Flaunting It

Author(s): RAQUEL A. G. REYES

Source: Early American Studies , Fall 2017, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Fall 2017), pp. 683-713
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

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 Flaunting It
How the Galleon Trade Made Manila, circa 1571–1800

R AQ U E L A . G . R E Y E S
The School of Oriental and African Stadies (SOAS), University of London

abstract Manila was designated by Spain as the colonial capital of the

Philippine archipelago in 1571. From being a small Muslim settlement,
the city was swiftly transformed by the trans-Pacific galleon trade to Aca-
pulco. Manila emerged as one of the greatest and wealthiest entrepôts
in Southeast Asia, rivaling the Dutch city of Batavia in Indonesia and
dominating commerce with America and Europe in both silk and spices.
Manila became a magnet to trading ships from China, Japan, Maluku,
Malacca, Siam, Cambodia, and Borneo, which arrived laden with an
astonishing abundance of luxurious goods. The trade flows of silver and
precious Asian merchandise—the bales of Chinese silks, the porcelain,
Indian textiles, spices, local wax, honey, and forest products—and the
shifting and hybrid populations that supplied labor and diverse expertise
lent the city its own special character and texture.
Drawing on a range of primary sources—from secular and missionary
accounts to architecture and artistic works, including paintings and
objects, this essay explores the much less well-studied social and cultural
effects of global trade on local contexts, and considers whether Manila
was any different from other early modern port cities in the Atlantic and
Asian worlds. I discuss a variety of fundamental areas—sartorial fashions
and bodily scents, culinary tastes, and architectural innovations—in which
imported goods and their consumption affected everyday sensibilities in
Manila and beyond.

I wish to warmly thank Jessica Choppin Roney at Temple University for inviting
me to Philadelphia to present an earlier draft of this paper at the superb conference
she organized on Port Cities in the Early Modern World at the University of Penn-
sylvania, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, November 5–7, 2015, and
Christian J. Koot at Towson University, Maryland, for his generous and stimulating
comments. Mark Mir, archivist at the Ricci Institute, University of San Francisco,
and Jim Richardson in London gave me their unstinting help and encouragement
in the research for this paper.

Early American Studies (Fall 2017)

Copyright  2017 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved.

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684 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

INTRODUCTION

When the Spanish navigator Miguel López de Legazpi (1502–72) and his
party of conquistadors arrived in the lowlands of Luzon in 1571, they found
a sheltered natural harbor on the eastern side of a bay and at the mouth of
the Pasig River. They encountered a population composed of natives, set-
tlers and merchants, and Muslim missionaries, about two thousand souls all
told, who lived in sparse clusters of hamlets and villages. They learned how
these communities were loosely organized in small sociopolitical and spatial
units called barangay, which had only just begun to submit to the leadership
of a foremost datu. These Muslims and native converts of the settlement
known as Maynilad, Spanish chroniclers noted, were strikingly proud, self-
confident, and aggressive in nature, materially prosperous and cultivated in
manners. They were bound by blood, trade, and friendship to the sultan
of Brunei, and they nurtured connections of commerce and culture with
neighboring Muslim centers spanning the Jolo archipelago in southern
Philippines; Borneo; Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra; the Moluccas,
within the Indonesian archipelago; Malacca, in the Malay Peninsula; and
Pattani, in the southern region of Thailand. At various times of the year,
Chinese merchants, the majority of whom came from the Fujian province
and were southern Min speakers, arrived in trading junks laden with wares
to do business with the coastal Malays, who favored their jars and dishes.
Chinese merchandise in turn would be used to barter for valuable forest
products—plant medicines, honey, and beeswax—that Negrito upland
peoples supplied. With its safe harbor, strategic position that allowed for
intraregional trade, and established Sino-Filipino-Muslim trade networks,
Manila presented an ideal location.
Legazpi liked what he saw. As he had done a few years earlier in the
Visayas, in the central Philippines, he expended great effort in putting down
local resistance and set about establishing a permanent colonial settlement.
He deposed Rajah Sulayman, the key native datu of Manila, negotiated a
series of pacts and alliances, and instituted Manila as the capital of the
Philippine archipelago, which the Spaniards would rule for more than three
hundred years, until 1898.
Legazpi died in 1572, by which time Spanish domination of the country
was virtually complete. Moreover, seven years earlier, a fast and efficient
return route across the Pacific to Mexico, a critical factor to Spain’s venture
in the East Indies, had already been secured by the circumnavigator and
Augustinian friar Andrés de Urdaneta (1498–1568). Carrying a small cargo
of cinnamon from Mindanao, Urdaneta sailed northeasterly from the

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 685

Visayan island of Cebu and, climbing between thirty-seven and thirty-nine

degrees, his ship caught the prevailing westerlies across the Pacific, skirted
the California coast, and reached Acapulco after a total journey time of four
months. Upon the ship’s arrival, the spices were sold for a tidy profit.1 Leg-
azpi’s successors ensured that within fifty years of the city’s founding,
Manila was transformed into the colony’s preeminent political, religious,
multiracial trading hub, and one of the wealthiest and greatest entrepôts in
Asia, through the lucrative galleon trade.
Since the publication of William Lytle Schurz’s pioneering study on the
Manila galleons and trans-Pacific commerce in 1939, a rich corpus of schol-
arly work has emerged that has closely examined diverse aspects of the
trade’s global reach: the origins of the galleon trade in relation to Spanish
expansion, the profitability of trans-Pacific commerce, the demand-and-
supply factors that gave impetus to the trade, and, more recently, the emer-
gence of a trans-Pacific slave trade and the political complexities that
enmeshed the economies of China, Japan, and Spain in the Philippines.2
These new revisionist histories make clear that the galleon trade, while
sponsored and maintained by the royal treasury, was both costly and
immense; yet, at its zenith, it was capable of financially bolstering the Span-
ish Empire, and its economic success continued well after the initial spec-
tacular commercial boom of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.3
What marked the “birth of world trade” also ushered in profound changes
at a microlevel.4 Manila became a contact point for the meeting of peoples,
ideas, and goods, and galleon-related business fostered a plethora of envi-
ronmental changes and social and cultural innovations in perception, aes-
thetics, and representations. To an extent, economic historians, in exploring

1. Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and James Sobredo, eds., European Entry
into the Pacific: Spain and the Acapulco-Manila Galleons (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate,
2001), xvii; O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (London: Croom Helm, 1979).
2. Most recent works are Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From
Chinos to Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Birgit Tremml-
Werner, Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571–1644: Local Comparisons and
Global Connections (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015); Arturo Giral-
dez, The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy
(London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). See also selected essays in A Primeira
Viagem Histórica da Globalização (Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macao, 2006).
3. Dennis O. Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham, eds., Pacific Centuries:
Pacific and Pacific Rim History since the Sixteenth Century (New York: Routledge,
1999), xxxiii.
4. Ibid., 2.

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686 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

Chinese entrepreneurial and mercantile activities of early modern Manila,

have shed much light on local-level cross-cultural interactions and ex-
changes.5 But putting contextual flesh and muscle on the bones of economi-
cally driven cross-cultural interactions has, arguably, been and continues to
be undertaken by art historians interested in the manufacture and trade of
religious images. They have drawn important connections among the mate-
rial objects themselves (their innate qualities and symbolism, and the influ-
ence of eclectic styles and artistic traditions), Manila’s resident Chinese and
Filipino sculptors, painters, and artisans who were involved in their produc-
tion and trade, and the global commerce in which the objects became vitally
enmeshed. Further, art historians have given importance to the tactile and
visual elements in historical analyses.6 Their investigations reveal the
involvement of many different cultures and geographic regions—Europe,
Asia, and the Americas; the various producers of the objects, Chinese and
Filipinos, with influence or intervention from Europeans in terms of design,
motif, and function; and the roles of intermediaries, transporting, distribut-
ing, and circulating art objects around the globe. In other words, colonial

