1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (26 page)

Typically each ship was chartered by a wealthy trader, who rented space in the hold to the others, usually for 20 percent of the merchant’s gross sales. Belowdecks was a warren of sealed, watertight compartments, windowless and barely the size of a closet, in which traders stored their goods. Porcelain was packed tightly in cases, Li said, with rice separating the plates and bowls. “They injected water on all sides, then set down the case in a humid place. It glued the ceramics into a solid, unbreakable mass.” Theft was rare aboard ship—thieves couldn’t escape with their loot. Nonetheless, merchants brought their own food, slept atop their goods, and stayed inside their dark, noisome compartment during the entire ten-day passage to Manila.

“If they could, they went only once,” Li said. Small-scale traders tried to avoid repeat voyages—“the trip was too dangerous.” The small islands and shallow water in the harbor restricted shipping to several narrow channels, along which oceangoing vessels had to be slowly pulled by smaller boats.
Wokou
lurked in the fog. To draw pirates from their hiding places, merchants sent out scouts in fast, maneuverable galleys. If they spotted
wokou,
they could skip away with a warning. Because the scouts could not travel as far as the Philippines, the last stage of the outward journey was particularly dangerous. Dutch pirates routinely ambushed Chinese ships on the approach to Manila, seizing everything aboard.

The merchants usually docked at Cavite, a long, skinny peninsula five miles from Manila, on the south side of the great bay.
⁶
A crowd of Chinese men—sales agents—awaited them. Cautiously the traders would disembark from their cubicles, blinking in the sun, looking for an agent from their extended family. Agents knew how much silver was in the most recent galleon and could raise or lower prices quoted to the Spaniards accordingly; they also had contacts necessary to bribe colonial inspectors. For their services they charged 20 to 30 percent of the sales price. Only after all the Yuegang traders had chosen agents would the ship be inspected by customs agents, who collected a tax—“three percent on everything to his Majesty,” as one Manila governor put it. Then the dickering would begin. Everyone had at most two months to make a deal, because the galleons began leaving in mid-June to avoid typhoon season.

Spanish buyers usually met the agents in the Parián, a Chinese ghetto that was a kind of metastasis of Yuegang, full of Fujianese washed by the silver trade to the Philippines. Located in a swamp outside Manila’s walls, the Parián was created in 1583 by Spanish officials in an attempt to control the growing number of Chinese, whom they regarded as conniving, job-stealing illegal immigrants. Initially it consisted of nothing but four big shed-like buildings Yuegang traders had built to store their goods. To encourage Manila’s Chinese residents to leave their homes and move into their warehouses, the Spaniards announced that any non-Spaniards found outside the Parián after sunset would be executed. In some sense, the quarantine was tit for tat: Europeans were not allowed to set foot in China, so Chinese were restricted from the little piece of Europe in Manila.

Denied permanent access to the European town, the Chinese built their own. Around the warehouses grew a maze of arcade-like shopping areas crammed with intensely competitive stores, teahouses, and restaurants. The narrow streets between were jammed at all hours with men in long, floppy-sleeved robes, embroidered silk shoes, and high round caps. Doctors and apothecaries hawked jars of unguents, tisanes, and medicinal roots. People were buying, selling, and making, arguing over tiny cups of Fujianese tea, racing about with piles of carefully packed bundles, eating foods that appalled the Europeans (a Yuegang favorite: chicken embryos baked inside the egg by burying the eggs in piles of salt and exposing the piles to the sun). It was the first Chinatown in the orbit of the West.

