The Chinese presence in Spanish America dates back to 1564, when Spaniards from Mexico in the Americas (then called New Spain) colonized Las Filipinas (The Philippines), the archipelago off the south China coast, and made Manila their headquarters for trade with Ming China.  By then, of course, all Europe had heard of the prodigious wealth of Great China from early travelers such as Marco Polo and the Jesuits.  Chinese traders from Xiamen (厦门) Quanzhou (泉州), and Zhangzhou (漳州) in Fujian province in south China had regularly sailed in their privately-owned chuan (junk) around the big island of Luzon and its surrounding archipelago on their way to Southeast Asia and other archipelagos, a well traveled trade route known as the dong-yang-chen-lu, or eastern passage.  (Ng; P. Chang; Qian).

These Minnan (southern Fujian) port cities were better known to Europeans as Amoy, Zaitun and Chincheo.  The Minnan people, today widely dispersed all over Southeast Asia, is also well known as Hokkien in their own distinctive spoken language (Minnan hua).  The Hokkien traders with their large, sea-going junks had been active in the greater Indian Ocean region, as far as Hormuz in the Arabian peninsular (the Middle East today) and the east coast of Africa.  In the pre-Manila era, they had gained early knowledge about Spain from contact with Arab (Muslim) traders. In fact, even before Spain formerly colonized Manila and the Philippines, some Spaniards had made their way through the Indian Ocean trade routes to Qunzhou (Marco Polo’s Zaitun) and Zhangzhou (which they named Chincheo) in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, preceded by Arabs and Africans, including the famous Ibn Battuta of Morocco in the fourteenth century.  (Dunn; Laufer; Chen) By the end of the fourteenth century, Quanzhou was the most prominent port city on the South China coast.  

Chinese official and travel accounts richly documented Hokkien merchants’ maritime activities in the South China Sea, Southeast Asia and Indian Ocean world from as far back as 84 C.E. through the fourteenth and fifteenth century, up to the moment in the sixteenth century when Portuguese and Spanish colonizers and merchants made permanent contact.  (Ng; Qian; Chen; Laufer)  The most famous of these intrepid long distance sailors was Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim of Yunnan province who sailed from Amoy.  With a huge “treasure fleet,” he commanded seven voyages from 1405-1433 through this vast region for Ming Emperor Yongle, collecting prodigious tributes and distributing vast amounts of Chinese goods along the way.  The sizes of these maritime expeditions were truly impressive: for example, the fleet of the second expedition (1407-09) consisted of forty-eight huge ships carrying more than 27,000 sailors.  (P. Chang, p. 25) Then the emperor inexplicably called off further voyages at the height of his maritime power in 1433.  (Levathes) Thereafter, private Hokkien junk traders mainly traced the routes that Zheng He’s voyages had carved and documented.   Throughout the region, junk traders stayed for months to sell their goods; in this sense, they were sometimes described as “sojourners” (residents who may stay for the long time, but who eventually intend to return home) and are credited with founding the first Chinese “overseas” communities. (P. Chang; Wang).  In 1511, when the Portuguese occupied Malacca (in Malaysia today), they encountered five Chinese junks trading with local native Malays.  (P. Chang, pp. 13-14) News and information circulated, so that Spaniards learned about Chinese sojourners throughout Southeast Asia.   They knew, for example, about Cebu island where Magellan was murdered by the natives, and that “Chinese [were] wont to go thither and trade for gold and precious stones.” (Schurz, p. 21).