1681, 1683-88, 1690

(8 yrs)

7.8 1 0.75 11.5

Batavia 1681-90 9.7 1.8 11.5

Manila1691-1700

16.2 0.9 17.1

Batavia 11.5 1.6 13,1

Manila 1701-03， 1705-10 (9 yrs) 22.2 0.3 22.5

Batavia 1701-10 11 2.9 13.9

15 See von Glahn 1996: chap. 7 for the Kangxi depression and Table 23 on p. 232 for estimates of silver imports into China from Japan and the New World.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the customs duties paid by Chinese ships in Manila reached an annual average of nearly 65,000 pesos、and it was not unusual for forty to fifty vessels to arrive every year. After 1684, the largest number of ships from China (legitimately) arriving in Manila was the twenty-seven in 1686, and the largest average annua) amount of customs duties did not quite reach 30,()00 pesos (for the period 1776-1780). I am excluding the anomalous figures for 1787.

J6 Bluss6 1986: 115-133.

Table (cont.)

Period Average number of vessels per year

China Macau Taiwan Total

Manila 1711， 1713-20 (9 yrs) 9.6 0.1 0.8 10.5

Batavia 1711-20 13.6 5.9 19.5

Manila1721-30

11.8 0.3 0.2 12.3

Batavia 16.4 9 25.4

Manila 1731-36, 1738-40 (9 yrs) 13.3 0.6 14

Batavia 1731-40 17.7 4.8 22.5

Manila 1741-43， 1745， 1747-50

(8 yrs)

15.8 0.75 0.25 16.7

Batavia 1741-50 10.9 4.1 15

Manila1751-60

12.7 0.6 0.1 13.4

Batavia 9.1 1.8 10.9

Manila 1764-70 (7 yrs) 8.1 1,1 0.1 9.3

Batavia 1761-70 7.4 2.4 9.8

Manila 1771-77 (7 yrs) 8.7 1 9.7

Batavia 1771-80 5.1 3 8.1

Manila 1787 (1 yr) 12 4 16

Batavia 1781-90 9.3 3.9 13.2

Sources: Chaunu 丨960: 168-198; Blusse 1986: 123.

In fact, the Nanyang (South China Sea) junk trade became part of an

expanding network of maritime commerce that now included the newly legal­

ized and fast-growing domestic trade along the China coast.37 Prominent

throughout this network were Minnan merchants located in Chinese port cities

and in various ports of Southeast Asia. Such developments, especially the

explosive growth of commerce between southern Fujian and Taiwan promised

',7 Ng 1983.

the economic recovery and perhaps even prosperity of the Minnan coastal

region. As Xiamen took off as the primary port in southern Fujian, it became

the nexus for both the domestic coastal trade and the Nanyang trade.

Contemporary accounts of eighteenth-century Xiamen remarked on its rapid growth

and the fabulous wealth of its merchants.

This growing trade had a significant impact on the population movement

within and out of Fujian. Xiamen, of course, was an obvious destination, as was

Taiwan. But many other migrants continued to go further overseas. If we accept

that for two to three decades starting in 1690，Chinese emigration to the

Philippines declined before reviving, what does this mean for population move­

ments in and from Fujian? During this period and for longer, China, Taiwan，

and Dutch-controlled areas of Java all provided viable alternative destinations.

The history of Zhangzhou immigration to Taiwan is the best-documented. And

through genealogies and government records, we are learning a fair amount

about Zhangzhou merchants and settlers in the Batavia region. While the

V.O.C. had been encouraging Chinese settlers since the establishment of

Batavia in 1619，this welcome heightened when peace was established with Javanese

rulers in Mataram (1659) and Banten (1693), so that opening up of the hinter­

land (“Ommelanden”）included (re-)establishment of sugar plantations that required

many more workers. Thus between 1680 and 1740, the Chinese population in

Dutch-controlled areas in and around Batavia doubled.38

For the task of tracing migration within China itself, genealogies provide

information at a level unavailable in government documents; they occasionally

mention entire families moving to Zhejiang as early as the late Ming, where

they were received by distant relatives of their lineage. On the other hand，for

more distant moves, such as to Sichuan, as encouraged by the Qing government，

my first look at genealogies in Sichuan suggests that the most promising leads

may come from starting with the target areas of migration.

