Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

Introduction: Spanish colonization of Las Filipinas and establishment of Manila

It is well known that spices were the original commodities that lured Portuguese and Spaniards to rush to East Asia, followed by trade with La Gran China. After Turkey sealed off the traditional land route (which Marco Polo and early Jesuits had taken to China), the Portuguese sailed eastward around the tip of Africa to reach Asia, while Spaniards, with the advantage of an American base in Mexico (New Spain) had the advantage of crossing directly westward across the Pacific.
 
Early exploratory voyages undertaken from Spain by Magellan, Elcano and Loaisa (1519-26) were followed by three more launched from Mexico under Saavedra Cerón, Grijalva, and López de Villalobos (1527-42). These voyages persuaded Emperor Charles V that the time had come to send an expedition to set up a colony in Asia. He commissioned longtime Mexico resident Miguel López de Legazpi to lead the colonizing enterprise in 1564, with the further imperative to find a return route (tornaviaje) from Asia back across the Pacific to Mexico, that is, a transpacific roundtrip. Fortunately, he had the service of a brilliant navigator, the Augustinian friar Andrés de Urdaneta, who left Cebú Island (Zibu on the adjacent map) and followed trade winds and currents northward close to Japan before veering eastward to the California coastline and then south back to Acapulco, Mexico.
 

Urdaneta’s galleon in this first transpacific roundtrip returned laden with Chinese silk, porcelain, and other luxury goods that the Chinese junk traders in the Philippines had provided in return for Mexican silver. This voyage constituted the first of a global trade system called the Manila Galleon Trade that would last over two and a half centuries. Not long after, the Spaniards opted for trade with China over the Spice Islands of the Moluccas, when Legazpi transferred the seat of Spanish colonial government in 1571 from Cebú to Manila on Luzón island, which was within easier reach of the coast of Minnan or southern Fujian, the source of most of the Chinese junk traders and later settlers already dubbed sangley by the Filipino natives. Within this historic context, two scientists and missionaries, the Augustinian Martín de Rada and the Dominican Juan Cabo, both fixed their eyes on China from their seat of operation in Spanish Manila.

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