The Oldest Chinatown: Binondo, the Sangleys, and Four Centuries of Chinese Manila

The Claim Is Narrower Than the Slogan

In 1594 the governor of the Philippines gave a piece of wooded ground across the Pasig river to Christian Chinese and to Chinese men who had married local women. That grant — not a market licence, not a wave of immigration — is the instrument underneath the phrase oldest chinatown, and the claim it supports is narrower than the slogan. What has been continuous on that bank since 1594 is Chinese and Chinese-mestizo residence. The building is another matter.

Two settlements did the work. South of the river stood the Parían (八连, bālián), the walled and counted market — designed to be taxed, which meant counted, which meant fixed in one place outside the walls. North of the river stood the pueblo of converts and mixed households that became Binondo (岷伦洛, Mínlúnluò).

The parish church proves the difference. The Dominicans planned it for Chinese worshippers in 1596; it was rebuilt in granite in 1852 and destroyed in 1945, leaving the west front and the octagonal bell tower. When the National Historical Commission installed a marker in Binondo on 27 May 2024, it called the district the country’s “oldest Chinatown, evolving down the centuries.” Evolving is the state’s word, not this article’s.

Before the Spanish, a Ming Decision

The community is four years older than the city that governed it. In 1567 the Ming court partially lifted its maritime ban — the Longqing opening (隆庆开海, Lóngqìng kāihǎi) — and licensed trade to the eastern and western oceans at Yuegang (月港, Yuègǎng) in Zhangzhou, the only legal private overseas-trade harbour of the period. Legazpi reached the Pasig four years later and found Minnan traders already settled at the river mouth.

The volume belongs in a range: in Salazar’s census for 1587–88, “usually more than twenty merchant ships a year from China, each with at least a hundred men”; in Chinese scholarship, thirty to forty junks a year.

The mechanism was silver. Zhang Xie (张燮, Zhāng Xiè) wrote in 1617 that Luzon (吕宋, Lǚsòng) has no produce of its own, that the Spaniards buy everything with silver coin, and that a returning junk therefore carries nothing but silver.

The first generation was Zhangzhou — Haicheng and Longxi — with a Quanzhou minority, as Chen Jinghe (陈荆和, Chén Jīnghé) established. The Jinjiang, Nan’an and Huian dominance in nineteenth-century Binondo deed books is a later recomposition, dated by Wickberg and Chu to the expulsions of 1762–1804 and the rebuild after them.

Passage here was not financed the way Cantonese passage would later be — the credit-ticket system that moved men from Taishan to the Americas did not operate in the 1570s and 1590s.

A Ledger with Walls

In early 1581 Governor Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñalosa ordered the Chinese gathered into a single silk market outside the walls. The logic was fiscal before it was urban: to tax them you must count them, and to count them you must fix them in place. Chinese secondary literature often says 1582; the Spanish text says 1581.

Salazar’s letter of 24 June 1590 is the best paragraph the period left behind: before the order, the Chinese had no fixed place to live, “until Don Gonzalo Ronquillo assigned them a place, a kind of raw-silk market which we call the parían, with four large houses.” Three to four thousand lived inside, and a Chinaman’s day wage was one real.

Three design features did the work. Residence was confined to the quarter, and the quarter sat outside the walls but inside the artillery arc of the Intramuros bastions — the Spanish phrase is to prevent a Chinese rising. The buildings were nipa palm, timber and rattan while Intramuros was stone. A single fire or a single order could empty the district, and both were used.

A fire on 19 March 1583 destroyed the first Parían — the sources disagree on whether it began during the wake for Governor Ronquillo or at a Chinese funeral. From 1593 the quarter stood on an island across the river and burned in 1597; after the 1603 rising the authorities burned it themselves.

