Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia. Ronald G. Knapp
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 between the Chinese and the Spaniards fell 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