Chinese Merchants of

Binondo
Chinese in the of
Merchants
Nineteenth Century
Binondo in the
Nineteenth Century
Richard T. Chu

UST Publishing House

Manila, Philippines
2010
University of Santo tomas Publishing House
Chinese Merchants of
Binondo in the
Nineteenth Century

UST Publishing House

Manila, Philippines
2010
Chinese Merchants of
Binondo in the
Nineteenth Century

Richard T. Chu
INTRODUCTION

In these essays, Richard Chu responds to recent

developments in the literatures of transnationalism
and global Chinese ethnicities, applying them to
Tsinoy (Chinese Filipino) history in new and fruitful
ways. In the first essay, he draws upon the work of
Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini on the “flexible
citizenship” of transnational migrants, arguing that
part of the transnational lives of so many Chinese
in the Philippines—past and present—were their
ability to escape or transcend the defining labels and
limitations put upon them by colonial governments
and national societies. The case in point is the major
Chinese figure of late nineteenth century Manila,
Don Carlos Palanca Tan Quien-sien. We are shown
how Palanca/Tan could not only evade the limitations
of a single obligatory label—“Chinese”—but could
also present himself in a variety of personae that would
enable him to pursue his goals and interests with a
maximum of options and a minimum of restraints.
Chu is at pains to show us, as he has done in some
x Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

of his other work, that the way to understand the

Chinese in Philippine history is to avoid being misled
by colonial classifications, and focus instead upon
the ways in which the Chinese both conformed to
and evaded colonial labels. Thus, Palanca/Tan could
manipulate his own sense of identity to maximize his
opportunities and minimize any limitations.
With these findings, Chu seems to be in the same
camp as Andrew Wilson who, in his recent book about
Chinese leaders in Manila, has also used Palanca/
Tan as an extended example of the Chinese elite of
Manila in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. But while Chu is concerned mostly to show
multiple identity possibilities and warns against
accepting colonial labels, Wilson makes an entire
book out of the “virtuosity” of Palanca/Tan and his
contemporaries in the Chinese elite. For Wilson, the
elite of that era not only used their flexible identities
as instruments of their own ambition; they also used
their cultural and political virtuosity to completely
control and enculturate the local Chinese population
with stereotypical versions of “Chineseness” that
served elite purposes. A similar approach, again,
 Richard T. Chu xi

well beyond what Chu is trying to do, is found in

a recent work by Flemming Christiansen. Here,
the context of time and place differs. Christiansen
is writing about immigrant Chinese businessmen
in contemporary (1990s) Europe but, like Wilson,
the leaders are seen as having no commitment to
an abstract or even a personal version of Chinese
culture. For them, everything is instrumental. They
use Chinese culture to maintain community, impress
China with their “patriotism,” and negotiate their
way with local governments in Europe. It seems to
me that it is very easy to fall into the trap of seeing
the behavior of Chinese overseas leaders as purely
instrumental, with no personal cultural belief and
subject to no uncontrolled cultural influences from
their local environment.
Instead of this, when we read Chu, it becomes
apparent that there must be real cultural concerns
for Palanca/Tan, as well as Ignacio and the other
Boncans of the second essay. Both are seen as
living—necessarily—transnational lives, with
relatives and business interests in both China and
the Philippines. In doing so, they acquire business
xii Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

and cultural experiences that complicate their lives.

In both families, intermarriages occur, producing
mestizo families and, as Chu says, the possibility of
several cultural traditions operating within a single
family. Will families like these, at some point, come
to rest on a more Philippine set of interests and
commitments or on a more Chinese one? Perhaps
so. But in the meantime, some kind of balancing
seems to be called for.
A kind of balancing of the two ends of their
transnational plank (and everything between the
ends) is evident in the genealogy of the Boncans. This
is a family of wealth, but without—at least in what is
presented here—the conspicuous formal leadership
role found in Palanca/Tan. Here, it becomes
apparent that over time the Boncans have become
more Philippine-oriented than China-oriented.
Chu, in this essay, uses “Filipino” and “Chinese” as
terms of cultural orientation. But seen more broadly,
what seems to be happening is “localization”: the
Boncans’ involvements and aspirations come to
be more in and about the Philippines than in and
about China. Filipino, Spaniard, Chinese, Indio, and
 Richard T. Chu xiii

