4 - A Chinese Ethnography of Spanish Manila (1812)

Summary

Abstract

The “Lüsong jilüe [A brief account of Luzon]” by Ye Qiangyong is the only detailed, firsthand narrative of galleon-era Manila by a Chinese observer. It is an ironic take on colonial society and culture that veers into larger issues like comparative religion, geopolitics, and even sexuality. It lays out the Chinese junk trade's cooperative business model and highlights the importance that the Shanghai–Manila route had gained by 1800. This narrative is an essential source for understanding the range of Chinese experiences and voices in the Spanish Pacific and has lingered in obscurity and only been accessible to scholars with Sinological training until now.

Keywords: Chinese sources, junk trade, cross-cultural exoticization.

Ye Qiangyong was a native of Taicang Prefecture in the Yangzi Delta, but little else is known about his life. According to his “Lüsong jilüe [A brief account of Luzon],” Ye made a single voyage to Manila in 1812, jumping on a merchant ship leaving from Shanghai. The resulting text, which is part amateur ethnography and part sensationalist travelogue, did not surface until the late nineteenth century. Both the Luzon account and Ye's very short but similarly titled “Brief Account of Sulu” appeared in the multivolume Geographical Compendium of the Small Square Kettle Studio, published in Shanghai in the 1890s. As a result, the text has been misattributed and overlooked as a late-nineteenth-century creation, even though it is an unparalleled window into how the galleon era was experienced by Chinese sojourners and settlers in Manila.

Proof of a much earlier circulation of the text can be found in the archives of Japan's Imperial Household Agency, where the text appears in a collection (printed as late as 1868) under the title A Record of Modest Reflections. Earlier copies are also reportedly found in the rare book collections of the Peking University and Shanghai libraries. The translation that follows is an abridged version of the Kettle Studio woodblock print, as it resurfaced in a compilation produced by Zhongshan University in 1980. This collection is made up of dozens of passages about the Philippines, but Ye's account stands out for its extent and originality.