Four names sit in layers over the same ground: Balián, from Tagalog pariyan, a market square — which is why the Spanish called it an Alcaicería and why the term is generic rather than a Manila place-name; Jiannei, what the Chinese called it; Minlunluo, the north-bank settlement; and Ongpin Street (王彬街, Wángbīn Jiē), a 1915 municipal renaming. And the seventeenth-century commercial centre was Tondo, not Binondo.

Sangley Was a Tax Bracket

The word came before the people it described, and it described a fiscal status. The gremio de chinos existed as an administrative body before anything like a self-conscious community did. The same man appears as sangley at a baptism, chino at a marriage, and mestizo de sangley in his children’s records.

Sangley (生理人 / 常来人, shēnglǐ rén / chánglái rén) has three competing etymologies and no settled one: “those who come often,” “those who come to trade,” and Hokkien seng-li, business. The earliest dated gloss is a governor’s — Francisco de Sande wrote in 1576 that these people are called sangleys, “a name for those who come and go.”

Baptism was the lever between brackets. An order of 1728 exempted baptised Chinese from all taxes for ten years and taxed them at the indio rate afterwards; during one expulsion two priests baptised 400 people in a single day; men who had lived decades as unconverted Sangley took baptism on the deathbed, to be buried in consecrated ground.

Then the grant. In 1594 Luis Pérez Dasmariñas gave land across the Pasig to Christian Chinese and to Chinese men married to local women — a wooded place between Tondo and Quiapo, under the Dominicans, who had taken charge of Chinese conversion in 1587.

And then the instrument almost nobody credits. A royal decree of 17 July 1679, under Governor Juan de Vargas, ordered all unmarried sangleys — including baptised Catholics — into the Parían, while married Chinese should live in Binondo, Santa Cruz and Tondo. That made Binondo a family district by law.

The Joint of the Galleon

The galleon trade was a three-cornered machine with one joint that could not be replaced. Fujian raw silk, silk cloth and porcelain went out through Manila to Acapulco; American silver came back through Manila to Zhangzhou. Chinese merchants assembled the silk at Zhangzhou and Huzhou, packed it in the Parían and took payment in silver.

The rent came from a restriction. A single-sailing rule — one ship a year, at most two — converted access to Chinese goods into the most valuable privilege in the Spanish empire, and the 1593 restriction was demanded by Sevillian silk interests being undersold.

One population supplied both cargo and labour. In the same year two hundred and fifty impressed Chinese rowers on the Ternate expedition mutinied under Pan Hewu (潘和五, Pān Héwǔ) and killed Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas near Maricaban on 26 October 1593.

Silver estimates for 1567 to 1644 run from about 330 million taels to an annual 57 to 86 tonnes, and cannot be averaged. The best Chinese sentence on the mechanism belongs to the Fujian grand coordinator Xu Xueju (徐学聚, Xú Xuéjù), the same official who handled the 1603 aftermath: “We trade to Luzon because the Spaniards have silver money.”

Everything had to be finished by late May so the Chinese could sail home on the monsoon, and buyers learned to wait and buy cheap after the deadline. Some stayed over with unsold stock. A trading season became a neighbourhood because a missed sailing had to be somewhere.

Five Massacres, and a State That Sent No Ship

How many massacres there were is itself a finding. Chinese retellings usually count four; the standard national history of 2012 counts five, adding 1686 — a royal expulsion order, some three hundred protesters, several hundred dead, on a single source; popular histories sometimes count six by adding an epidemic episode in 1819–20. Each event runs through the same four parts — a trigger, a geography, a Spanish casus belli, a contested toll.

1603 began with a rumour about gold. In 1602 Yan Yinglong (阎应龙, Yán Yīnglóng) and Zhang Yi (张嶷, Zhāng Yí) memorialised the Wanli court that Mount Jiayi (机易山, Jīyì Shān), which the Spanish called Cavite, held gold and silver; the court sent an official to look, and he found nothing. The Spanish read a Ming mission in their harbour as invasion reconnaissance, demolished the part of the Parían nearest the wall, and bought up iron goods from the Chinese at high prices to disarm them. Three hundred or more merchants killed themselves.