5. For several recent works see, for instance, selected essays in Ma. Dolores Eli-
zalde, Josep Fradera, and Luis Alonso, eds., Imperios y naciones en el Pacı́fico: La
formación de una colonia, Filipinas, 2 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaci-
ones Cientı́ficas, 2001), 1:181–299; Edgardo J. Angara, José Ma. A. Cariño, Sonia
Pinto Ner, eds., El Galeón de Manila: Cruzando el Atlántico (Manila: Read Founda-
tion, 2014).
6. Lourdes Diaz-Trechuelo, “The role of the Chinese in the Philippine Domes-
tic Economy (1570–1770),” in Alfonso Felix Jr., ed., The Chinese in the Philippines,
vol. 1, 1570–1770 (Manila: Solidaridad, 1966), 175–210. On the work of art histo-
rians, see, for instance, Marjorie Trusted, “Survivors of a Shipwreck: Ivories from a
Manila Galleon of 1601,” Hispanic Research Journal 14, no. 5 (2013): 446–62;
Regalado Trota Jose, Images of Faith: Religious Ivory Carvings from the Philippines
(Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, 1990); Regalado Trota Jose and Ramon N. Vil-
legas, Power  Faith  Image: Philippine Art in Ivory from the 16th to the 19th
Century (Makati: Ayala Foundation, 2004); Margareta Mercedes and Estella Mar-
cos, Ivories from the Far Eastern Provinces of Spain and Portugal (Monterrey: Espejo
de Obsidiana Ediciones, 1997); Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Translation and Meta-
morphosis in the Catholic Ivories of China, Japan, and the Philippines, 1561–
1800,” in Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Michel Massing, and Nuno Vassallo e Silva,
eds., Ivories of the Portuguese Empire (Lisbon: Scribe, 2013); Cristina Cruz-
Gonzalez, “Landscapes of Conversion: Franciscan Politics and Sacred Objects in
Late Colonial Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2009), esp. 213; Donna
Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, eds., Asia & Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and
Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2009).

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 687

religious art played a significant and far-reaching role in global trade, mak-
ing money, and religious conversion.
Was Manila any different from other early modern port cities in the
Atlantic and Asian worlds? Philip D. Curtin, along with other contributors
to the volume Atlantic Port Cities, identified certain elemental features that
defined port cities, which could readily be applied to Manila. For Curtin,
“hierarchies of multifunctionality” determined how cities networked in
accordance with political and economic relations of dominance and depen-
dence. Singapore, for instance, was under the command of the colonial
office in London and had government officials in the straits settlements.
Similarly, Manila was administratively under Mexico and deferred to
Madrid.
Referring to British colonial port towns, Jacob Price observed an “interre-
latedness of economic function, occupational structure, and long-term
growth.” For Price, whether they were the great port towns of Europe or
the many American and Atlantic ports between Montreal and Buenos
Aires, port towns functioned not only in terms of attracting goods for their
own consumption but also, importantly, for “storage, exchange, and trans-
shipment,” in the process linking the “economies of riverine and ocean
transport.”7 Frank Broeze’s exploration of Asian port cities likewise empha-
sized a geographic area where “goods and/or passengers are physically trans-
ferred between two modes of transport, of which at least one is maritime.”
The land-sea exchange is here the fundamental key to the port city’s essen-
tial character. “This process,” writes the geographer Rhoads Murphy, “has
been and remains a major source of livelihood, and a major force for culture
mixing or cosmopolitanisation.”8
Historians studying port cities in Asia have, at best, glossed over the life
of Manila’s constituent parts or, at worst, tended to exclude or sideline
Manila altogether. Yet their findings would find resonance in apprehending

7. Philip D. Curtin, “Port Cities in the Atlantic World,” and Jacob M. Price,
“Summation: The American Panorama of Atlantic Port Cities,” both in Peggy K.
Liss and Franklin W. Knight, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society
in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991)
xi–xvii and 262–77, respectively.
8. Frank Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th
Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 11, and Rhoads Murphy,
“On the Evolution of the Port City,” ibid., 225. See also, Gerrit Knaap and Heather
Sutherland, Monsoon Traders: Ships, Skippers, and Commodities in Eighteenth-
Century Makassar (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004).

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688 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

Manila’s entrepôt.9 In his conference comment on this paper, Christian J.

Koot echoes many of the salient points made by some of these earlier works
on Asian port cities. He has urged us to think about port cities in the early
modern world as “zones of contact.” Not only, Koot says, were people
brought in touch with the wider world and wider circuits of trade and infor-
mation, but also local and hinterland communities were integrated into
multiregional networks of exchange. Port cities also looked “inward, repro-
cessing and disseminating goods and information to their own hinterlands.”
The effect of global trade can be seen as both deep and far-reaching, “re-
shaping cultures of consumption not only at the sites of oceanic trade but
also in the city’s hinterlands” and transforming “marginal or subaltern eco-
nomic actors [into] active consumers.”10
While port cities share defining commonalities in their natures and evo-
lutions, their particularities—the ways in which they were shaped by their
unique circumstances—should not be lost from view. Like other port cities,
Manila was networked to other trading cities, hierarchical, multifunctional,
and cosmopolitan. The trade flows of American silver and precious Asian
merchandise—the bales of Chinese silks, the porcelain, Indian textiles,
spices, local wax, honey, and forest products—and the shifting and hybrid
populations that supplied labor and diverse expertise lent the city its own
special character and texture. This essay delves into some of those elements
that made the port city of Manila typical and representative in some ways,
as well as unique in others. How did a sensory appreciation of certain trade
goods shape the material tastes and consumption habits of Manila’s resi-
dents? What sorts of goods came to be understood as measures of power
and markers of status? By focusing on the much less well studied quotidian
diffusion of trade goods and objects and their influence on local communi-
ties, I explore the social and cultural effects of global trade on local contexts
and will consider a variety of fundamental areas—sartorial fashions and
bodily scents, culinary tastes and architectural innovations—in which im-
ported goods and their consumption affected everyday sensibilities in
Manila and beyond.
MANILA’S GOLDEN AG E, CIRCA 1570s–1630s
When Don Antonio de Morga (1559–1636) arrived in Manila around
1595, he was duly impressed by the city. In less than two and a half decades,

9. For instance, Manila does not figure at all in the recent volume by Haneda
Masashi, ed., Asian Port Cities, 1600–1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), or in
Broeze, Brides of the Sea.
10. Christian J. Koot, e-mail to the author, November 7, 2015.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 689

it had become a commercial mecca, with a Hispanicized walled center

(known as Intramuros) and native and Chinese communities in the imme-
diate extramural environs. The streets were uniformly laid out and featured
plazas around which stood lofty state and administrative buildings, some
with graceful courtyards and upper and lower galleries, all stoutly built from
hewn stone. Finely built houses with tiled roofs, spacious interiors, many
windows, and balconies with ornamental iron latticework grilles flanked the
streets. The arsenal was well stocked, and a fort held cellars of food and
munitions and lodging quarters for soldiers. The archbishop resided in an
apartment within the stately cathedral, which was ornately decorated with
three naves. There were a number of chapels, convents, and friaries. Several
hospitals and apothecaries run by the principal religious orders ministered
to the city’s various ethnicities and social classes, and a Jesuit college edu-
cated students in Latin, humanities, and moral theology. Wide spaces
served as parade grounds, and there were two shorefront paseos for evening
strolls and recreation. Finally, the city was encircled by an impressive tur-
reted stone wall secured by three main city gates that closed at dusk and
were guarded by night watchmen.11
Even allowing for the hyperbole that afflicted the accounts of so many
Spanish colonial observers, Morga was generally inclined to plain speaking.
He was certainly not a starry-eyed Spanish provincial. He was thirty-seven
years old, well educated, having qualified in canon and civil law, and mar-
ried to a highborn woman in the first of what would be three marriages,
and he had worked with distinction as a government lawyer in Salamanca.
Philip II, in recognition of his abilities, personally endorsed his appoint-
ment to the post of lieutenant of the governor of the Philippines, or Oidor
of the Royal Audiencia, a rank just below that of governor general, which
in effect made Morga second in command in the colony. The post not only
boosted his career, but set him on the overseas bureaucratic path from which
he would never diverge. He remained in colonial service and served in Mex-
ico, Peru, and finally Ecuador, where he died in 1636. His stint in the
Philippines lasted for eight years. It was a period marked by controversy
and spectacular failure as well as success, but, by his own admission, he
considered those years “the best of [my] life.”12
Morga noted the considerable revenue Manila raised from various

11. Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1605), trans. J. S. Cummins
(Cambridge, U.K.: Hakluyt Society, 1971), 280–84.
12. Ibid., 47.