The changes within Zhangzhou itself starting in the early Qing period are

significant. By the mid-seventeenth century, Haicheng had long ceased to play

any role in the maritime trade, although the regional inland trade coming down

the Jiulong River was substantial enough that the Qing established in Shima

(between the Zhangzhou prefectural seat and Haicheng) a branch office of the

customs station located in Xiamen. But apparently most of the merchants for­

merly in Haicheng had moved to Xiamen, even if they retained their residence

3lt Blusse 1986: 80-89. Furthermore, between 1680 and 1740. even though the Chinese population around Manila hovered at about five thousand before slowly increasing again, it was still larger than that in Batavia, despite the fact that it had doubled in this period. See also Bluss^ 1996.

registration in Zhangzhou.;9 The coastal area of Zhangzhou that had seen rapid

development of manufacturing and crafts in the late Ming, when Haicheng was

the premier port for the Nanyang trade, reverted largely to agriculture, growing

fruits, sugar cane, tobacco, and indigo as cash crops.40

The history of the rise and decline of the manufacture of the kind of export

ceramics commonly known as Swatow ware provides an interesting illustration

of these changes. From the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries,

these ceramics were produced in kilns in several Zhangzhou areas, including

Haicheng, Changtai, Pinghe, Yunxiao，and even locations further inland, like

Nanjing and (what is now) Hua'an.41 Dating of both the excavated kilns and of

the ceramic pieces suggests little or no production after the mid-eighteenth cen­

tury, at the latest. Some kilns continued to produce export ware in southern

Fujian, but apparently most others either closed down or produced exclusively

for local popular use. Genealogies indicate that at least some of the potters orig­

inally came from the further inland Dehua area in Quanzhou, which was long

known for its porcelain.42 This fact provides an interesting example of how

migration within Minnan itself was stimulated by economic developments in a

specific area. On the other hand, while Zhangzhou export ware largely disap­

peared, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Dehua ceramics continued to

be exported in fairly large quantities. One explanation may be that although

continued demand specifically for products from well-established porcelain

centers like Jingde zhen and Dehua ensured their survival, kilns involved in pro­

ducing more common ceramics were more susceptible to their immediate eco­

nomic environment. When Haicheng's role as a seaport declined and when the

Ming-Qing transition wreaked havoc on coastal Fujian, production of ordinary

w For the details of the Qing customs administration in the years right after 1684, see Ng 1983: 67-71; for Xiamen residents keeping their original residence registrations, see pp. 85-88; for a]) the Haicheng and Shima merchants who were ship guarantors moving to Xiamen after1683, see p. 171.

40 The economic growth of the coastal Zhangzhou area in the late Ming has been explored in Rawski 1972. esp. chap. 4.

41 Apparently, ihe name Swatow came from the fact that Westerners bought these ceram­ics from Chinese shippers who came oul of Shantou in Chaozhou prefecture in Guangdong, just south of Zhangzhou. This kind of ceramics, which included a wide variety of styles, including imitations of (generally) higher-qualily Jingde zhen ware from Jiangxi was proba­bly made in a wide area throughout southeastern China, so that the alternative name Hua'nan ware is more accurate. Through Che end of the seventeenth century, much of it was probably made in Zhangzhou kilns, although archaeological excavations suggest that there were also kilns in Chaozhou producing similar export ware. For the most recent studies on Zhangzhou ware, see Fujian wenbo—both the supplementary 1999 issue of '*Zhongguo gu taoci yanjiu hui 1999 nian hui zhuanji” and three articles in vol. 38 (2000, no. 2),

42 For genealogies of Dehua potters moving to Zhangzhou, see Luo 1999: 125.

export ceramics was easily relocated. In any case, the economic changes in

Zhangzhou from the mid-sixteenth century through the early eighteenth century

are fairly well-established, although we still need a more complete explanation

for them.