The toll divides by tradition. Spanish administrative accounts put the dead at about 15,000; Chinese tradition near 23,000; the Ming History‘s Luzon chapter at 24,000 to 25,000. The honest span is 15,000 to 25,000, with no single total that can be defended.

The Ming answer is the real subject. Xu Xueju’s memorial asked for the return of surviving merchants and their goods; he did not verify the numbers or the value, and the court, as the Chinese sources transmit its reply, declined to send a fleet. A memorial, not a ship — and the junks sailed again the next year.

1639 was agrarian, not commercial. Chinese growers on the Laguna de Bay lands around Calamba, squeezed by compulsory-purchase quotas and forced farm labour, rose and were destroyed over roughly four months; both traditions converge near 20,000, inside a 17,000–22,000 range. It is absent from the Ming History.

1662 was the only massacre triggered by a letter from China. Zheng Chenggong (郑成功, Zhèng Chénggōng), having taken Taiwan from the Dutch, demanded the islands’ submission; the Spanish read the Manila Chinese as a fifth column and killed 2,000 to 4,000 of them. The 1663 burial-inquiry mission (祭葬, jìzàng) is the only occasion a Chinese regime sent anyone to ask about a Manila massacre — and it produced no consulate, no fleet and no register.

1762–64 changed the map. During the British occupation the Chinese provisioned and guided the occupiers; the returning regime under Simón de Anda answered with killing and expulsion — about 6,000 dead, attributed — ended the Parían, and forced the community across the Pasig for good. Zhuang Guotu’s phrase is the one to keep: an oscillation between economic need and security fear.

Seven Thousand, Twelve Thousand

For the stretch between 1700 and 1850 the Chinese-language literature is thin. Chen Jinghe’s study stops at 1603, the standard national histories thin out across the eighteenth century, and for this interval an account in English still rests largely on Wickberg’s 1965 book.

The number that gets quoted is seven thousand. In 1590 Salazar counted 3,000 to 4,000 inside the Parían plus more than 2,000 transient, and concluded the Dominicans had nearly seven thousand sangleys under their care. The literature also attributes a ceiling of 7,000 to an early-eighteenth-century royal order, reaffirmed in 1720 and 1732. Both readings may be one number wearing two uniforms: a missionary’s headcount that hardened into a legal limit. Report both; resolve neither.

The ceiling could not describe the population it governed. In 1596 — more than a century before that ceiling was restated — Governor Francisco Tello de Guzmán deported some 12,000 Chinese from Manila, a removal recorded by Antonio de Morga, who classed most of them as illegal or undesirable settlers. Both the year and the figure are contested in the scholarship: the 12,000 is Morga’s number as later historians have read it, Tello’s own letter to the king puts the removal at “more than ten thousand” and asks to keep three or four thousand for the work of the place, and other accounts fold the episode into a different expulsion altogether. It is a documented deportation with an approximate scale, not a census.

So the arithmetic is not “a crown that capped the population and then expelled twelve thousand at once.” Those are two different centuries. It is a state repeatedly legislating a figure it had already exceeded.

A same-regime comparison is smaller and stranger. In 1755 Governor Pedro Manuel de Arandía expelled the non-Christian Chinese only: 515 baptised to evade the edict, 1,108 allowed to remain as catechumens, and 2,070 banished from Manila by the 30 June deadline, per Blair and Robertson; a peer-reviewed study puts the banished at around 600, with 3,443 allowed to remain.

And it was reversed every time. The 1603 survivors were back outside the walls within a few years: where profit leads, they go. The decrees of 1686 to 1700 were abandoned within about two years each, and the Royal Philippine Company failed partly because it could not command the Chinese distribution network it was meant to replace.