Mestizo are categories into which they seek to insert

themselves in order to gain their ends. Localization
is happening, as some Chinese scholars—Zeng
Shaocong, for example—seem to see as an inevitable
process in diasporic Chinese life.
Can we compare what we know of the Palanca/
Tan family and the Boncan family? Is it possible
to say that while the Boncans were becoming
more Philippine-oriented, the Palanca/Tans were
becoming more China-oriented? Such a comparison
is more difficult than it may seem. Many
transnational Chinese families in the Philippines of
an earlier time maintained a dual family system; one
family in Fujian, the other in the Philippines. It is
commonly said in China that the family in China
was seen by the emigrant, at least when he first went
to the Philippines, to be more important than any
family he might establish in the Philippines. But
if there were a long period of absence from China
and little direct contact, the Philippine family might
become the more important, especially if the migrant
had become so successful in the Philippines that he
could not really leave his business and other interests
xiv Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

in the country. It seems to me that to completely

understand what was happening to the Palanca/Tan
family and the Boncan family, we would have to
know about both ends of the migration connection
in the transnational life sphere that the migrant and
his families inhabited. Would success at one end
imply failure on the other? Does the visibility of the
Boncans in the Philippine context imply that they
became largely invisible in the Chinese context? Or is
it simply that we know more, for the present at least,
about the Philippine end? In the Palanca/Tan case,
I remember meeting a descendant of Don Carlos
in Manila some forty years ago, who was known to
me by the surname Chen, the Mandarin version of
Tan. I have no further information about the family.
Did it become de-localized from the Philippines but
flourished in China?
In these two essays, then, Chu deals with colonial
classification and the varieties of self-identities in
the first essay and, in the second, with the question
of localization and—by implication, though not
explicitly—with questions of “Filipinoness” and
“Chineseness.” I would like to pursue the subject
 Richard T. Chu xv

of “Chineseness” here, both how it is being studied

by others and how Chu is going about it. We have
already seen the radical attempts of Wilson and
Christiansen to present the essence of being Chinese
as merely a set of convenient ethnic stereotypes to
be manipulated for their own interests by leaders
and would-be leaders in Chinese overseas contexts.
Other writers take “Chineseness” seriously. Some of
them, adopting the term huaren (ethnic Chinese),
introduced by China to indicate global Chinese who
are not citizens of China, perceive a global “cyber-
community” of ethnic Chinese. Others attempt
to assess the essence of nationally-defined Chinese
“communities” around the world. They ask such
questions as “How are Chinese Canadians different
from Chinese Americans?” Since the 1940s, nations
with important Chinese populations have tried to
nationalize the terms used for them (thus, Chinese
Americans, or Chinese Filipinos), implying that in
a cohort of global Chinese, Chinese Americans, for
example, will have certain cultural characteristics
that differ from both non-Chinese Americans and
also from those of Chinese Filipinos. Much of the
xvi Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

current academic literature refers to contemporary or

recent Chinese populations and, as indicated, much
of it wishes to characterize whole populations—
local, regional, national, or global—in some way.
Thus, one can find at the Chinese Heritage Centre in
Singapore an exhibition entitled “Chinese More or
Less,” suggesting that quantification or classification
of “Chineseness” on national or other terms, is
somehow possible.
Although the study of the Chinese who live
outside of China has focused mostly on individual
“communities,” there has also been a growing
attention to the ethnicities of “Chinese” families
and individuals. Some years ago, Wang Gungwu
suggested several kinds of personal identities among
the Chinese overseas, depending on situations and
contexts. Most recently, I have discussed sources
of information about “Chineseness” that new
immigrants to a global city may make use of in
adapting to their new situation, while providing
for maintenance of certain values of their own. A
recent study of South Asian Indian and Korean
migrants to Dallas by Pawan Dhingra carefully
 Richard T. Chu xvii