Change was not as obvious in Quanzhou，whose natives' role in domestic

and international trade not only continued but became more important. And

unlike Haicheng, there were enough ports around Quanzhou~chiefly in Jinjiang

(Hanjiang, Yongning, Shenlu, Anhai, etc.) that remained active, even if much

of the trade was illicit until the late eighteenth century.43 The most lucrative

smuggling involved rice from Taiwan (or Penghu Island) to the mainland and

the surreptitious transport of emigrants in the opposite direction. Indeed, since

the Quanzhou region itself apparently did not enjoy any appreciable economic

growth from the 1690s onward, its largest export was its own natives to

Taiwan.44 The move to Taiwan was a continuation of what their ancestors had

done one or two generations earlier under the Zheng family. In fact, generally,

settlers from Quanzhou predate those from Zhangzhou, the latter coming in

greater numbers after the eighteenth century, again supporting the idea that the

Zhangzhou natives might have changed their migration patterns around that

time.45

As a result of the rapid growth of the trade along coastal China after 1684,

the presence of Minnan merchants in port cities other than Xiamen became

increasingly prominent. Ng Chin-keong gives some impressive figures for

Guangzhou (over a thousand in the 1730s); Ningbo (several thousand by the

mid-nineteenth century); Suzhou (over ten thousand，therefore constituting over

half of the sojourning merchants there); and Tianjin (at least several hundred).46

The question of how much wealth these early sojourners brought home to

Minnan may never be fully answerable, but we can at least tentatively provide

ways of addressing it. The clues I derive from genealogies and commemorative

literature for ancestral shrines in the Quanzhou area47 suggest that some wealth

4J By the late eighteenth century, Hanjiang was designated as a port for trade with vari­ous Taiwan ports. As Ng 1990: 313 points out, by this time, Xiamen’s trade with Taiwan had declined sharply.

44 Ng 1983: 40 suggests that about 20% of the population of the greater Zhangzhou- Quanzhou region had migrated to Taiwan around 丨 700. Based on my own work, I would suggest an even higher percentage for the Jinjiang area on the Quanzhou coast.

45 Dai 1963.46 Ng 1983: 96-98.47 The 162 ancestral shrines described in Quanzhou ming ci 2003 constitute less than a

quarter of those in the area, and the commemorative literature (on stone inscriptions and in genealogies) often provide a history of the shrines, including dates of (re-Construction and names and details about at least the major donors.

found its way to their native places，but apparently far more was channeled into

business networks wherever family members located, whether elsewhere in

China or in Southeast Asia. The various devastations suffered in the Minnan

area from the mid-Ming period onward time and again destroyed much of the

benefits of investments in land and business in the home area. Thus the money

Minnan natives put back into their home areas went largely to sustaining their

families and lineages by buying some land for building (rather than cultivation),

(re-)constructing ancestral halls and lineage schools, houses, and roads, rather

than to investing in business ventures.48

In short, it seems that even as Xiamen became prosperous in the eighteenth

century, its economic success was not shared by the rest of coastal Minnan.

Attachment to one’s native place did not include large financial investments,

which went instead into businesses in Xiamen and other port cities in China,

Taiwan, and in various regions of Southeast Asia, especially the Philippines and

Java. In some ways, this differentiation between Xiamen and other parts of

coastal Minnan resembles recent developments. When Xiamen became a Special

Economic Zone two decades ago, most of the regional economic and human

resources were sucked away from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou, so that even

investments and donations by overseas Chinese in these two municipalities only

minimally maintained their economic viability.49 For much of Zhangzhou and

Quanzhou, not just along the coast, but further inland by the nineteenth century,

this was a time when the chief export was sojourners and settlers.