The Mestizo Ratchet and the 1849 Escape Clause

A tax schedule outlived the Chinese it was written for. A crown order of the 1740s separated the Chinese mestizos (密斯蒂佐, mīsīdìzuǒ) from indios on the tribute rolls, assessed them above the indio rate and exempted them from the polo, the forced labour levy. The category grew faster than the population around it: roughly 121,000 in 1810 to some 240,000 by mid-century.

The ratchet was violence. Each catastrophe killed or expelled Chinese men and left their Filipino wives and children in place, converting a bachelor-sojourner population into a settled, Catholic, locally rooted one. Mestizos stood outside the gremio, so the expulsions aimed at the Chinese did not reach them.

Then the decree, and its escape clause. Governor-General Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa issued it on 21 November 1849 with the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos, a 141-page book of 61,000 surnames. Rule 4 is explicit: natives of Spanish, indigenous, or Chinese origin who already had a surname might keep it and pass it to their descendants.

So 1849 was not universal renaming. It imposed a fixed, heritable, alphabetically distributed surname on those who lacked one — and then the record stopped being able to distinguish Chinese descent.

Clavería’s stated motive is the best sentence in the archive: inconsistent surnames made it sometimes impossible to prove degrees of consanguinity, “rendering useless the parochial books.” The decree existed to make the parish registers work as a civil register. Sacrament and surname are one system, not two.

Which is where a Tsinoy surname comes apart in the reader’s hands. Cojuangco (许寰哥, Xǔ Huángē, Hokkien Khó͘ Hoân-ko) is not a Spanish name and not a Chinese name; it is a Hokkien nickname spelled by a Spanish clerk, and the surname inside it was Xu (许, Xǔ) the whole time. Clavería did not invent Cojuangco; he made the Spanish form heritable and let the character drop out of the record. A fourth mechanism needed no decree: a son could take his father’s given name, which is how Wang Yibin became Wang Bin (王彬, Wáng Bīn).

The national payoff should be attributed, never asserted. T. H. Taylor’s count of 174 significant revolutionaries found 28 “undoubtedly” of Chinese descent, Aguinaldo among them; Antonio Tan’s formulation is the sharpest: the claim to be the true natives required forgetting the Chinese father while remembering only the indio mother.

After the Galleon: Credit, the Tienda, and 1902

Two dates remade the community again. The last galleon was abolished in 1815, and Manila opened to non-Spanish foreign houses in 1834. The Chinese moved from galleon supplier to provincial commodity broker: buying rice, abaca, sugar and tobacco, advancing credit against the coming harvest in Laguna, Batangas and Pampanga, and reaching the customer through the tienda, the credit book (lista) and the sari-sari network.

Indispensability is what made them hated. The agitation of the 1880s and 1890s was a coalition of fiscally squeezed Spanish officials, friar publicists, and Filipino and provincial traders, and the grievance at its centre was the credit relationship rather than ethnicity alone. This is also the stretch in which the great outflow of 1840 to 1940 reshaped the same coast, a subject covered elsewhere.

Then the hinge. The extension of United States Chinese exclusion law to the Philippines in 1902 recast Binondo’s merchants from a taxed colonial corporation into an administratively excludable alien population. The legal category did not develop in Manila; it arrived by extension — the machinery of certificates, head taxes and paper identities built for other borders, switched on here.

The Paper, and the Hole in It

Three classes of record survive, all in Spanish, and all biased toward Catholic, propertied, male households. The parish registers of Binondo record baptisms, marriages and burials, with Chinese fathers entered under Hispanicised names. The protocolos notariales in the Philippine National Archives hold wills, powers of attorney and estate inventories. And La Loma Chinese Cemetery (华侨义山, Huáqiáo Yìshān), in use from about 1850, with the Chongfutang (崇福堂, Chóngfútáng) at its centre — the community’s only continuous non-state archive, and the opposite arrangement to the bone-repatriation custom that carried Wuyi dead home.

