into a pattern of distrust and latent hostility” (Wickberg, 1965: 8). Mestizo de sangley was used to refer to persons of mixed Chinese and indigenous ancestry. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the boundaries separating Spaniards, some of whom were actually of Mexican descent, Chinese sangleys, and native indios increasingly became blurred because of intermarriage and conversion. Accompanying these transformations was the rise of both pure Chinese and hispanized Chinese mestizos to economic and social prominence. The Spanish viewed the sangleys and Chinese mestizo as cultural minorities, yet the actual number of Chinese always exceeded the number of Europeans in the Philippines. Today, the word Tsinoy, also Chinoy, is the general term used to describe Filipinos with a Chinese heritage.
Discrimination, uprisings, and massacres of Chinese populate the historical narrative of the Philippines during the colonial period. In Manila, Chinese were controlled with the establishment of a distinct quarter called Parian, which was an enclave outside the walls of Intramuros, close enough for the Spanish to benefit from their labor yet sufficiently distant for the purposes of security. Non-Christian Chinese were forced to live in the Parian ghetto, and were only permitted through the Puarta del Parian, one of the seven gates into Intramuros. Although Parian also were created in other towns, Chinese traders and settlers were able to skirt the colonial efforts at controlling them by seeking opportunities throughout the archipelago, a dispersal that contributed to the emergence of the widespread mestizo culture that characterizes the Philippines.
Cebu City’s Calle Colon, which is named after the navigator Christopher Columbus, is said to date to 1565. In this photograph, taken in 1910, it is lined with wooden shophouses.
Religious conversion of all those living in the Philippines to Catholicism was clearly an overall objective, a consequence of the close association of State and Church in the colonial enterprise. While some Chinese were receptive to the incorporation of elements of Catholicism into their own fundamental syncretic beliefs, others saw baptism as a “shrewd business move.” “Besides reduced taxes, land grants, and freedom to reside almost anywhere, one acquired a Spanish godparent, who could be counted upon as a bondsman, creditor, patron, and protector in legal matters” (Wickberg, 1965: 16). The absence of Chinese women contributed to marriage with indio women and the bearing of mestizo children. Raised by their indio mothers, children accepted Catholicism and perhaps even the Spanish language but without identifying themselves as “Spanish.” Depending on the interest and efforts of their Chinese father, some of whom also maintained a family in China, attitudes and practices that were Chinese were consciously or subconsciously adapted by their children.
This late sixteenth-century painting indicates that the word Sangley comes from the Chinese word changlai, meaning “frequent visitor” in Hokkien.
Unlike in the Dutch and English colonies farther south, Chinese in the Philippines did not establish the type of independent associations of kinsmen called kongsi that spurred the opening of tin mines and rubber plantations. Some Chinese gained wealth as recruiters of coolie laborers and as contractors for government monopolies, such as that controlling the importation and distribution of opium. Most, of course, merely maintained their families with modest incomes from small shops that retailed whatever was needed, or used their hands and simple tools to work tin, wood, leather, iron, among other materials, into useful and marketable objects Rather, Chinese in the Philippines principally acquired wealth through wholesale and retail trade.
A bahay na bato residence, which dates to 1830, is described on pages 240–7. Located in Vigan in the Ilocos region along the northwestern coast of Luzon, the Syquia mansion has a distinguished lineage and is maintained as a heritage residence in a town in which some Chinese immigrants who married local women from élite families established an upper-class lifestyle. A much smaller, simpler, and earlier residence, the Yap–Sandiego residence in Cebu, in the Visayan region of the central Philippines, is illustrated on pages 248–53. Resemblances among the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century bahay na bato as both residences and commercial establishments throughout the Philippines are well noted by Fernando N. Zialcita and Martin L. Tinio (1980: 29ff, 212ff).
Tjong A Fie, a worldly entrepreneur whose eclectic mansion for one of his families in Medan on Sumatra is featured in Part Two, constructed this manor near that of his brother for the family he maintained in China.
Residences from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are not common in the Philippines, and many of those surviving from earlier times are deteriorating because of indifference and neglect. Those still standing have somewhat miraculously endured earthquakes and war, while now suffering the abuse of poor residents who know nothing of their historical significance. Wandering the crowded streets and side lanes of Binondo, it is easy to spot buildings with obvious historical character that have fallen into decay through lack of maintenance with only hasty repairs that are unsympathetic with the original character of the structures. Interest in preservation in the Philippines emphasizes monuments, landmarks, and historically important sites, including a wealth of ecclesiastical architecture of great significance. Interest in the preservation of common dwellings is only now emerging.
Overseas Chinese Houses in China
In villages throughout Fujian and Guangdong today, it is possible to see countless structures that affirm that Chinese who once emigrated from their home villages indeed were able to realize their dream of one day returning to build a grand residence, “a glorious homecoming in splendid clothes.” While it is not possible to know with full assurance how many Chinese succeeded in returning, port records of departures and arrivals reveal that two-way traffic was often substantial. Today, websites in the qiaoxiang, “hometowns of Overseas Chinese,” in Fujian and Guangdong, highlight many of the Huaqiao guju, “ancestral homes of Overseas Chinese,” most of which were built in the hundred years between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many are notable because they were built as yanglou, “foreign” in style, while most retained traditional characteristics.
The fabled Nanyang Mandarin-capitalist Zhang Bishi/Cheong Fatt Tze, whose Blue Mansion is also featured in Part Two, built this expansive manor as his retirement home in his remote home-town village in eastern Guangdong. Sadly, he died while still abroad and never lived in the house.
Even prior to a majestic home being built by a returnee, remittances usually flowed back over decades to spouses and families that led to alterations and oftentimes expansion of the original homestead. Return visits, which were surprisingly frequent for some, provided opportunities to inject new ideas about domestic architecture and life in general that already were in flux. The multigenerational aspect of these changing circumstances is shown in the pages that follow. Virtually all of these emphasize the oft-repeated family narrative of a penniless migrant who labored abroad while accumulating meager savings, but who was able to return home and live in a sufficiently commodious grand residence that accommodated many generations, all hopefully living in harmony.
These are three of nine diaolou in Zili village, which sent migrants to the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
For Overseas Chinese, nothing stated success and wealth more clearly than the construction of a grandiose residence that combined traditional elements with whatever ornamentation and furnishings were au courant and that spoke the language