For Spain, the Parián was an oddity and a humiliation. From the beginning, when Spain ejected Muslims and Jews from its kingdom, the empire had what it thought of as a civilizing mission: universal conversion to Christianity. Manila was thronged by missionaries, heads afire with the zeal to bring the Roman Catholic church to Asia. They forced Filipino and Malay natives to adopt the cross, but this was a side project. The true goal, at least at the beginning, was to conquer and convert China. Believing that Cortés (conqueror of Mexico) and Pizarro (conqueror of Peru) had needed only small bands of committed men to seize entire empires for Christ, these clerics and soldiers initially imagined that a few thousand Spaniards could repeat these feats in China. In Manila, the Ming realm seemed so near—vast riches, spiritual and material, almost close enough to touch. Wiser counsel eventually prevailed, as Manila’s governors and the Spanish court concluded that China was too big to conquer. Indeed, the Spaniards in the colony began to worry that China might conquer
them.
Fearing annihilation, they allowed the Chinese an otherwise unthinkable concession: to live in their own infidel quarter, worshipping their own un-Christian idols. They even allowed it to have its own
gobernadorcillo
—a mini-governor.

Frightened by the crowded Chinese ghetto called the Parián, Manila’s few hundred resident Spaniards literally walled themselves off from it. To enter Manila proper, Parián residents had to walk across this moat and through a heavily guarded gate. (
Photo credit 4.9
)

Parián artisans and shopkeepers sold the Spaniards everything from roof tiles to marble statues of Baby Jesus—“much prettier articles than are made in Spain, and sometimes so cheap that I am ashamed to mention it,” wrote Domingo de Salazar, bishop of the Philippines. Colonists flocked to the Chinese ghetto, where stores purveyed the latest European styles. European merchants griped about the competition. The monarchy ordered the shops moved further away, but Spaniards kept coming to them, attracted by the low prices.

The trades “pursued by Spaniards have all died out,” Salazar lamented, “because people buy their clothes and shoes from the [Parián].” As a warning, he told the story of a Spanish bookbinder and his Chinese apprentice. After carefully observing the master at his work, the apprentice set up his own shop in the Parián, driving his former master out of business. “His work is so good there is no need of the Spanish tradesman.” The Chinese were not universally successful, of course. One shopkeeper sold a wooden nose to a Spaniard who had lost his in a duel. He tried to capitalize on his success by importing “a fine boatload of wooden noses.” Sales were poor.

By 1591, twenty years after Legazpi entered Manila, the Parián had several thousand inhabitants, dwarfing the official city, which had only a few hundred European colonists. For the Chinese, the arrangement was convenient. They had created a Chinese city outside of China, where the nominal presence of the Spanish authorities insulated them from the scrutiny of the Ming. To the Spaniards, the ghetto was alarming, alien, an unwelcome necessity. And it was
big,
especially when compared to Manila. Despite constant exhortation, Spaniards refused to settle there in any numbers. The city was too remote, too hot, and, above all, too full of disease, especially what we now know as malaria. European residents often sought cooler air by building homes in the hills around town. By bad luck, the hills are the habitat of the mosquito that is the islands’ main malaria vector. The more Europeans escaped the heat, the more they got sick.

The only reason Manila attracted any Europeans at all was because it represented an extraordinary opportunity: China would pay twice as much for Spanish silver as the rest of the world. And its merchants were willing to sell silk and porcelain amazingly cheaply. “The prices of everything are so moderate, it’s almost for free,” one Spaniard had crowed when the Chinese first arrived in Manila. Yet somehow the deals rarely were as lucrative as the newcomers wanted. To their dismay, the Chinese were always able to play them off against each other, bargaining them down time after time. Sitting in the nexus of exchange made Manila’s colonists wealthy, but not as wealthy as they wanted. “Among all those one hundred and fifty families who are settled at Manila, there are not two who are
very
rich,” groused the Spanish admiral Hieronimo de Bañuelos y Carrillo in 1638.

Trying to regain the advantage, the Manila government imposed taxes, freight charges, and registration fees on Chinese merchants; they were effectively forced to pay soldiers to stand guard over their property. Angered, the Chinese staged an Ayn Rand–style producers’ strike, starving Manila of supplies, and the Spaniards backed down. Frustrated, the king ordered the colony to create a kind of cartel: it would buy all incoming Chinese goods at a single price and “distribute [them] fairly among the citizens.” In theory, this would wipe out all the Chinese retailers, which in turn would greatly reduce the Parián, which in turn would greatly reduce Spanish anxieties.

