Manila as Base of Trade and Evangelization in China
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.[4] 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.[5]
[1] Schurz, The Manila Galleon, 20.
[2] 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.”
[3] 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.”
[4] Marciano R. de Borja, Basques in the Philippines (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2005), 49; Ellis, They Need Nothing, 139.
[5] Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).