Perhaps the best evidence of Spaniards’ designs on Asia consisted of the failed attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Cambodia late in the 1590s.  Arriving in 1596, a band of Spanish would-be conquerors led by the Manila-based profiteers Blas Ruíz and Diego Veloso took advantage of internal political turmoil in Cambodia to unseat the Siamese king who had taken the throne from a Cambodian rival two years earlier, in 1594. The European invaders murdered the king and plundered his palace, installing a puppet king to rule Cambodia.[20] Blas Ruíz wrote to the chief judge of the Manila audiencia Antonio de Morga requesting royal aid and declaring that a “fortress on the mainland” would be "the beginning of great things."[21] Royal aid was not forthcoming, eventually forcing the Veloso and Ruíz expedition to retreat, outnumbered by the deposed Siamese king’s partisans and other opponents stirred up, so the Europeans said, by a powerful Muslim courtier of their puppet king. Blas Ruíz and Veloso died, along with a number of others in their expedition.[22] The Spanish raiding parties onto the Southeast Asian mainland had been organized in Manila, provoking the opposition of some colonial officials; indeed, the Crown had sanctioned neither of the aggressive imperial forays into the Kingdom of Cambodia in either 1596 or 1599. For instance Morga himself complained in his Sucesos, published in Mexico in 1609 as a defense of his embattled tenure in the Philippines, that adventurers like Veloso and Ruíz proposed reckless interventions in Asia while Spaniards had yet to establish effective control over the southern Philippine islands.[23] It is clear from the Sucesos that Morga disapproved of the Cambodian adventure. Yet while the short-lived conquest of Cambodia did not receive the sanction of royal officials, neither had the Cortés expedition to Mexico. The Crown had in the past happily taken advantage of unsanctioned expeditions to expand imperial authority across the Americas, and Spanish conquerors themselves were usually just private adventurers with loose ties to the Crown. (Veloso, a leader of the failed Cambodian expedition, was actually a Portuguese, not Spanish, subject. Given the decentralized nature of rule in the Spanish Empire, where the Crown exercised little practical control over day-to-day affairs in remote areas of the empire, ordinary profiteers and officials alike were largely free to pursue their private agendas; thus, that imperial conquests into Asia were royally unsanctioned reveals little about the actual agendas of Spanish settlers on the ground in Manila, or about the possibilities for imperial expansion contemplated by Spanish profiteers.[24] Even though the Philippines ultimately came to mark the western limit of Spain’s empire in the Pacific, this was not a foregone conclusion in the sixteenth century as China and mainland Asia lay within the sights of Manila’s most aggressive imperialists.

Thus, in the late sixteenth century, Manila came to function for some aggressively imperialist Spaniards as a sort of staging ground for the conquest of mainland Asia. The territories of Asian mainland kingdoms lay within some would-be conquistadors' imperialist designs, while explorers set up Manila to function as a base for Spain’s strategic interests in the Pacific including, as the Cambodian expedition reveals, possible conquests on mainland Asia. Contemporary ecclesiastical sources like Salazar, expressing enthusiasm at the prospects of the Christianization of China, underscore the close links between religious proselytizing and Spanish imperial ambitions. Indeed in the Americas, the conquerors had used the requerimento, or legally prescribed, formulaic injunction read to native peoples to induce their conversion to Christianity, as a strategy to legitimize the taking of territory by force.[25] In his classic The Manila Galleon, historian William Schurz recounts the bluster of the Spanish captain of the galleon San Felipe, washed onto Japanese shores in 1596, who, in response to a Japanese official’s question how Spain had come to control such a vast empire, declared: “‘Nothing is easier. Our kings begin by sending into countries which they desire to conquer some friars, who engage in the work of converting the people to our religion.  When they have made considerable progress, troops are sent in who are joined by the new Christians.’”  Hearing of this, the Japanese Emperor Hideyoshi proceeded in February 1597 to execute by crucifixion twenty-six Christian missionaries in Nagasaki.[26] This exchange between the indiscrete Spanish captain and Sengoku officials perhaps never took place; Schurz uses the Spanish imperial archives in his reconstruction of the Pacific world of the late sixteenth century, and there is no footnote to indicate where Schurz found evidence of the exchange. Possibly, a political enemy of the San Felipe’s captain sought to make him a scapegoat for the martyrdom at Nagasaki, a setback for missionary activities in Japan.  Nevertheless, the exchange seems remarkably consistent with others like Bishop Salazar’s spiritual designs on the Asian mainland; efforts to convert Japanese and Chinese subjects to Christianity proceeded as Spanish traders sought access to Asian markets. The spiritual conquest of Asia lay within the ambitions of Spanish missionaries and traders.
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^{[20] Ellis, They Need Nothing, 112-113, 119-120 ; Schurz, The Manila Galleon 149-150.
[21] Schurz, The Manila Galleon, 149.
[22] Ibid.
[23] S. Cummins, “Antonio de Morga and his Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas," Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 3 (1969), 572-574.
[24] For a discussion of royal administration and the slow extending of Spanish imperial authority to non-urban peripheries of the empire, see James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 103-106.
[25] Gonzalo Lamana, “Beyond Exotization and Likeness: Alterity and the Production of Sense in the Colonial Encounter,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47,
no. 1 (2005), 31-33.
[26] Schurz, The Manila Galleon, 102.}