Manila as Base of Trade and Evangelization in China
From the Philippines in 1584, the first Archbishop of Manila Domingo de Sálazar wrote to King Philip II of the openness of China to Christian evangelization, attributing China’s dark reputation among Spaniards for executing foreigners on its soil to jealous Portuguese traders, who presumably sought to safeguard exclusive trading rights in the kingdom by scaring off Spanish competitors. According to Salazar, the Portuguese had defamed Spaniards in China, spreading rumors they were “thieves” or “spies” who plotted the conquest of a city on the Chinese mainland.[16]
In turn, according to Salazar, the Portuguese had deceived the Spaniards into believing that their missionaries and traders had barely escaped death on the Chinese mainland, as evidence of China’s hostility to foreigners on its soil. The Portuguese evidently had told Spaniards a Chinese law prescribed the death penalty for foreigners in Chinese territory without permission. Against “this deceit,” Salazar declared that “it is certainly false that in China they kill everyone who goes there without license, and that there is no law prohibiting entry, and that discarding the poor opinion they have of us, of course we can have commerce with them.[17] As Salazar’s expressed designs for the Christianization of China make clear, the bishop brushed off Portuguese claims that China executed foreign interlopers in the kingdom, in order to secure the Crown’s support for Christian proselytizing on the Chinese mainland. Interestingly enough, Salazar was also an avid defender of indigenous peoples, early in his life in the Americas and later in the Philippines, against the abuses of encomenderos. Fearing Salazar was “another de las Casas in the making” according to historian Marciano R. de Borja, King Philip II had apparently sent him to the remote Philippines lest he stir up too much trouble in more central parts of the empire.[18] Bishop Salazar’s call for Christian proselytizing in China would presage sustained missionary efforts by Spaniards and other Europeans primarily in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces, in particular the establishment of a number of Jesuit missions in southeastern China.[19]
________________________
[15] Schurz, The Manila Galleon, 20.
[16] Domingo de Salazar, “Carta-Relación de las cosas de China y de los chinos del Parián de Manila, enviada al Rey Felipe II por Fr. Domingo de Sálazar, O.P., primer Obispo de Filipina.” Dolores Folch, ed., “La China en España: Elaboración de un corpus digitalizado de documentos españoles sobre China de 1555 a 1900,” http://www.upf.edu/asia/projectes/che/principal.htm. “…para esto usaron de una maña no muy fundada en cristiandad que echaron fama entre los chinas que los castellanos eran ladrones corsarios y que no andavan sino a rrobar, y que si a la China yvan era con propósito de saquear alguna çiudad, y los que yvan como desmandados era por disimular, siendo espías de los que acá quedavan.”
[17] Ibid. “…donde claramente consta ser falso que matan en la China a todos los que van sin liçencia a ella, y que no ay ley que proyva el entrar en ella, y que perdiendo la mala opinión que de nosotros tienen, holgarán que tengamos comerçio con ellos.”
[18] Marciano R. de Borja, Basques in the Philippines (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2005), 49; Ellis, They Need Nothing, 139.
[19] Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).