in peninsular Siam. Their family, with the adopted surname Na Songkhla, is also well known throughout Thailand.
Kim Lo Chair, a Chaozhou immigrant to Siam between 1824 and 1851, was the progenitor of the family known today by the surname Poshyanonda. His surviving three-bay single-storey home was built in the last half of the nineteenth century and is noted for its gilded altar and ornately carved wooden features.
Vietnam
From the seventh to the tenth century, the Kingdom of Champa controlled not only what is known today as central and southern Vietnam but also the seaborne trade in spices, incense, silk, and ivory between China, India, Java, and as far west as the sprawling Abbasid Caliphate with its capital at Baghdad. Hoi An, the most important Champa entrepôt along the sea lanes of the South China Sea that stretched from coastal China to the Strait of Malacca, became during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries a cosmopolitan town for Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants. Each of these nationalities left traces of their cross-cultural presence, including the well-known Japanese covered bridge, which was built in 1593.
Enterprising merchants from China set up shops and warehouses that not only looked to the seas but also traded up and down the coast and rivers within a mercantile network of increasing complexity. Along a series of narrow streets lining the Thu Bon riverbank, which were intersected at right angles by slender lanes, a Chinese quarter soon emerged in Hoi An, complete with shophouses, merchant residences, temples, ancestral halls, guild halls, native place associations, pagodas, and tombs. By the end of the 1700s, however, as the estuary of the river silted up and as the port of Da Nang 30 kilometers to the north overtook it as the new center of overseas trade, Hoi An became a rather languid backwater. Yet, while entrepôt trade diminished at Hoi An, Chinese merchants from the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas of southern Fujian nonetheless continued to grow, diversify, and to some degree flourish. Intermarriage with local women was common (Wheeler 2001: 34, 168).
For the past 200 years, unlike so many other Vietnamese towns and cities that suffered the destruction of warfare, Hoi An remained relatively untouched. The overall street plan seen today is much as it was when the port developed centuries ago. One, one-and-a-half, and two storey shophouses as well as merchant terrace houses constructed of wood survive from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries although many were reconstructed during the nineteenth century using brick as well as wood. Pastel-colored façades and rooflines are little changed from the past, and there is only limited evidence of modern materials like concrete and corrugated metal added to the old structures of wood and tile. At the end of September 2009, Typhoon Ketsana brought three-meter-deep flooding of filthy brown water to the historic areas of Hoi An, causing levels of destruction not experienced for decades.
These two views of a restored nineteenth-century shop-house built by a Chinese immigrant in Hanoi, Vietnam, show the skywell and balcony as well as the furnishings in the reception room.
Philippines
When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese by birth sailing under the flag of Spain, anchored in the harbor at Cebu in 1521, his intent was to claim the land for the Spanish Crown and convert the people to the Roman Catholic faith. Magellan was killed in Cebu that same year and it was decades before other Spanish conquistadors vanquished native tribes, set up defensive settlements, initiated a flourishing trade network, and began the proselytizing of Catholicism across the sprawling archipelago. Magellan’s initial discovery led to results that at the time could not easily have been foretold: East Asia’s only Christian nation and one in which the blood of immigrants from China mixed with that of natives to create a vibrant and syncretic mestizo culture. In 1543 another explorer reached the islands, naming them Felipinas, the Philippines, to honor Crown Prince Don Felipe who later was to become Felipe II de España, the Spanish monarch Philip II.
During the more than three and a half centuries that the Philippines were a colony of Spain, the Spanish only found limited riches, unlike the riches they obtained in Mexico and Peru or the spices they had sought as they journeyed towards the East Indies. However, once the Spanish had established their capital at Manila, they recognized the profits that could be made from transshipping China’s luxuries to Europe and from encouraging the immigration of Chinese laborers, traders, and artisans to the Philippines. From 1565 into the early decades of the nineteenth century, a far-flung and lucrative trading network using large sailing ships called galleons, sailed in convoys once or twice a year from Manila in Nueva España or New Spain and back. Chinese luxury goods such as porcelain, ivory, silk, precious stones, copper cash, mercury, and lacquerware, as well as spices from the Moluccas and elsewhere in the Nanyang, were amassed at Manila and then carried in galleons across the Pacific to Acapulco on Mexico’s west coast. The sailing routes depended upon favorable winds for voyages that spanned a three or four month period. From Mexico the goods were carried overland to Vera Cruz for transshipment by sea, first to Cuba and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain in annual treasure ships. In exchange, vast quantities of Mexican and Peruvian silver were transported via the Philippines to China. The route across the Pacific Ocean made it possible for the Spanish to avoid a much longer and more dangerous voyage across the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
To facilitate this trade, the number of Chinese living in the Philippines, not counting transient merchants and traders, increased to more than 15,000 by the beginning of the seventeenth century (Schurz, 1939: 27). Until the 1750s, Chinese junks and Chinese traders were necessary to acquire, move, and dispose of cargo from China destined for Manila. Within the century afterwards, not only was Manila thriving but regional centers like Vigan and Cebu were also drawn into profitable trading system involving not only China but also the United States and England. Export commodities included items in great demand in China, such as mother-of-pearl, birds’ nests, tortoiseshells, salted fish, ebony, rice, and black pepper, as well as those destined for markets beyond Asia: sugar, tobacco, coffee, and the newly popular fiber plant abaca. Well before Westerners took an interest in it, Chinese traders had sought out abaca, a light, strong, and durable plantain fiber used to make rope, string, fishing nets, and textiles. Grown only in the southern region of the Philippines, abaca, one of only a few economically important native plants in the islands, became the most important export product of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.
The home of Celestino Chan in the Binondo area of Manila was constructed before 1880, a certain fact since the structure has a base of volcanic tuff, a building material that was forbidden to be used after the disastrous 1880 earthquake. As with other large residences in the Philippines, the understory served many functions: a vestibule or zaguan that provides access to the broad stairway leading to the expansive upstairs residential area, a place for vehicles as well as spaces for storage and a well.
For much of the Spanish colonial period, Chinese immigrants were thought to be immune to conversion to Catholicism and other aspects of Hispanic culture, unlike the more receptive indigenous people. This led initially to cultural pluralism as an element of colonial policy in which there were distinct communities of Spaniards, Chinese immigrants, native indios, and mestizos of varied compositions. Over time, however, the differences became less distinct. During the Spanish colonial period, this tiered system of legal classification of different “races” was used for purposes of administration and taxation. Those of pure Chinese ancestry were called sangley, derived from the Chinese term changlai meaning “frequent visitor,” or other terms. “Within a few years after the Spanish conquest, the relations
