Beginning with the arrival of Legaspi’s expedition from Mexico in 1565, Spaniards colonized the Philippines and established Manila as a strategic entrepôt for trade across the South China Sea with the empires for East Asia. For over two and a half centuries Manila served as the annual port of departure for Manila Galleons—laden with silks, porcelain, spices and other commodities from Asia—bound for Acapulco in Spanish America. Late in the sixteenth century, Manila became home to merchants, traders and other profiteers from the lucrative galleon trade.

Yet Manila’s role as a way station for trade with Asia should not eclipse its role, too, as a strategic point of spiritual and territorial conquest in the Spanish Empire. In the first decades of Spanish rule, Manila became a staging ground for Spanish incursions onto the Asian mainland, including the briefly successful (but ultimately disastrous) conquest of the Kingdom of Cambodia in 1596-1599. Manila was home not just to galleon profiteers but also to would-be conquistadors who, having been shut out of profitable grants of indigenous labor in the Americas, envisioned the Christianization and conquest of neighboring Japan, China, and allied tributary kingdoms. (See Fray Diego Aduarte's Tomo Primero de la Historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, Japon y China, 1693)

From the writings of Manila’s besieged chief judge Antonio de Morga, the Philippines’ first bishop Domingo de Salazar, and other civil and ecclesiastic officials, this paper analyzes the presence of an aggressive imperialist faction in early colonial Manila, which proposed the continued Spanish territorial expansion into East Asia. These imperial designs on mainland East Asia underscore the complexity of Spaniards’ motives for colonization in the Philippines, a combination of trade, missionary proselytizing, and territorial conquest, as well as the diverse and sometimes competing agendas of Spaniards settling in Manila in the late sixteenth century.