shows how these migrants and their local-born

children balance “Indianness” or “Koreanness”
with “Americanness” in order to manage the various
domains of their multicultural lives (work, leisure,
politics, etc.).
Richard Chu’s work fits roughly into this
category of individual and familial ethnicities. His
intention is to demonstrate how—in the domains
of family, religion, and business—the Philippine
Chinese of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century used the full range of institutions and
attitudes available in managing their transnational
lives. What is most striking to me among Chu’s
findings is the willingness of the nineteenth century
Chinese in Manila to leave their businesses in charge
of non-Chinese while they were away (presumably
in China tending to the other half of their lives).
Chu has discovered this, among others, through the
use of church and legal archives in which marriages,
wills, and business arrangements are managed by the
colonial religious and legal institutions rather than
by methods commonly associated with Chinese
culture. Clearly, the Chinese families whose records
xviii Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

he has studied were deeply involved in non-Chinese

institutions and social contexts.
On this point, there could hardly be a greater
contrast in Chu’s findings to what we see in Wilson’s
work. Wilson presents Chinese elites as absolute
bosses of an “ethnic enclave.” In his version, ordinary
ethnic Chinese are totally controlled (from migration
in Fujian to burial in Manila or Fujian) by these
bosses, who make use of stereotypical versions of
“Chineseness,” which they manipulate for their own
interests. There is no sense that any of the Chinese—
whether the leaders or all the others that the leaders
supposedly control—have any genuine Filipino part
of their lives. Chu’s contribution is to show us, first,
that the categorization of the ethnic Chinese as only
Chinese is a misleading artifact of colonialist record-
keeping, and second, that the individual Chinese
and their families were often deeply involved in
non-Chinese aspects of life. And, while Wilson is
interested only in migrant leaders, Chu, especially
in his earlier work, is also interested in the second
generation (as most current students of the global
Chinese are). On this subject he is able to challenge
 Richard T. Chu xix

assumptions I made in my early work that mestizos

were a cohesive and totally localized group that had
little to do with Chinese migrants. Chu has even
suggested that the first generation of mestizos may
have been very different from subsequent generations
in its possession of cultural skills that enabled
its members to continue running the businesses
established by their parents and also remain very
much in touch with the migrant Chinese.
The character of such families and the attitudes,
objectives and usages of their founders and
subsequent heads could vary greatly. In the two cases
at hand—Palanca/Tan and Boncan—we are talking
not about essential or abstract culture, but rather
about how one wishes to be seen culturally. The two
families differ greatly in this. Don Carlos had a stock
of identity performances. He wished to be seen as
one or another of his identities according to the
needs of the situation. Seemingly, he had no desire
to settle on any visible identity other than those
required by emerging situations. The Boncans, by
contrast, had a sense of direction. While Don Carlos
used the categories accepted by others in order to
xx Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

remain flexible, the Boncans tried to be seen as

either Spanish or Filipino within the legal categories
established. Palanca/Tan was a transcendent of
legal categories; the Boncans attempted to fit into
established legal categories. But they were both alike
in their concern about how others saw them.
These various new findings I have pointed
out set Chu’s research apart from that of others
who work on the Philippines. These constitute
pioneering work, not only with respect to his
findings, but even more so with respect to his
method. It is the latter that I wish to discuss in
the remainder of this introduction. It is a method
that traces family histories by archival means and,
where possible, by oral history. Can that method
be extended in some way to topics broader than
the one at hand? In the middle of the Boncan essay,
Chu speculates that his method might be used to
determine the proportion of families with Chinese
background in the present Philippine population.
I would go further.
 Richard T. Chu xxi