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690 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

sources—through the collection of rents on businesses owned by the Chi-

nese in the Parian (an area specially designated for the burgeoning immi-
grant Chinese community, located outside the city walls), the regulatory
dues on the “playing-card monopoly,” charges on merchandise, and court
fines imposed by the judiciary. But the amount was negligible compared to
the fabulous money being made from the galleon trade and the opportuni-
ties that could be had from the abundance of goods arriving in Manila from
all over Asia.
Between late October and late April each year, ships from Japan brought
cargoes of finely woven silks, decorated screens rendered in gilt, folding fans
and lacquerware, finely wrought armor, lances and swords, delicately
worked boxes and trinkets, teakettles and wooden bathtubs, skylarks, quality
wheat flour, salted meats, tuna, and fresh pears. From Malacca, Bengal,
and Cochin, Portuguese ships arrived laden with treasures—spices, precious
jewels and gemstones, a diversity of textiles from thin cotton muslins and
gauzes to soft wools, Turkish and Persian tapestries and carpets, and a rich
assortment of fruit preserves, almonds, and wines. Filipinos sought out the
boats from Siam, Cambodia, and Borneo, which carried benzoin, camphor,
rhinoceros products (horn, hide, hoof, and teeth), intricately woven palm
mats, sago, black-glazed jars, and slaves. The majority of ships, of course,
were from China. Usually making two visits each year that were timed to
take advantage of the monsoon winds, Chinese ships arrived in squadrons
of thirty to forty, packed with exquisite things and rarities: luxurious
fabrics—in addition to the softest silks were brocades, taffeta, damasks, sat-
ins, and velvets; musk and ivory; pearls, rubies, and sapphires; fresh and
preserved oranges, peaches, pears, and chestnuts; copper and cast-iron uten-
sils; cargoes of live animals, including different types of fowl, horses, mules,
donkeys, buffaloes, and birds with the ability to talk and perform tricks.
Vessels owned by New Christians, or the cristāos-novos (descendants of
Iberian Jews from Portugal and Spain who were compelled to convert to
Christianity in the late fifteenth century), Armenians, Moslems, Hindus,
and Parsis also traded in Manila from the mid-seventeenth century. The
New Christians were enthusiastic commercial opportunists, possessing sub-
stantial amounts of capital and a formidable reputation for skillful bargain-
ing. They participated actively in any lucrative overseas trade, and many
annually invested hundreds of thousands of cruzados in the galleon trade.13
Armenian merchants, principally from New Julfa, took advantage of the

13. James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 30.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 691

maritime trade route from India to Manila, bringing with them Iranian
and Indian silk varieties, Bengali textiles, Chinese goods from Malacca and
Canton, and cinnamon from Ceylon to exchange for silver.14 Armenian
traders played a role in the highly profitable and illicit so-called country
trade, in which Dutch, English, and French entrepreneurs covertly partici-
pated. Spanish prohibitions on other Europeans trading in Manila were put
in place from the outset; they were intended to protect the Spanish com-
mercial monopoly with Asia from their more powerful European rivals. But
these rules were circumvented in various ways. Spanish officials were easily
bribed to turn a blind eye. English- and Dutch-owned ships sailed under
assumed Asian flags (the Armenian colors was favored, for instance, as they
were honored in Spanish Philippines and Portuguese ports in the Indian
Ocean) and were skippered by Portuguese or Armenian captains who acted
as go-betweens, dummies, or front men in possession of passes obtained
from Makassar or Siam. These ships arrived in Manila loaded with English-,
Dutch-, and French-owned commodities.15 They often took circuitous
routes, departing from Madras, Bengal, Coromandel, and Malacca. Behind
these operations were English and Dutch merchants, individual entrepre-
neurs who might be either rivals or collaborators, and who sometimes were
connected with the East India Company or the Dutch East India Company
(VOC).16 The ships carried cotton piece goods, chintz, diamonds and
pearls, spices and black pepper, Dutch iron and lead to exchange for silver
specie.17
Over three months in the year, from March to June, Manila’s inhabitants
and merchants engaged in feverish commercial activity. Unloading the
cargo was an uproarious, jostling, greed-fueled, haggling affair. “Ah, woe to
you, Manila! When will you ever set your affairs in order! Ay, false deceiv-
ers, schemers, fabricators of bribes, outbidders by the ton!” despaired one

14. Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The
Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011), 58–65.
15. Ibid.
16. Jan Christiaan Nierstrasz, “In the Shadow of the Company: The VOC
(Dutch East India Company) and Its Servants in the Period of Its Decline (1740–
1796)” (Ph.D. diss., Leiden University, 2008), 135–39.
17. On covert English trading with Spanish Manila, see Serafin D. Quiason,
English “Country Trade” with the Philippines, 1644–1765 (Quezon City: University
of the Philippines Press, 1966); on illicit Dutch trading, see Ruurdje Laarhoven and
Elizabeth Pino Wittermans, “From Blockade to Trade: Early Dutch Relations with
Manila, 1600–1750,” Philippine Studies 33, no. 4 (1985): 485–504.

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692 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

Filipino caught up in the mêlée.18 The trade required little effort and mini-
mal business acumen, while the profits that could be reaped were, as Morga
put it, “quite simply splendid.”19 Morga also calculated that what flowed
into the city’s Royal Exchequer was not unsubstantial. Dues of three percent
were levied on merchandise from China, and dues of two percent that were
payable by Spaniards for the export of goods to Acapulco brought in around
150,000 pesos to the Philippine treasury annually. In addition, a ten percent
tax on goods arriving in Acapulco was paid over to Manila in the form of a
subsidy.20
By June and July, Japanese ships would set off with the southwest winds
on their return journey loaded with the goods they had exchanged: Chinese
silks, deer hides, gold, honey, wax, civets, palm liquor and Spanish wine,
mirrors, and jars for tea. The Portuguese ships departed with the northeast
monsoon winds in January, taking with them rice, gold, and wines. A few
ships from Siam and Cambodia made turnaround visits in the months of
April, May, and June, arriving and departing in the interlude between the
northeasterlies and the southwesterlies. Thus, by the end of June, the great
Manila galleon had been loaded with goods and was ready to sail for Aca-
pulco with the first southwest winds.

C O S MO P O L I TA N MA N IL A

Unsurprisingly, the galleon trade irresistibly drew settlers and transient mer-
chants alike to the colonial capital. From a population as small as 2,000 in
1571, the city’s population grew by 1620 to 41,400, of whom 2,400 were
Spaniards, 3,000 Japanese, 20,000 Filipinos and 16,000 Chinese.21 Natives
and other Asians were compelled to reside in extramural communities. Fili-
pinos clustered along the Pasig River and the shore of Manila Bay in sub-
urbs called arrabales. Working as market gardeners, domestic servants, and

18. William Henry Scott, Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino (Quezon City: New
Day, 1992), 67.
19. Morga, Sucesos, 304.
20. Ibid., 313.
21. Robert R. Reed, Colonial Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and
Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 33. Other
scholars have given a higher number for the Chinese. Edgar Wickberg claims there
were 20,000 to 30,000 Chinese living in Manila at the end of the sixteenth century.
See Edgar Wickberg, “Anti-Sinicism and Chinese Identity Options in the Philip-
pines,” in Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid, eds., Essential Outsiders: Chinese and
Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1997), 155.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 693

soldiers, or as wage laborers, skilled craftsmen, and petty traders, Filipinos

served the Spanish community, including the members of the Catholic reli-
gious orders—the Augustinians, Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinian Recol-
lects, and Dominicans.
The Japanese who chose to remain in Manila, traders and professed
Christian pilgrims, were assigned a small area in Dilao and were ministered
to by the Discalced (unshod) Franciscans. For a time the Spaniards had
been especially hospitable to Japanese settlers, an ingratiating gesture made
with the hope that their bid to gain entry into Japan for trade might be
looked on more favorably. Described by the governor as an “energetic race,
skilled in the use of our weaponry,” the Japanese created their own distinct
enclave, “a great number” finding employment as domestic servants in
Spanish homes.22
The Chinese were known by the term sangleyes, or “those who come to
trade,” and were by far the largest of the Asian ethnic settlers. They were
kept segregated from Spaniards and natives and located in a swamp outside
the city walls, where they were confined to the Parian. In the suburban
environs, along the banks of the Pasig, the Chinese worked as gardeners
and farmers tending to the orchards, rice fields, and sprawling estates of
wealthy Spaniards. The Parian grew into a crowded, dirty warren of shops,
markets, and cheap taverns frequently razed by fire. Spiritually ministered
to by the Dominicans, the Parian had an entirely self-sufficient economy
thanks to its industrious and enterprising residents, who engaged in, and
reputedly excelled at, every imaginable occupation, from bakers, tailors,
shoemakers, and carpenters to silversmiths, weavers, painters, sculptors,
bookbinders and printers, doctors and apothecaries.23 Spaniards came to
depend on their services, but the rapid growth of their population, their
relative political autonomy, their monopolistic business practices, and the
exorbitant prices they sometimes charged for goods brought daily conflict,
as one Filipino observed on his daily trips to the Parian: “I found Spaniards

22. James K. Irikura, “Trade and Diplomacy between the Philippines and Japan,
1585–1623” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1958), 153.
23. On the Chinese in early modern Manila, see Felix , The Chinese in the Philip-
pines; Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1965); Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars:
Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2009); Timothy Brook, Ver-
meer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2008); Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created (New York: Knopf, 2011).