Conclusions

What was the impact on southern Fujian of trade with and migration to the Spanish Philippines? The short answer is that with the exception of Xiamen,

southern Fujian did not prosper much, at least for the first two hundred fifty

years when its natives traded with or sojourned in the Philippines. Although

trade did stimulate commercial agriculture and manufacturing in Minnan, espe­

cially during the late Ming era, many of these activities fell by the wayside not

only during the turmoil of the Ming-Qing transition and did not revive along

48 Apparently, in the Quanzhou area, through the nineteenth century, families that had all emigrated to Taiwan still kept houses and land in their native places, which remained untenanted and uncuitivaled for years. Information from Huang You, interviewed April 17,2004.

49 The situation is different today, at least around the coastal areas of Quanzhou, where business investments and a less lop-sided relationship with Xiamen are contributing to eco­nomic development. Zhangzhou has yet to experience a similar growth.

with the maritime trade in the late seventeenth century. Minnan merchants did

profit from trade with the Philippines and other parts of the Nanyang and even

more from the trade along the China coast. But their emotional attachment to

their native places largely translated into funding activities that would maintain

lineage ties and support relatives still living in Minnan. And their major capital

investments went chiefly into building ships and sustaining their trade and busi­

ness networks throughout the port cities on the China coast and in the Nanyang.

The long answer is that an adequate assessment of the impact of the

Philippines on southern Fujian requires examining the latter region’s ties with

the rest of the Nanyang region, as well as with areas of China where Minnanese

settled, especially Taiwan and the port cities along the coast. That Chinese

traders in the Nanyang survived and often bested their competitors, Asian and

European, had much to do with their extensive business networks throughout

East and Southeast Asia. These networks included not only the overseas traders,

ship-owners, and their investors, but also local merchants and those involved in

the production and wholesale and retail distribution of goods. For instance, a

number of Minnan genealogies show members of the same family going to dif­

ferent destinations in south China (Guangzhou, Macau) and the Nanyang

(Manila and Batavia). Thus it is not surprising to discover furthermore that men

involved in sugar production and trade in Luzon had relatives involved in the

same activities in Zhangzhou, Taiwan, as well as Batavia. Indeed, several

Taiwan genealogies show that some Minnanese went to the Philippines not

directly from southern Fujian, but via Taiwan.

By broadening our outlook to encompass China and the Nanyang, we can

perceive not only the links among the Fujianese in this entire region but also

the similarities and historical continuities in their sojourning and migration. We

see variations in their strategies that evolved over many centuries—since the

Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) at the latest— in an area whose survival

depended on maritime commerce, and whose tradition of sojourning was longer

than that of the Huizhou merchants of Anhui or those from Shanxi. Never­

theless, even the obvious differences among these groups show the similar gen­

eral strategies that Chinese sojourners employed to help themselves survive and

hold a place of some power and wealth in the area where they stayed. For

instance, although native place associations did not exist as such in the early

Spanish Philippines, we have evidence for networks and patronage systems

based on native place and family connections. Indeed, Fujianese domestic and

overseas migrations were not only closely linked, but represent different seg­

ments in a continuum.

If we narrow our focus, however, we see that the various sub-regions within

Minnan itself (about the size of Maryland) responded differently to the devel­

opments starting in the late sixteenth century. Here we are not talking about

the ways different dialect or speech groups of overseas Chinese (Hokkien from

Minnan, Teochiu from Chaozhou in northern Guangdong, Cantonese, etc.) often

ended up settling in different economic niches and establishing distinct sub­

communities in a given area abroad, thereby perpetuating or even magnifying

their original differences back in China. Instead we are looking at two areas in

southern Fujian distinguished not by linguistic differences (which are quite

minor) but by their geographies and economic developments. Ultimately, the

chief export of the coastal districts of both Zhangzhou and Quanzhou was their

own people, but their migration patterns differed. Zhangzhou men made up most

of the earliest and numerous long-term settlers in the Philippines. Quanzhou

men traded in the Philippines but tended less to settle there. This pattern lasted

