1 - “Indescribable Misery” (Mis)translated : A Letter from Manila’s Chinese Merchants to the Spanish King (1598)

Summary

Abstract

Over a hundred Chinese merchants in Manila wrote a letter in Chinese to King Phillip II of Spain in 1598. In the letter, they denounced the corruption and abuses of the Spanish colonial officials in the Philippines. Their petition sheds light the poetic and political subjectivity of the Chinese merchant class under Spanish colonial rule. The elite Manila Chinese challenged the Spanish tendency to marginalize and treat the diverse peoples in the Philippines as a single, inferior group. They also resisted identification as “sangleys,” a common term used by Spaniards for the Chinese in Manila. Their narrative also challenges the sincerity of Catholic conversion of the resident Chinese, who considered it a beneficial process for naturalization.

Keywords: Chinese in Manila, sangleys, Chinese transculturation, Spanish colonialism, Philippines.

In May 1598, a delegation of Chinese merchants and shipowners penned a letter of complaint in the Chinese language to King Phillip II of Spain.23 With “urgency and sincerity, sorrows and tears [激切哀泪],” they wrote to denounce the corruption of the local officials, and the abuses and injustice the writers had endured. Miguel de Benavides, the bishop of Nueva Segovia (1595–1601) in northern Luzon, included this Chinese letter in his missive, had it translated into Spanish by the Dominican Diego de Aduarte (1570–1636), and added his own cover letter (dated July 15964) attesting to the truthfulness of the Chinese statements. The archival dossier also includes a brief comment from the Council of the Indies (dated 1600), advising the officials not to mistreat the “these sangleys” (fig. 1.1).

This bilingual set of documents—a rarity in the colonial archives—sheds light on the experience of the Chinese merchant class under Spanish colonial rule. On the one hand, their letter allows scholars to engage directly with a particular group of the Chinese in Manila, whose agency, in general, was seldom recognized by the ruling Spaniards either in the sociopolitical milieu or in the historical archive. On the other hand, the accompanying documents, composed by Spanish friars, demonstrate the extent to which these Chinese voices were mistranslated and misrepresented. It is clear that the Dominican friars overlooked the poetic subjectivity of the letter writers and appropriated their efforts for the friars’ own purposes.