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694 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

quarreling with the Chinese every day, and because they did not give them
their goods for what they wanted, they would threaten them with violence,
and kick and slap them and grab them by the neck, and call them queers,
cuckolds, thieves, traitors, dogs, Moros . . . and us they called carabaos.”24
The Chinese came to be regarded as a threat to Spanish sovereignty and
a barbarous people of low morals with sodomitic predilections.25 Forced to
bear onerous taxes that were collected with cruelty and extortion, the Chi-
nese, on the other hand, labored under an atmosphere of oppression. A
string of Chinese-led insurrections gave vent to their grievances and dissat-
isfaction but were harshly suppressed and achieved little.
The lethal mixture of mutual distrust, fear, prejudice, and paranoia was
felt on both sides but culminated in mass expulsions and massacres of the
Chinese in 1603, 1639, 1662, 1686, and 1762. The massacre in 1603
claimed up to 25,000 Chinese lives and was enthusiastically aided and abet-
ted by disgruntled Filipinos who felt their livelihoods undermined. A severe
shortage of Chinese artisans and retailers predictably resulted, depriving
the city of much-needed services. “Since there were no sangleyes,” Morga
lamented, “there was nothing to eat and no shoes to wear.”26 Yet the Chi-
nese continued to arrive undeterred, and after each massacre their numbers
rebounded. Between 22,000 and 24,000 Chinese perished in the 1639 mas-
sacre. Ten years later their number had bounced back to 15,000 in Manila.
Another identifiable demographic trend was the increase in Sino-Filipino
births. By the 1620s it was estimated there were over 1,000 Chinese mesti-
zos in the colonial metropolis, their Filipino mothers raising them to be
good Catholics while their Chinese fathers taught their mixed-blood sons
to be astute merchants.27
In addition to the settlers, Manila’s population swelled during the trading
season. Transient peddlers, hucksters and hawkers, traders and merchants,
crewmen and seamen converged on the Hispanic colonial emporium in
droves. Observers noted men “from all kingdoms and nations,” listing,

24. Quoted in Scott, Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino, 70.

25. On Spanish anti-Chinese racism and prejudice and the earliest documented
instance of an intra-Asian male-male sexual relationship, see Raquel A. G. Reyes,
“Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Manila: The Luck of a Mandarin from Taiwan,”
in Raquel A. G. Reyes and William G. Clarence-Smith eds., Sexual Diversity in
Asia, c. 600–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2012), 127–40; David E. Mungello, The
Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1999).
26. Morga, Sucesos, 225.
27. Reed, Colonial Manila, 35.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 695

among others, France, England, Italy, Flanders, Denmark, Russia,

Greece, Persia, Africa, and Turkey.28 A small minority of black people,
slaves of Portuguese merchants from Goa and Malacca or of Spaniards
from Spanish America, as well as freemen of African descent, held jobs as
common laborers or offered their services on the galleons. Natives and
mestizos from the Americas made their way to the city by boarding at
Acapulco. Some were imperial soldiers taking up a military posting in the
Philippines, others served as crewmen who joined the ranks of other sail-
ors, including Indian Muslim Lascars manning the westward-bound
Acapulco-to-Manila galleons known as the naos de Manila, which were
often piloted by Westerners—English, Irish, French, and Germans. Chi-
nese mariners and merchant adventurers, many from South China, min-
gled with the Chinese Manileños.
The Manila galleons turned transients and locals alike into risk-taking
gamblers. Fortunes could be made from a treasure ship’s successful run, or
carrera. But the ships themselves were death traps. Passengers and crew
perished by the tens and hundreds because of the insalubrious conditions
on board.29 Further, the months-long two-way crossing was exceedingly
perilous. Reliant only on wind and rowing power, the galleon traversed the
roughest seas, storms, and treacherous currents. Financial losses could be so
steep when a ship was wrecked that many an investor could be reduced to
destitution.30
Those who were made to work in ship construction and timbering expe-
rienced the sharp end of the galleon trade and the city’s growth. Building
the ships required a massive amount of human labor, timber, and other
resources.31 Labor drafts, known as the polo, compelled natives to work in
the shipyards at the Cavite peninsula constructing the galleon ships, felling
trees, and cutting wood both for shipbuilding and for the repair and mainte-
nance of Manila’s walls and buildings. Conscripts fled to the hinterlands in

28. Ibid., 33.

29. Shirley Fish, The Manila-Acapulco Galleons: The Treasure Ships of the Pacific,
with an Annotated List of the Transpacific Galleons, 1565–1815 (Milton Keynes,
U.K.: AuthorHouse, 2011); Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri, A Voyage to the
Philippines (1708) (Manila: Filipiniana Book Guild, 1963).
30. Michael J. McCarthy, “Gambling on Empire: The Economic Role of Ship-
wreck in the Age of Discovery,” International Journal of Maritime History 23, no. 2
(2011): 69–84.
31. Andrew Christian Peterson, “Making the First Global Trade Route: The
Southeast Asian Foundations of the Acapulco-Manila Galleon Trade, 1519–1650”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2014).

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696 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

a desperate bid to escape shipbuilding work, infamously known to be “the

total ruin and death of the natives” because of the difficult conditions, abuse,
and lack of food the laborers suffered.32 Finding laborers to keep the city
looking splendid was a difficulty infinitely compounded by the frequency of
natural disasters and hazards. Earthquakes and fires periodically reduced
Manila’s stately buildings to ash and rubble.33
Despite being a city of dreams, Manila was unhealthy, unsanitary, and
periodically disease-ridden. The poor, who had little access to clean water,
suffered the most, but, as Linda Newson has shown, no one was spared
from “malignant and contagious fevers,” the major smallpox epidemics that
affected the city in 1656 and 1705, the virulent but undiagnosed epidemic
that struck in 1668, the deadly outbreak of measles, and “fever with vomit-
ing and a cough” that caused high mortality in the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury.34 Writing in the late 1500s, the Jesuit priest Father Pedro Chirino
recorded how in 1591 smallpox “spread around Manila and the surrounding
region [and] spared neither young nor old.”35 Later, it seems, a terrible
sickness, “widespread and contagious,” struck many native converts again in
Manila even as they worshiped in church, which caused them to turn away
from Catholicism and return to their former idols.36
Yet not even the hardships of forced labor or the hazards of living in a
filthy, overcrowded, disease-ridden city could tarnish the glitter of Manila’s
Golden Age. Commercial prosperity lent a brilliant sheen to a city that the
Spaniards had essentially turned into “an urban warehouse linking Nueva
España to China.”37 Chirino, who became the rector of the Jesuit church in
Manila in 1599 and was later promoted to vice provincial, was far from
impressed: “In grandeur [Manila] may not equal Rome, Nineveh, Alexan-
dria, Paris, Venice, Lisbon, Toledo, Seville, but for barbarians attracted to
the mountains like beasts of the field, it is not nothing.”38 But few shared

32. Linda Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 128.
33. Fernando N. Zialcita and Martin I. Tinio Jr., Philippine Ancestral Houses
(1810–1930) (Quezon City: GCF Books, 1980), 28.
34. Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 127.
35. Pedro Chirino, History of the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus (1602),
trans. José S. Arcilla, 2 vols. (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press,
2009–10), 1:264.
36. Ibid., 2:178.
37. Robert K. Reed, “The Colonial Origins of Manila and Batavia: Desultory
Note on Nascent Metropolitan Primacy and Urban Systems in Southeast Asia,”
Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (1967): 557.
38. Chirino, History, 2:251.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 697

Chirino’s disdainful opinion. For sojourner and resident alike, the city
evoked glamour, the promise of riches and prestige, a place where life-
changing fortunes could be made. People’s keen sense of awareness of that
idea found expression in ostentatious display. Being shown off was not only
the newly acquired wealth, but also the confident knowledge of living in
the greatest emporium in all Asia: “The streets, squares and churches, are
ordinarily filled with people of all classes, especially with Spaniards, all of
them, men and women alike, carefully dressed and adorned in silks. They
wear many ornaments and all sorts of fine clothes, because of the ease with
which these are obtained: so that this is one of the settlements most highly
praised by all strangers who visit here from all over the world.”39