Economics 101 says that cartels rarely work, because individual cartel members will cheat and cut side deals. In this case, Economics 101 was correct. Spaniards made secret arrangements with Chinese traders, paying higher prices for better-quality silk or the first chance to select pieces of porcelain. When the galleons left Manila for Mexico, they met Spanish dories full of contraband silk and silver a few miles outside the harbor.

Madrid was dismayed by the magnitude of the galleon trade—too much silver was going out, and too much silk and porcelain was coming in. Exact figures are not possible to calculate, but somewhere between a third and a half of the silver mined in the Americas went to China, either directly via the galleon trade or indirectly, via Europeans’ purchases of Chinese goods shipped overland by Central Asian traders or around Africa by the Dutch and the Portuguese. The monarchy was furious, because the king wanted the silver to buy supplies and pay troops in Spain’s innumerable wars. (“The Manila galleon’s most fearsome adversary was beyond doubt the Spanish administration itself,” the French historian Pierre Chaunu observed.) To prune back the galleon trade, officials cut the number of ships allowed to cross the Pacific to two per year. In response the galleons became enormous, ballooning to two thousand tons. Built by conscripted Malays out of tropical hardwoods, they were castles of the sea. On the Manila-bound lap they carried more than fifty tons of silver—equal, Flynn and Giráldez have calculated, to the combined annual exports of the Dutch East India Company, the English East India Company, and the Portuguese Estado da India.

Much or most of that silver was illegal. Worried Mexican officials informed the monarchy in 1602 that the galleons that year had exported almost four hundred tons of silver—eight times the declared amount. Furious imprecations from Madrid changed nothing; smuggling was too lucrative. “The king of China could build a palace with the silver bars which have been carried to his country … without their having been registered,” Admiral Bañuelos y Carrillo complained thirty-six years later. In 1654 the
San Francisco Javier
sank near Manila Bay. Its official manifest claimed that it carried 418,323 pesos. Centuries later, divers found 1,180,865 aboard. Even if one assumes, absurdly, that the divers found every last coin, the cargo was almost two-thirds contraband.

To restrict trade on the other side, the government issued import quotas. If the junks brought too much silk or porcelain to Manila, customs officials were supposed to send it back. To get around the quotas, Chinese traders arranged to have their agents meet the junks as they approached the Philippines. Much of the onboard merchandise had been ordered the year before, by Spaniards looking at samples. In a mirror image of the Spanish practice of loading illicit silk and porcelain onto galleons after they left Manila, the Chinese offloaded illicit silk and porcelain from their junks before they arrived. Only after these transactions did the ship officially enter the harbor and let the Spanish harbor patrol guide it to its berth.

Spain had its own silk weavers and dressmakers, as did its colony in Mexico. But the scale of Chinese textile production was so much bigger that Europeans couldn’t compete. Indeed, the silver-hungry Ming dynasty actually
forced
farmers to plant mulberry trees, the food for silkworms. Landowners with between five and ten
mu
(one
mu
is about one-sixth of an acre) had to plant, the official history of the dynasty says, “half a
mu
each of mulberry and cotton.” Those with more than ten
mu
had to plant “twice as much.” Farmers who didn’t plant mulberry had “to pay one bolt of silk.” Spurred by these decrees, farmers in eastern China covered the hills with mulberry trees. By the 1590s, the Fujianese writer Xie Zhaozhe was reporting areas with “mulberries planted on every foot or inch.” Rich farmers, he claimed, devoted “more than a million
mu
” (roughly 130,000 acres) to mulberry trees—entire landscapes of a single species. Working in a frenzy, farmers upriver from Yuegang harvested silk five times a year.