And there is a hole on the Chinese side. There is no Philippine qiaopi corpus. Individual remittance letters survive in Fujian village collections, but they belong to other lines; there is no Manila-side archive of the kind that carries the Wuyi record. The Manila record runs through sacraments and notarial protocols instead — a structural difference, not a loss. The letters are their own subject.

The compensating discovery is the best single image in the archive: a will in a Binondo notary naming a wife in China and a wife in Manila, with a Fujian heir who surfaces only at probate. One firm, two households. The 1903 census counted 41,035 Chinese men and 518 Chinese women, the most skewed ratio in Southeast Asia, which is what produced the split household (两头家, liǎngtóujiā) and wills with heirs in two countries.

The Chinese side supplies four instruments, and each fails differently. Village tables in a provincial gazetteer were compiled from overseas-Chinese affairs reporting, so they undercount men who died abroad. The 1951 boundary and the 1988 carve-out of Shishi mean a family saying “Jinjiang” may mean a town now elsewhere. Lineages are cited but never reproduced, and most were recompiled in the 1990s, so an entry belongs to its edition. And federation certification makes village membership renegotiable.

The boundary trap is the method of this article in miniature. Hongjian village’s Ming and Qing address was Tong’an county, Quanzhou prefecture. It was reassigned to Longhai in the 1950s and now sits in Jiaomei town, Zhangzhou city. So an old source reading “Hongjian village, Tong’an county, Quanzhou prefecture” is correct for its period, and it is not a statement that the village is in Jinjiang. Retellings collapse the prefecture into Quanzhou, and Quanzhou into Jinjiang, and the collapse has reached print.

The Order of Reading: Two Families, Two Chains

The method can be stated as a rule before the cases: baptismal entry first, then the 1849 surname, then the named Fujian village. A family that starts at the village and works forward usually fails; one that starts at a sacrament and works back through the surname has a chance, because the decree kept the sound and dropped the character.

Start with the better-documented case, which is not the more famous one. In 1995 scholars from the Quanzhou local-history society matched entries in a Ke-surname genealogy — the 1897 continuation of the Upper Guo register — to the first two ancestors in the Philippine Rizal family genealogy. Ke Changli (柯长豊, Kē Chánglǐ) in the eighteenth generation and Ke Nan (柯南, Kē Nán) in the nineteenth fit uniquely. So “Domingo Lam-co” is Ke Nan, born 1662, from a village now called Shangguo, in Jinjiang; in January 1999 the Chinese ambassador reportedly notarised the identification. His descendants carried Mercado, then Realonda.

Now the other one. Xu Shangzhi (许尚志, Xǔ Shàngzhì), nineteenth generation, recorded in the Philippines as Xu Yuhuan (许玉寰, Xǔ Yùhuán), is the man the Philippine record calls José Cojuangco — and the great-grandfather of Corazon Aquino, the Philippines’ eleventh president. He was born in 1841 and left Hongjian in 1861, at about twenty. He landed first in Manila, moved to Malolos in Bulacan in 1865, and later to Tarlac, where rice and sugar made him the province’s richest man. His monument at Paniqui names him as Hongjian of the same county, nineteenth generation.

The asymmetry is the content. Rizal’s link is book-verified from both ends. Cojuangco’s is verified on the village side by government chronology, a standing hall and a carved tombstone, and on the descent side by family tradition and by the government’s own generation numbering, nineteenth to twenty-second, which is why the two agree. That chain is not a register; the relationship itself — that he was her great-grandfather — is stated consistently by the family’s memorial foundation, and the intermediate generations rest on documents this article has not seen.

The section’s last object is the tombstone, because it is the boundary trap carved in stone. Tongyi — “of the same county” — is Tong’an, which was in Quanzhou prefecture. One phrase on a monument in Tarlac carries the administrative history that produced the Jinjiang error.