HOW T O S PEND IT

Thorstein Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption as the relentless

acquisition of goods motivated primarily by competition and status seeking
would seem to fit Manila’s nouveaux riches.40 But magnificence, Peter
Burke suggests, was just one mode of self-presentation. In the colonial Phil-
ippines, material consumption and its effects were not confined to ostenta-
tion or to the flamboyant elites. The desire for goods—fine, expensive,
exotic—rippled outward, touching the lives of different people and commu-
nities, having differing consequences and effects that could not have been
predicted.41
Manileños liked to display their wealth but also pursued expensive mate-
rial things that satisfied private sensuous desires. According to Morga’s
description, rich residents reveled in everyday conspicuous consumption,
announcing their wealth and status, first and foremost, by the things they
put on their bodies. Raiment and jewelry were the most eye-catching, of
course, and as he recounts, people luxuriated in ornaments, as well as rich
and expensive fabrics, which for the first time were readily within their
reach. The galleon trade introduced a host of new goods that took dressing
up to a new level. Spanish missionary chroniclers had already observed the
native inclination to bathe frequently and pamper the body with exquisite
fragrances. Morga was frankly surprised by the way young and old liked to

39. Morga, Sucesos, 286.

40. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Insti-
tutions (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970).
41. Peter Burke, “Res et Verba: Conspicuous Consumption in the Early Modern
World,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 148–62

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698 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

submerge their “whole bodies in rivers and streams without reflecting that
it could at any time be harmful to them.” Women of all classes took particu-
lar pride in their lustrous tresses. They washed their hair using the boiled
bark of a vine called gogo (Entada phaseoloides), which made it gleam. Fra-
grant herbs, aromatic flowers, and sesame oil scented the hair of most
women, and it is probable that the perfumes and oils included the endemic
ylang-ylang (Canangium odoratum), whose blossoms exuded a powerfully
sweet scent and which women were fond of tucking into their hair. Affluent
women anointed their heads with animal-derived scents—musk, ambergris,
and civet.42
Aromatic tree resins joined the arsenal of perfumes already in use. There
was so-called true Manila Elemi that yielded a distinct spicy, herbal fra-
grance. Derived from the tree Canarium luzonicum, Manila Elemi is a
highly aromatic honeylike resin with a smell suggestive of fennel and
mace.43 Camphor and benzoin had been staples in the Southeast Asia–Sino
trade since at least the Sui Dynasty (589–618 c.e.). In the mid-thirteenth
century the Chinese particularly sought out Barus camphor from Sumatra,
Patani, and Ligor for its pungency and potent medicinal qualities, whereas
benzoin from Siam (Styrax tonkinensis), Malacca, and Sumatra was consid-
ered to have the most powerful scent.44 The olfactory choices enlarged with
the galleon trade. Fine camphor arrived from Borneo, and Cambodian ships
brought benzoin of the Styrax tonkinensis variety. But an even more luxuri-
ous and exotic perfume was introduced. Still more indulgently, well-to-do
women had begun to moisten and perfume their hair with oils mixed with
a brand-new substance—mastic.45 Sometimes known as Arabic gum, mastic
is an aromatic resin derived from the small Mediterranean evergreen tree
Pistacia lentiscus. Prized in Asia Minor since ancient times, mastic was
worth its weight in gold. Ancient Egyptians used mastic in embalming;
Turks, Greeks, Moroccans, and Lebanese used it as frankincense and pro-
duced incense from it; soaps and cosmetics were scented with mastic; it

42. T. H. Breen, “The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Econ-

omy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World
of Goods, 249.
43. I. H. Burkhill, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula,
2 vols. (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1935), 1:422, 431.
44. Raquel A. G. Reyes, “Glimpsing Southeast Asian Naturalia in Global Trade,
c. 300 BCE–1600 CE,” in David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds., Envi-
ronment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective (Boston:
Brill, 2015), 115.
45. Chirino, History, 1:267.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 699

perfumed sweetmeats and desserts; and pieces of it were chewed for both
its scent and its antibacterial properties.46 It smells much like cedar, pine,
and olibanum—woody and spicy with a hint of citrus; mastic-perfumed hair
must have surely been the height of refined grooming.
As new scents subtly changed the smell of bodies, sartorial innovations
began to insinuate themselves. Women wound ribbons into their hair knots;
pleated skirts started to be worn, the edges of their saya, or skirt, and tapis,
or overskirt, embroidered and trimmed with gold and silk. Women’s stock-
ings appeared, as did mantillas, lavishly embroidered shawls or wraps that
came to be known as mantones de Manila or pañuelos Filipinos de tapar. “On
going out,” Chirino observed, “they cover themselves with cotton and or
taffeta shawls, their entire dress perfumed and fragrant.” Japanese-inspired,
Chinese-made hand-held fans—los abanicos chinos–of silk, paper, and lac-
quer, with intricately carved folding blades of bone, ivory, and mother-of-
pearl, were exported to Acapulco along with so many other knickknacks,
but they appealed to the city’s women, who found them indispensable not
only on warm days but in conversation, when they were used to make
emphatic gestures.47
Tagalog men folded and tucked striped cotton cloths around their legs
and waists to form a garment that was an attempt at breeches. Another
wide cloth would be wound around the body and—a first—fastened with
solid gold buttons, “each one bigger than a dove’s egg.” Pockets appeared: a
small one to keep “pieces of gold or silver to pay for what they had bought,”
and a larger pocket sewn on a belt below the chest, which also carried a
dagger; some were made of gold and had an ivory hilt and a scabbard of
carabao horn. The ensemble was completed with three more remarkable
additions: a hat, stylish stockings, and shoes.48
The city presented a number of opportunities when its well-heeled popu-
lation could show off publicly: there were the daily rituals—the late after-
noon paseo and the church Mass; beatifications and canonizations, seasonal
and votive festivities, and the regular feasts that marked the liturgical calen-
dar, which ranged from Christmas and Holy Week to the feast days of the

46. A. F. Hill, Economic Botany: A Textbook of Useful Plants and Plant Products,
2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952); Maud Grieve, A Modern Herbal, 3rd ed.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980); Christos Belles, Mastiha Island (Chios: Aegeas,
2007). I thank William G. Clarence-Smith for these references.
47. Blas Sierra de la Calle, Vientos de Acapulco: Relaciones entre America y Oriente
(Valladolid: Museo Oriental de Valladolid, 1991), 125; Chirino, History, 1:264–68.
48. Chirino, History, 1:267.

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700 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

city’s patron saints, those that protected against disasters and those associ-
ated with Spanish military and naval victories.49 The best occasions, how-
ever, were the sumptuous fiestas that celebrated the departure of the
galleons to Acapulco, when images of the Blessed Virgin Mary and saints
were petitioned to ensure the success of the voyage. A novena, a daily Mass
held for nine consecutive days, honored the patron saint Nuestra Señora de
Guı́a, whose image resided in the extramural parish church of Ermita. The
novena culminated in a procession in which the saint was carried from her
chapel to the cathedral. In 1642 a city ordinance was passed stipulating that
a procession be held to celebrate the completed construction of every new
galleon ship.50 The image of Nuestra Señora de Antipolo, renamed Nuestra
Señora de la Paz y del Buen Viaje, was the tutelary patroness of the Manila
galleons.
Brought by Governor Tabora from Acapulco in 1626 on the galleon ship
El Almirante, the small statue carved from dark wood undertook eight gal-
leon crossings from 1641 to 1746.51 It was believed that her presence safe-
guarded the ship and her crew from the perilous journey and ensured their
return. Each safe return was a joyous occasion that began with a procession
on the Pasig River in her honor. Flags, banners, and cheering crowds lined
the shores. She would be carried back to her shrine in Antipolo, southeast
of Manila, at the foothills of the Sierra Madre. Lasting two days, the cele-
brations included artillery salvos, singing, fireworks, music, litanies, and
Masses to mark her triumphant return.52
Fiestas to commemorate the feast days of saints and the Virgin were
numerous and expensive.53 Available data suggest that the city was truly
blessed—at least fourteen saints manifested themselves in some form or
other in the city. The date of the fiesta would be set in conjunction with
the saint’s first apariciòn. The sums spent were considerable. The Spanish
scholar Inmaculada Alva Rodrı́guez has shown that the expenses for each
fiesta during the period from 1592 to 1613 ranged from a few hundred

49. For the full calendar of celebrations, see Nick Joaquı́n, Almanac for Manileños
(Manila: Mr & Ms Publications, 1979).
50. Inmaculada Alva Rodrı́guez, Vida municipal en Manila, Siglos XVI–XVII
(Córdoba: University of Córdoba, 1997), 106.
51. Horacio de la Costa, S.J., The Jesuits in the Philippines (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1961), 369.
52. D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 220.
53. Reinhard Wendt, Fiesta Filipina: Koloniale Kultur zwischen Imperialismus
und neuer Identität (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997).