until the late seventeenth century when several important changes occurred: the

expulsion of many Chinese from the Philippines, the growing attraction of other

destinations for Minnan migrants boih in China (Xiamen and other port cities)

and overseas (Taiwan, Java, Siam). As a result, the migration patterns of Zhangzhou

and Quanzhou natives seem to have grown more similar but Zhangzhou and

Quanzhou continued to differ. Zhangzhou inhabitants, with sufficiently rich land

in the Jiulong river plain，returned largely to agriculture, while the truly hard­

scrabble coastal areas of Quanzhou dispatched even more migrants, including

some to Zhangzhou.

Studies of the Chinese diasporas throughout the world for all periods focus

much more on the destination areas where sojourners and settlers land than on

their native places, perhaps with the implicit assumption that the latter are far

better understood. For southern Fujian, however* whose identity is so bound up

in its maritime trade and migrating population, we must examine the region as

thoroughly as those places where its natives went. We can then better under­

stand the great and varied impact of the silver that flowed into China in the

early modern period and why southern Fujian, through which most of this silver

came, remained poor. And the answer may be closely linked to another major

issue一 that of Chinese migration and sojourning patterns, both domestic and

overseas. Why did the Minnanese and many other Chinese exhibit (and still do)

a wanderlust that contradicts the traditional idea of Chinese geographical root­

edness while at Ihe same time evincing a deep reverence for their native place?

This tension is perhaps one of the most enduring characteristics of Chinese cul­

ture, both in China and abroad.

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G lo ssa ry o f C hinese names a n d terms

A n h a i安海Anhai Feiqtan Chen shi z u p u 安海飛錢陳氏族譜 Changtai 長泰 Chaozhou prefecture 潮州府 Ch’enJinghe 陳荆和 .Chen Qianshan/Zui丨iang 陳謙善 / 最贞 Dai Y a n h u i政炎輝 D e h ua德化Dongxi yangkao 東西洋考 Fujian wenbo 福 _ 文傅

Haicheng xianzhi 海澄縣志 H a n 綠Hanjiang ttJ 江Huaqiao yu Fe iliib in華腐與菲揀賓Haicheng 海沒H u a 'a n華安Hua'nan 華南

Huang You 黄献huaqiao 華摘Jing hi j i 衆壁集

Jingde zhen 衆徳锁Jinjiang 晉江Jiulong River 九能江k e jia客家Li Guangjin 李光德Li T ia n x i李天锡Liu Chih Tien 劉芝田Longhai Municipality 龍海市Luo Lihua 罗 华Lii Shipeng 呂士朋Nan’an m 安Nanjing 南靖Penghu 游湖P ing h e平和

Qing dai Taiwan xiang zhuang zhi shehui de kaocha 清代台湾鄉莊之社會的考察Qian lun Minnan Ming-Qing qinghua laoqi duandai yiju 淺论闽南明淸靑花晌器断 K 依据qianjie 遷界Quanzhou 泉州Quanzhou ming ci 泉州名祠Quanzhou^pudie huaqiao shiliao yu yanjiu 泉州 i普滕华侨史料与研究Sandu 二 都Shantou 汕頭Shenlu 深速ShimaS h is h i石獅 Tongan district 同安縣Xiling shiqi Feilubin huaqiao zhi shangye huodong 西領時期罪律费華備之商業话動Yongning 永苹Yuegang 月港Yunxiao 雲宵Zhang Xie 張變Zhangzhou 掩 ')flZheng Chenggong 郧成功Zheng Zhilong 齡芝龍Zheng Shanyu 郑山玉Zhenia g u o 真联國Zhongguo gu taoci yanjiu hui 1999 nian hui zhuanji 中 國 古 陶 瓷 硏 究 會 丨 年 會 傅 街 Zhuang Weiji 庄为沉