The Village at the End of the Route

The route ends not in Binondo but in a village. Hongjian (鸿渐村, Hóngjiàn cūn) sits in Jiaomei town, in the Zhangzhou Taiwanese Investment Zone — formerly Longhai city — at the mouth of the north channel of the Jiulong river. It has 1,113 households and 3,280 people, half of them surnamed Xu; more than 1,300 of its people are overseas Chinese, mostly in the Philippines and Indonesia.

That is why the village is nicknamed Luzon village (吕宋村, Lǚsòng cūn), and its migrants Luzon guests (吕宋客, Lǚsòng kè). The village’s own chronology has men leaving through Yuegang from the Chenghua and Hongzhi reigns, the decades either side of 1500, with almost every household sending someone, and a 1491 claim that eight or nine households in ten had a man abroad, mostly to Luzon. That is village tradition, not a register.

In the middle of the village stands the Xu lineage hall (许氏家庙, Xǔ-shì Jiāmiào), also called Chongben Hall (崇本堂, Chóngběntáng): brick and timber, facing southwest, with a 1741 “presented scholar” plaque and Ming and Qing stone drums at the door. This article prints no foundation date for it; the village’s own account and the reference entries disagree by centuries.

On 14 April 1988 Corazon Aquino worshipped at that hall, holding incense before the ancestral tablets, and planted a Norfolk Island pine (南洋杉, nányángshān). The line usually attributed to her there — that she might be president of the Philippines but was, in a sense, also a daughter of this village — reaches us through a 2011 China News Service report quoting the village head, Xu Bingsheng (许秉生, Xǔ Bǐngshēng), recalling the speech. It is a recollection, not a wire dispatch, and the qualifier belongs inside the quotation marks. The tree needs no attribution: by 3 September 2011 her son had come on the same pilgrimage, to a pine that was by then mature.

The village’s own account of the 1861 departure rests on a lineage genealogy — and reading one of those is a skill with its own rules, including the rule that an entry belongs to its edition. This is a qiaoxiang story too, but a Zhangzhou one with a Catholic archive at the other end, a combination the Fujian route material does not usually have to account for.

What is four centuries old here is not a street. It is a habit of return — men leaving through Yuegang and coming back, and then, in one generation after another, not coming back. This route is walkable for this family because four separate kinds of record survived: a baptism, a notarial will, a tombstone, and a hall with a plaque in it. Most families have none of the four. The pine is the only object in the village that connects 1861 to 1988.

Continue Reading

• Bringing Bones Home: How the Chinese Dead Returned to Wuyi
• Fujian and Chaozhou: The Other Chinese Diaspora
• Chinese in Singapore: The Nanyang Hub, 1819 to 1965
• How to Read a Chinese Zupu: The 10 Parts, Explained Simply

Stay Connected

Follow RootsOfChina on Facebook and Instagram for new article updates, behind-the-scenes from Kaiping, and stories from the Chinese diaspora.

Sources

• National Historical Commission of the Philippines, historical marker for Binondo installed 27 May 2024 — nhcp.gov.ph
• Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, Vol. VII — Salazar’s letter of 24 June 1590 on the founding of the Parían — Project Gutenberg
• “A Supplement to the Chinese Expulsion from the Philippines, 1764–1779”, Philippine Studies (Ateneo de Manila) — the 1596 deportation recorded by Morga, and the 1755 Arandía figures — archium.ateneo.edu
• Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, Vol. XLVIII — the expulsion of the non-Christian Chinese in 1755 — Project Gutenberg
• Clavería’s decree of 21 November 1849 and its Rule 4 — genealogy.ph
• 漳州台商投资区 (Zhangzhou Taiwanese Investment Zone), 「主要著姓」, 2021 — Hongjian village demography and the 许尚志 chronology — tiz.zhangzhou.gov.cn
• 中新社 (China News Service), 「科拉松·阿基诺夫人与鸿渐村」, 13 May 2011 — the village head’s recollection of the 1988 speech — chinanews.com.cn