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 701

Figure 1. Nuestra Señora de la Paz y del Buen Viaje, Antipolo.

pesos to several thousand. The feast day of San Andrés, the patron saint
of Manila, was one of the most lavish celebrations.54 The spectacle was
amazing: horses were richly dressed, and people from neighboring towns
came wearing their most excellent finery, competing with one another.
The celebrations ran for two days and went on late into the night; a splen-
did banquet was prepared, possibly cooked by the Chinese, and there was
music and dancing.55 Priests spared no expense in ensuring their churches
put on grand musical performances. The archbishop in charge of Nuestra
Señora de Guı́a spent five hundred pesos on a new bell and the choir. The
richly ornamented capilla real, or royal chapel, possessed an organ and a
choir of skilled singers; Augustinian parishes around Manila had ensem-
bles comprising harps, various stringed instruments, organs, and singers.56
The performances were lively and spirited. Writing in the mid-eighteenth

54. Rodrı́guez, Vida municipal, 107.

55. Ibid., 113.
56. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint, 183.

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702 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

century, the French traveler Le Gentil de la Galaisière, however, was

ungenerous and said he heard nothing but caterwauling: “something so
wild and so barbarous. . . . I heard confused shouts that were out of time
and out of tune, while the ensemble that accompanied had the skill of
making it yet more horrible. Such is the state of music at Manila, and this
is pretty much what one hears in all the churches on the days of great
feasts.”57
The galleon trade stimulated the growth of a new artisanal cottage indus-
try devoted to the manufacture of religious statuary for export and for local
use. Invariably the artists were Chinese who lived in the Parian. Reputed to
have great skill in painting and carving, Chinese artists, it was observed,
could make exquisite reproductions of religious icons and paintings that
were technically equal to those found in Europe. Domingo Salazar, the first
bishop of Manila, observed that, thanks to the skillful Chinese, “with the
Sangleys’ ability to replicate those images from Spain, it should not be long
when even those made in Flanders will not be missed.”58
Carved from bone, ivory, and wood, Marian images and those depicting
the infant Christ were shipped to New Spain and beyond. Others were
made to order for local consumption. The Nuestra Señora del Santı́simo
Rosario de La Naval, popularly known as La Naval, for example, was com-
missioned from a Chinese artisan by Governor Don Luis Perez Dasmariñas
in 1593. Thought to be the oldest dated Philippine-made ivory carving, La
Naval measured 152 centimeters (5 feet) and found special fame in 1646
when Spanish victories over the Dutch and the safety of Manila were attrib-
uted to her divine intercession. She was bewigged and bedecked in sumptu-
ous finery that reimagined late sixteenth-century Spanish courtly dress: she
wore a hooped underskirt over which was layered a dress, a blouse with
fitted cuffs, a long coat, a gilded silver crown, and jeweled headdress, or
rostrillo.59 La Naval’s ostentatiousness was far from uncommon. First dis-
played at the founding of the Augustinian church in Manila in 1604, the
image of Nuestra Señora de Consolación acquired an elaborately worked
silver full-body armor composed of a tunic inlaid with white sapphires, a
full skirt made from a thick sheet of silver decorated with baroque floral

57. Quoted ibid.

58. Salazar is quoted in Regalado Trota Jose, “Imaging Our Lady in Sixteenth-
Century Manila: Nuestra Señora del Rosario de la Naval,” www.cilam.ucr.edu/diago
nal/issues/2008/TrotaJose2.pdf; accessed August 15, 2015.
59. Ibid.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 703

Figure 2. Silver full body armor of Nuestra Señora de Consolación. Photo

courtesy of San Agustı́n Church, Manila.

motifs, embossed, chased, and riveted, and a silver stomacher with almost
two hundred rock crystals of different sizes and cuts.60
The galleon trade made financing such religious flamboyance possible.
Although considered unseemly among the more high-minded members of
the clergy and officially frowned upon, clerical participation in galleon com-
merce was as enthusiastic as those of other traders. Since the establishment
of the galleon trade, religious and secular priests enjoyed the same advan-
tages and privileges as other Spanish traders. The Ecclesiastical Cabildo of
Manila, composed of priests, was a trading bloc ostensibly formed to aug-
ment clerical incomes, but, in practice, there seems to be no way of telling
whether it was real financial need or the amassing capital in the name of
profit that lay behind clerical motivations.61 The economic interests of the

60. Pedro G. Galende, OSA, and Clifford T. Chua, The Gold and Silver Collec-
tion, San Agustin Museum, Intramuros, Manila (Manila: National Commission for
Culture and the Arts, 2003), 92–93.
61. Nicolas Cushner, “Merchants and Missionaries: A Theologian’s View of
Clerical Involvement in the Galleon Trade,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47
(1967): 360–69; Barbara Andaya, “Between Empires and Emporia: The Economics

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704 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

Figure 3. Map of the Philippine Islands by Pedro Murillo Velarde, 1734. Cour-
tesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

Jesuits found graphic expression in a map by Pedro Murillo Velarde dated

1734. Engraved by Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay and decorated by Francisco
Suarez, both of whom were Filipinos, the map is strewn with galleon trad-
ing ships and Chinese junks. The cartouche enumerates the islands’ alleged
natural resources, including gold, pearls, cinnamon, indigo, medicinal herbs,
and the New World plants cacao and tobacco. Around the map are vivid
depictions of the cosmopolitan trading communities in the islands and
agricultural practices and cultivation of useful plants, including bamboo,
betel, coconuts, and the New World fruits papaya and jackfruit (nanca).

of Christianization in Early Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of the Economic and

Social History of the Orient 53, nos. 1–2 (2009): 357–92.

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 705

Figure 4. Embellished pulpit with an inverted pineapple, San Agustı́n Church,

Manila. Photo by the author.

Clerics did not shy from hoarding earthly riches and had an eye for pre-
cious decorations, alajas, and sacred vessels, vasos sagrados. They spent
extravagantly. Religious purchases for San Agustı́n church in the early
seventeenth century were solid gold chalices from Mexico studded with
diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and amethysts, gold cruet sets and reliquaries
heavily embellished with precious jewels, also from Mexico, and gold bells
from China.62 The interior of the vaulted church, built in 1604, boasted an
ornate choir stall, gilded retables, and a magnificently carved and embel-
lished pulpit with an inverted pineapple. Used as a decorative motif, did the
pineapple, a New World import, reformulate the pinecone, a well-known
Euro-Christian symbol for eternal life, for local use?63
Religious imagery was venerated, and precious New World church trea-
sures doubtlessly dazzled, but native peoples set their sights on acquiring a

62. Galende and Chua, The Gold and Silver Collection, 5.

63. Lucia Impelluso, Nature and Its Symbols: A Guide to Imagery (Los Angeles: J.
Paul Getty Museum, 2004).

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706 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

rather different class of trade object—ceramics. Foreign high-fired ceramic

trade wares have a long history in the archipelago.64 The extensive recovery
of Thai, Vietnamese, and ninth-century Middle Eastern objects, and most
predominately Chinese trade ceramics, the oldest being Yue and Yue-type
wares dating from the Five Dynasties period (907–960), and most abun-
dantly Guangdong and Fujian Song ware, prove the pervasiveness, robust-
ness, and long tradition of a trade in ceramics. Ceramic shards excavated in
northeast Mindanao indicate a Philippine-Borneo-Celebes network and,
more broadly, its place in Song-era Chinese, Southeast Asian, and Middle
Eastern trade patterns.65 Moreover, evidence of mortuary activities and the
presence of porcelain items as grave goods found in burial sites dated to the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show that trade ceramics were an integral
part of indigenous society beyond the status of valued commodity.66
By the seventeenth century the sheer scale and variety of trade ceramics
entering Manila through the galleon trade was unparalleled. In 1600 the
ill-fated galleon San Diego, under the command of Antonio de Morga, went
down in a miscalculated skirmish against a Dutch ship led by the com-
mander Oliver van Noort. Its sunken cargo consisted of Thai earthenwares;
black- and brown-glazed Martaban stonewares from Pegu; massive so-
called dragon jars from South China, weighing up to twenty kilograms
(forty-four pounds); Vietnamese blue-and-white porcelains as well as the
blue-and-white porcelains from the Jingdezhen kilns, which famously
applied imported cobalt on kaolin clay; celadons, finely made bowls and
plates the vast majority of which were decorated with fallow deer motifs;
and pouring vessels, including animal-shaped kendi from China.67 Aside

