1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [86]
The merchants usually docked at Cavite, a long, skinny peninsula five miles from Manila, on the south side of the great bay.6 A crowd of Chinese men—sales agents—awaited them. Cautiously the traders would disembark from their cubicles, blinking in the sun, looking for an agent from their extended family. Agents knew how much silver was in the most recent galleon and could raise or lower prices quoted to the Spaniards accordingly; they also had contacts necessary to bribe colonial inspectors. For their services they charged 20 to 30 percent of the sales price. Only after all the Yuegang traders had chosen agents would the ship be inspected by customs agents, who collected a tax—“three percent on everything to his Majesty,” as one Manila governor put it. Then the dickering would begin. Everyone had at most two months to make a deal, because the galleons began leaving in mid-June to avoid typhoon season.
Spanish buyers usually met the agents in the Parián, a Chinese ghetto that was a kind of metastasis of Yuegang, full of Fujianese washed by the silver trade to the Philippines. Located in a swamp outside Manila’s walls, the Parián was created in 1583 by Spanish officials in an attempt to control the growing number of Chinese, whom they regarded as conniving, job-stealing illegal immigrants. Initially it consisted of nothing but four big shed-like buildings Yuegang traders had built to store their goods. To encourage Manila’s Chinese residents to leave their homes and move into their warehouses, the Spaniards announced that any non-Spaniards found outside the Parián after sunset would be executed. In some sense, the quarantine was tit for tat: Europeans were not allowed to set foot in China, so Chinese were restricted from the little piece of Europe in Manila.
Denied permanent access to the European town, the Chinese built their own. Around the warehouses grew a maze of arcade-like shopping areas crammed with intensely competitive stores, teahouses, and restaurants. The narrow streets between were jammed at all hours with men in long, floppy-sleeved robes, embroidered silk shoes, and high round caps. Doctors and apothecaries hawked jars of unguents, tisanes, and medicinal roots. People were buying, selling, and making, arguing over tiny cups of Fujianese tea, racing about with piles of carefully packed bundles, eating foods that appalled the Europeans (a Yuegang favorite: chicken embryos baked inside the egg by burying the eggs in piles of salt and exposing the piles to the sun). It was the first Chinatown in the orbit of the West.
For Spain, the Parián was an oddity and a humiliation. From the beginning, when Spain ejected Muslims and Jews from its kingdom, the empire had what it thought of as a civilizing mission: universal conversion to Christianity. Manila was thronged by missionaries, heads afire with the zeal to bring the Roman Catholic church to Asia. They forced Filipino and Malay natives to adopt the cross, but this was a side project. The true goal, at least at the beginning, was to conquer and convert China. Believing that Cortés (conqueror of Mexico) and Pizarro (conqueror of Peru) had needed only small bands of committed men to seize entire empires for Christ, these clerics and soldiers initially imagined that a few thousand Spaniards could repeat these feats in China. In Manila, the Ming realm seemed so near—vast riches, spiritual and material, almost close enough to touch. Wiser counsel eventually prevailed, as Manila’s governors and the Spanish court concluded that China was too big to conquer. Indeed, the Spaniards in the colony began to worry that China might conquer them. Fearing annihilation, they allowed the Chinese an otherwise unthinkable concession: to live in their own infidel quarter, worshipping their own un-Christian idols. They even allowed it to have its own gobernadorcillo—a mini-governor.
Frightened by the crowded Chinese ghetto called