1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [90]
Into the festering situation blithely sailed three Chinese high officials. Arriving without notice in May 1603, they emerged from a Chinese warship in sedan chairs ringed by bodyguards and led by drummers and musicians; at the head of the parade marched two men who cried, “Make way for the mandarins!” If Parián residents failed to prostrate themselves, one eyewitness reported, the bodyguards flogged them. The three visitors were the chief military official in Fujian, the county magistrate for Yuegang, and a high-ranking eunuch from Beijing. They had been sent by the emperor to present a letter to Manila’s governor, Pedro Bravo de Acuña. It is hard to imagine what Acuña thought as he heard the contents of the letter. Rumors were circulating in China, it explained, of a magic mountain in Cavite, loaded with gold and silver, all free for the taking. The three visitors had been sent to ascertain whether the mountain existed.
To judge by the appalled reports in Chinese records, the expedition seems to have originated in some daffy con job that bubbled through the court bureaucracy—not the only incident of its type in the Ming dynasty. But to the Spaniards, who watched the mandarins comb the colony for gold and silver, the visitors looked like a scouting party for an invasion—a Ming-style Trojan horse. Surely these people could not be the pack of bumblers they appeared to be—they must be part of a sinister plot. While Governor Acuña debated whether to kill the officials, they apologized for the mix-up and suddenly left.
Potosí’s mines still operate, though at a low level. Scouring the mountain for its last grains of metal, poor miners hack away in lightless tunnels. Conditions are dismayingly like those in centuries past, except that the men are mining zinc and tin, rather than silver. (Photo credit 4.7)
Fearing the departure signaled an imminent invasion, Acuña ordered his forces to demolish Chinese houses that were too close to Manila’s defensive wall, register every Chinese person in the Parián—and buy or confiscate every Chinese weapon.
What happened next is difficult to sort out, because Spanish and Chinese accounts of events differ radically. In the Spanish version, angry Chinese gathered outside the city walls to protest. Acuña sent seventy soldiers, led by his nephew, to quell the protest. Unprovoked, the Chinese mob attacked the soldiers, killing all but four, and fled to the hills outside Manila. After restoring order to the Parián, the government sent a peace emissary to the rioters. The Chinese treacherously slew him and went on a rampage. Naturally, the official reports explain, the government had to protect the citizenry. It sent out more troops. The Chinese in the hills resisted. But they had few weapons and inevitably suffered heavy losses.
Eleven years after the killings, the Ming geographer Zhang Xie wrote Studies on the East and West Oceans, a summary of Chinese foreign relations. In it was an account of the incident from the point of view of Parián residents—an account that included a few details that Spanish officials had neglected to mention. Zhang agreed that the Spaniards had entered the Parián and “bought every bit of iron in Chinese hands at a hefty price,” supposedly to make cannons. But from that point his account was quite different. There was no angry mob outside the walls, no unprovoked slaughter of soldiers. Instead the government, having effectively disarmed the Chinese, announced a formal residency check, during which they divided the ghetto into groups of three hundred, placed each group in a separate