64. William Henry Scott, Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine
History (Quezon City: New Day, 1984); and Scott, Looking for the Prehispanic
Filipino.
65. Roxanna M. Brown, ed., Guangdong Ceramics from Butuan and Other Philip-
pine Sites (Manila: Oriental Ceramic Society of the Philippines, 1989), 79.
66. Elisabeth A. Bacus, “The Archaeology of the Philippine Archipelago,” in
Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood, eds., Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (New
York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 267. On the Vietnamese trade, see Kerry Nguyen
Long, “Vietnamese Ceramic Trade to the Philippines in the Seventeenth Century,”
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (1999): 1–21.
67. These are on permanent display at the National Museum, the Philippines,
visited in August 2015. Martaban (also Martabani, Martabana, Montaban, Mata-
vann) identifies massive, lead-glazed, narrow-based water or storage jars that were
produced in Burma by the eleventh century and commonly traded between the
fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the Gulf of Martaban, near Moulmein
in lower Burma. Pamela Gutman, “The Martaban Trade: An Examination of the
Literature from the Seventh Century until the Eighteenth Century,” Asian Per-

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 707

Figure 5. Sunken cargo of earthenware jars recovered from the galleon San
Diego, commanded by Antonio de Morga in 1600, on display at the National
Museum, Manila. Photo by the author.

from these, recently discovered seventeenth-century Hizen porcelains from

Japan, characterized by motifs of rocks and leaves, seem to have also made
their way to Manila from Nagasaki on Dutch VOC vessels and Chinese
junks.68
The cultural influence of trade ceramics on local societies was profound.
Both lowland and upland communities in Luzon acquired Chinese porce-
lain jars, which, along with rice fields, livestock, copper gongs, precious
beads, and gold ornaments, were a key component of ceremonial wealth

spectives 40, no. 1 (2011): 108–18; Don Thein, “Ceramic Production in Myanmar
—Further Evidence on Old Traditions,” in Traditions in Current Perspective: Pro-
ceedings of the Conference on Myanmar and Southeast Asian Studies, November 15–17,
1995, Yangon (Yangon: Universities Historical Research Center, 1996). Kendi, a
Malay word from the Sanskrit kunda, is a spouted vessel for drinking and pouring
that has been used in rituals and daily life in Southeast Asia since ancient times. In
the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, glazed kendi produced in China, Japan,
Thailand, and Vietnam was an important item of trade for the Southeast Asian
market. Roxanne M. Brown, The Ceramics of Southeast Asia: Their Dating and Iden-
tification (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), and http://rooneyarchive.net/
articles/kendi/kendi_album/kendi.htm; accessed May 8, 2017.
68. Takenori Nogami, “On Hizen Porcelain and the Manila-Acapulco Galleon
Trade,” Indo-Pacific Pre-History Association Bulletin 26 (2006): 124–30, http://jour
nals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/BIPPA/article/viewFile/12001/10626; accessed
August 25, 2015.

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708 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

and prestige. In the nineteenth century it was reported that mountain

groups from as far away as the Cagayan and northern Ilocos areas had
grown wealthy by trading in wax, cacao, and tobacco, decorating their
homes with vases and jars from China.69 The Isneg of northwest Cagayan
obtained Chinese jars and ceramics from coastal traders, treating ceramic
ware as precious heirlooms and burying them alongside important dead.70
The early twentieth-century North American ethnographer Fay Cooper-
Cole observed how porcelain jars, probably Ming dated, were passed down
from generation to generation among the Tinguians—they were were
offered as bride-price payment; accepted in lieu of a head in head-taking
raids; and used to serve liquor at important ceremonies and rituals.71 Tingu-
ian folktales are replete with stories of the magical abilities, adventures, and
supernatural ancestry of porcelain jars. In these tales Chinese jars could
speak and mate with other jars to produce offspring, and a very special few
had not even originated in China but belonged to spirits and had to be
captured as they roamed in forests.72 These accounts afford us a rare glimpse
of the multiplicity of cultural meanings and uses that became attached to
imported objects.

FLORAL AND FAUNAL I NTRODUCTIONS

It is well known how the Columbian Exchange (the term coined by Alfred
Crosby to describe the global movement of plants and animals after 1492)
brought about profound environmental changes.73 Equally, agriculture and
everyday diets were immeasurably enriched by the migration of crops and
animals: wheat, cattle, and horses traveled from the Old World to the New,
while New World potatoes, tomatoes, and paprika went to Europe, maize
and cassava to Africa, and maize, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes to Asia. In
maritime Southeast Asia, maize and sweet potatoes spread rapidly and
widely to become prominent staples, even supplanting, in certain areas espe-
cially vulnerable to unseasonable weather, the traditional staples of indige-
nous millet and roots and tubers, specifically aroids and yams, the most

69. Felix M. Keesing, The Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1962), 163.
70. Ibid., 188.
71. Fay Cooper-Cole, Chinese Pottery in the Philippines (Chicago: Field Museum
of Natural History, 1912), 14.
72. Ibid., 13.
73. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences
of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972).

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 709

important being taro (Colocasia esculenta) and ube (Dioscorea alata),

respectively.74
In the Philippines, the arrival of galleon shipments of New World cattle
was accommodated on arable lands that were given over to ranches and
raising livestock, which were also used for the provisioning of the galleons,
“an instance of geographical influence stemming from the needs of the
trans-Pacific trade.”75 Horses were brought first from Mexico and quickly
flourished. By the late seventeenth century foreigners noted their plentiful
presence in Luzon and Mindanao, where feral herds roamed.76 New World
botanical introductions were numerous and various: cereals and beans, fruit-
ing trees, vanilla, peppers, peanuts and pineapple, medicinals, ornamentals,
and textile plants.77
Much has been written about the influences of Hispanic gastronomy and
its penetration of indigenous culinary life, particularly within elite society, as
well as the indigenization of Hispanic foods. Rafael Bernal has highlighted
linguistic assimilations, pointing to the names of foods of Mexican origin
that were successfully adopted into the local lexicon. Examples are legion:
atsuete from achuete; annatto from achiote (Bixa orellana), the seeds from
which red food coloring is obtained; panocha from penuche, the brown,
unrefined, coarse-grained sugar; papaya; casaba from cassava; abokado from
aguacate or avocado, to name a few.78
Tobacco and cacao, once introduced, joined an existing repertoire of
indigenous stimulants and relaxants that included betel and locally produced
alcoholic drinks. Tobacco made its first appearance in 1575 and rapidly took

74. Peter Boomgaard and Marjolein ‘t Hart, “Globalization, Environmental

Change and Social History: An Introduction,” International Review of Social History
55, supp. 18 (2010): 1–26; Peter Boomgaard, “Maize and Tobacco in Upland Indo-
nesia, 1600–1940,” in Tania Murray Li, ed., Transforming the Indonesian Uplands:
Marginality, Power, and Production (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1999), 45–79; Peter Boomgaard, “In the Shadow of Rice: Roots and Tubers in
Indonesian history, 1500–1950,” Agricultural History 77, no. 4 (2003): 582–610.
75. Pablo Guzman-Rivas, “Reciprocal Geographic Influences of the Trans-
Pacific Galleon Trade” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1960), 175.
76. Greg Bankoff, “Horsing Around: The Life and Times of the Horse in the
Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Peter Boomgaard and David
Henley, eds., Smallholders and Stockbreeders: Histories of Foodcrop and Livestock
Farming in Southeast Asia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 233.
77. Corazon S. Alvina and Domingo A. Madulid, Flora Filipina: From Acapulco
to Manila (Manila: Art Post Asia, National Museum of the Philippines, 2009), 11.
78. Rafael Bernal, México en Filipinas: Estudio de una transculturación (Mexico:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1965).

