• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2969 0

workers from other parts of China and spewing out goods at frightening volume. Yuegang merchants sold this silk in Manila, making profits of 30 to 40 percent. Spanish merchants doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled the price and still sold their goods in the Americas for a third the cost of Spanish textiles. Incredibly, they sold silk from China—silk that had crossed two oceans!—in Spain for less than silk produced in Spain. So much raw silk poured into Mexico that a secondary industry sprang up, with thousands of weavers and dressmakers making clothes from Chinese silk and exporting them throughout the Americas and across the Atlantic.

Yuegang merchants initially exported silk as bolts of fabric. But as they got to know their customers, according to Quan Hansheng, the Taiwanese historian, they acquired samples of Spanish clothing and upholstery and in China made perfect knockoffs of the latest European styles. Into the galleons went stockings, skirts, and sheets; vestments for cardinals and bodices for coquettes; carpets, tapestries, and kimonos; veils, headdresses, and passementeries; silk gauze, silk taffeta, silk crepe, and silk damask. Packed alongside them were women’s combs and fans; spices and incense; gems cut and uncut and mounted into rings and pendants; and, alas, Malay slaves.

Alarmed Europeans saw their textile mills threatened—and fought a covert regulatory war against Chinese competition. They importuned the king to restrict silk imports to bolts of fabric, rather than finished clothing. They insisted that he block direct travel between Manila and any place in the world except Acapulco, so that Chinese imports could be monitored. They demanded that he set import quotas by restricting incoming silk to a given number of chests of a specified size. Chinese merchants evaded every trade barrier, often aided by Spaniards in Manila. They built special chests with false bottoms and sides to conceal pre-made clothing. They sent agents to Acapulco to facilitate smuggling on the Mexican end of the trade. They designed special presses to mash huge quantities of silk into the chests, packing them so tightly, according to Li, the Fujianese scholar, “that a single sea-chest had to be carried by six men.”

MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Commercial and political imperatives constantly collided. In 1593 the Manila governor, Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, decided to fulfill Madrid’s long-held dream of conquering the Maluku Islands, the spice centers that Legazpi had failed to seize. The supply of European sailors in Manila being inadequate for the task, Pérez Dasmariñas abducted 250 Fujianese merchants from incoming junks to serve as galley slaves. Protests from Manila’s Chinese tradespeople led the governor to promise to release the sailors—and seize the necessary men instead from the Parián. “The next day, all their windows were closed, and the merchants closed their shops,” the historian Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola reported a few years later. “The community was deprived of the provisions which they supplied to it.”

After more threats from Pérez Dasmariñas, the Chinese caved in, allowing him to conscript more than four hundred men. In return, he promised to treat the men well. The expedition left in October 1593. Contrary winds and currents made the passage to the Malukus difficult. Fearing the expedition would not reach its destination as fast as he wanted, the governor ordered the conscripts chained to their galley benches, where sailors whipped them to greater effort. As further motivation, he cut their elaborately braided hair. “Such an insult among the Chinese is worthy of death, for they place all their honor in their hair,” Argensola wrote. “They keep it carefully tended and gaily decked, and esteem it as highly as ladies in Europa.” In a well-planned mutiny, the enslaved Chinese in the flagship killed Pérez Dasmariñas and his crew while they slept, then rowed for Fujian.

To Spaniards, the lesson from Pérez Dasmariñas’s death was clear: the Chinese were untrustworthy and dangerous. The Manila government evicted twelve thousand of