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710 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

hold among the populace. Added to the betel quid and chewed, rolled into
cigars and smoked, or inhaled as powdered snuff, tobacco, and the nicotine
it contained, contributed a new sensory dimension to the consumption of
addictive substances and established social rituals. Cultivated from the mid-
seventeenth century, cacao was a favorite of the Spanish Catholic clergy,
who introduced and popularized its consumption as a hot beverage among
all classes of Philippine society.79
Hispanic food came to be associated with wealthy, urbanized, lifestyles—
luxurious, classy, and expensive food of the rich. The use of certain ingredi-
ents that were heavy on the stomach and rich in taste, such as beef and
cured pork, contrasted sharply with the native fare of fish and braised vege-
tables and demanded new cooking methods—sautéing (called guisando
locally) and frying in oils, prito. Sourness, the pronounced and defining
flavor of lowland, Christianized Filipino cuisine, came to be enhanced when
combined with the new additions of garlic, onions, and chili peppers.80 Chi-
nese chronicles from the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces indicate that chili
became known to the Chinese in about 1671, in all probability through
trade with the Philippines, where five different species were collectively
known by the vernacular term buyobuyo.81 In the Visayas, in central Philip-
pines, betel chew is also known by the same term, which perhaps suggests
that chili was not only used for culinary purposes, but may also have been
incorporated in the betel quid or consumed in the same way, as a stimulant.
Filipinos developed a sweet tooth, a taste for sweet, sugary, buttery, egg-
based foods, particularly in the form of desserts and pastries—a liking that
has been attributed to the Hispanic culinary legacy. In contrast to native
rice-based puddings, or panghimagas, “our repertoire of sweetness,” write
Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre, “seem[s] to have come from the
Spanish kitchen and the elite lifestyle: flan de leche . . . mamones con man-
tequillado . . . borrachuelos . . . buñuelos o suspiros de monja.”82 The terms

79. William G. Clarence-Smith, “Betel, Tobacco and Beverages in Southeast

Asia,” in Raquel A. G. Reyes, ed., Art, Trade, and Cultural Mediation in Asia, 1500–
1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
80. Fernando N. Zialcita, “Why Insist on Asian Flavor?” in Elizalde et al., Impe-
rios y naciones en el Pacı́fico, 2:3–21.
81. Stefan Halikowski Smith, “In the Shadow of a Pepper-Centric Historiogra-
phy: Understanding the Global Diffusion of Capsicums in the Sixteenth and Seven-
teenth Centuries,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 167 (2015): 64–77.
82. Doreen D. Fernandez and Edilberto N. Alegre, Sarap: Essays on Philippine
Food (Manila: Mr & Ms Publishing, 1988), 150. For an indication of the enduring
Hispanic culinary legacy, see Enriqueta David-Pérez, Recipes of the Philippines
(1953; repr., Mandaluyong: Cacho Hermanos, 1973).

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 711

enculturation and transculturation are variously used to describe the processes

by which foreign foods are integrated into local food cultures. Hispanic
gastronomy dug deeply into native culinary sensibilities, informing Filipino
“days ordinary and special; it flavors our family fare and our feasts. Trans-
formed and transmuted through time, by native ingredients, and by the
native taste, it has been indigenized, adapted and adopted. . . . It is now
Filipino.”83
The influence of New World flora and fauna was not confined to culinary
landscapes but also found striking expression in architecture. Built over a
ten-year period, 1787–97, in the Baroque-Romanesque style, the church in
Miag-ao, on the island of Panay in the Visayas, features a stunning pedi-
ment decorated with a bas-relief sculpture of Saint Christopher, native in
garb and appearance, carrying the Christ Child and planting a fully grown
coconut palm. Flanking him are papaya and guava trees, the latter planted
in vessels, perhaps stylized porcelain vases, their branches drooping under
the weight of their luscious fruit.84 How were these symbols interpreted or
understood by different viewers? Did the symbols resonate with established
cultural practices? Miag-ao’s striking pediment and ornate facade must have
been awe-inspiring, but evidence of its indigenous reception is scant, and
architectural historians have had little choice but to speculate.85

C O N C L U SI O N
The first of the Manila galleons sailed for Acapulco in 1572, and the last in
1815.86 Luxuries and precious merchandise from the East—cargoes of
spices, and silks and porcelain from China, demanded by New Spain and
Europe, were traded in New Spain in exchange for American silver desired
by China. Neither demand outweighed the other. The significance of this
demand-and-supply commerce, and the route taken to facilitate it, was far-
reaching. Through the direct exchange of goods, Asia and the Americas
came into contact with one another for the first time. But, arguably, the

83. Fernandez and Alegre, Sarap, 152.

84. This observation is elaborated on in Raquel A. G. Reyes, “Representations
of New World Plants and Animals on Philippine Colonial Churches,” in Reyes,
Art, Trade, and Cultural Mediation in Asia.
85. See, for instance, brief remarks by Alicia M. L. Coseteng, Spanish Churches
in the Philippines (Manila: UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines,
1972), 101–8.
86. Benito J. Legarda Jr., After the Galleons: Foreign Trade, Economic Change and
Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de
Manila University Press, 1999).

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712 Early American Studies • Fall 2017

Figure 6. Ornamented pediment of the Augustinian Church at Miag-Ao,

Panay Island, Philippines. Photo by the author.

trans-Pacific trade also influenced the histories of Europe, Africa, and the
Levant—the commercial corridor linking Asia.
On a quotidian level, the effect of the galleon trade on Manila was just as
profoundly transformative. During its Golden Age, Manila was a teeming
cosmopolitan city, where many languages could be heard and where people
from all walks of life converged to try their luck at getting rich. The city
was elegant and stately, but also conflict-ridden, corrupt, dirty, and disease-
filled. It was a city of dreams, where no expense was spared on fiestas and
feasts. Filled with music, pomp, and revelry, these occasions celebrated the
safe arrival of ships and were divinely blessed by the resplendent earthly
images of the Virgin and the Christ Child.
The influx of worldly goods took consumption habits to new heights.
Prosperous inhabitants delighted in ostentatious displays of wealth and
adored the luxurious and sensuous. Bodies were clothed in fine, costly
fabrics—silks, damasks, taffeta—new imports that brought about sartorial
innovations: new folds and pockets, embellishments and trimmings, and
accessories, from hats and fans to stockings and shawls. New fragrances
introduced olfactory experiences and an air of worldly glamour. With the
introduction of New World plant crops and animals, culinary as well as
geographic landscapes were irrevocably altered. A taste for rich and sweet

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 Reyes • Flaunting It 713

foods was engendered. Plant motifs found their way to church decoration,
thereby bringing about new visual aesthetics that reached beyond Manila.
Communities far removed from the urban milieu of the galleon trade
responded to a manifold increase in the range and variety of Chinese trade
ceramics and porcelains, age-old objects of desire about which new stories
could be spun.
Peter Burke has pondered why and how there was an apparent rise of a
“more conspicuous kind of consumption” in different parts of the world; he
cites Europe and Asia, at much the same time, that is, between the late
sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Though focused mainly on Europe
and the Renaissance and taking a different tack, Lisa Jardine found how
mercantile rivalries and collaborative commercial enterprises expanded hori-
zons, which in turn fostered acquisitiveness and an appreciation of finery
and luxuries, but also in the process enacted an intellectual and cultural sea
change.87
Could Manila’s Golden Age of conspicuous consumption claim an intel-
lectual and creative flowering that profoundly defined an era and beyond?
In terms of scale, and if a Eurocentric compass were to be our guide, the
answer would have to be a rather undramatic No. But similar ingredients
were present. The period was not devoid of creative energy, enthusiasm,
and swashbuckling bravura, whose effects were felt throughout the archipel-
ago. The Manila galleon trade offered a quick route to riches but could
plunge a man into penury just as fast. It fueled conspicuous consumption
and encouraged venality, vanity, and acquisitiveness on a massive scale. But
flaunting it had other consequences. Cultures of consumption were formu-
lated and reshaped in and beyond the port city. As hinterland communities
reprocessed and disseminated goods, they too became economic actors as
well as active consumers. Objects and their materiality took on a multiplicity
of meanings and cultural uses for the different peoples that received, con-
sumed, and cherished imported goods. Thus, for a brief period, the port
city of Manila was one of the world’s most spectacular emporia with cosmo-
politan sensibilities and a genuinely global outlook that reached out to a
truly diverse consumer market.

87. Burke, “Res et Verba”; Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the
Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1993).

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