I have in mind two suggestions. First, why could

we not use Chu’s method to prepare a multicultural
history of the Philippines—one that includes not
only the Chinese but all the peoples who have
lived in the country? Could we thus have a history
whose themes are those of social and cultural
interaction? Such a project would change the study
of Tsinoy history—as well as Muslim and Cordillera
history—from specialized topics of interest only to a
few persons of such background, to a general topic
that included the Chinese and other “minorities” as
integral to Philippine history and thereby a topic of
interest to mainstream historians and others.
Second, the study of the Chinese, as Chu is
doing, leads us to the externalities of what we
usually think about Philippine history. The Chinese
in the Philippines were and are transnationals placed
in a national political frame of reference. But many
Filipinos—both now and in the past—have also
led transnational lives, whether inside or outside
of the Philippines. Could we prepare transnational
histories of the Philippines by using Chu’s method
of combining archival and oral history methods?
xxii Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

Either of these two projects would be extremely

labor intensive. Clearly, on a large scale, Chu’s
method demands group efforts. If one were to attempt
either of the projects suggested, the quickest way to
do so would be to organize interested individuals to
write their own family histories. These are best done
through organizing groups, in which no more than
ten people at a time are involved in writing their
own family stories, based on interviewing elders and
consulting archives, genealogies, and other records.
Once these stories are published, the families are
identified and more in–depth archival work may
begin. All of these needs organization. Some of these
projects are now underway in several countries. In
the case of migrant Chinese, the projects I know
of are in North America and Australia. In Canada,
small groups produce small books of eight or ten
family stories, each story dealing with only one
aspect of a family’s history.
How far should one extend these “family” stories
cum histories? In the case of the Chinese, should one
include parts of a family that remained in China?
Where dual families existed certainly seems to be
 Richard T. Chu xxiii

part of the story. The work of Madeline Hsu and Li

Minghuan has dealt with both ends of the traditional
migration concourse (south China and overseas).
And in China, Wang Lianmao, of the Quanzhou
Maritime Museum, has shown how Chinese family
genealogy books yield evidence of one family’s
strategic planning for migration. For me, the most
memorable of the cases he has discussed is the one
he presented in Vancouver some years back, in
which a family in the Quanzhou area of Fujian in
the eighteenth century decided to send one son to
Taiwan, another to Jakarta (Batavia) and a third to
Manila. This, we were assured, was a common practice
on the part of the Chinese living around Quanzhou.
From this perspective, the story of the Chinese in the
Philippines, begins not in the Philippines but with
family strategies in Fujian and should include what
subsequently happens to the family in China as well
as in the Philippines and elsewhere.
If story-telling and historical research on that
scale were attempted, it would still require more
organization and coordination. Who would organize
all these? In the Philippines, it might be the Kaisa
xxiv Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

para sa Kaunlaran, Inc., an organization of Filipinos

of Chinese descent who are dedicated in tracing their
past and recognizing their ancestry. It likely would
be too much to include—at least on the outset—
all dimensions of the transnational (transregional)
family histories that would be studied. It is probably
best to start small as how we are doing in Canada.
We are limiting our family histories to the province
of British Columbia, and beginning with Vancouver.
What would such an historical enterprise
accomplish? For one thing, it would encourage us
to think of Philippine history writing in new ways.
Chu is working within a tradition of global Chinese
studies. But he is basically a historian of the Chinese
in the Philippines. In these two essays and in his other
work, he has introduced us to new ways of thinking
about and accomplishing the study of that subject.
Could these methods prompt us to think whether
we could study Philippine history as a whole, as a
history of families, with a theme of social interaction
of all the peoples who have lived in the Philippines?
In this way, the history of Tsinoys would not be of
interest only to those of Tsinoy background, like
 Richard T. Chu xxv

Chu, but to all who are committed to the history of

the Philippines. The study of the Chinese would no
longer be a specialized topic, but an integral part of
general Philippine historiography.
If it is seen that way and if we accept that the
Tsinoy story necessarily has Chinese links and is
both a national and transnational topic, then we
might find ourselves also doing histories of the
transnational and transregional dimensions of
Philippine history, something that has not been
popular in Philippine historiography up to now. In
the contemporary context, Philippine history, given
the large number of Filipinos around the world,
has now some obviously transnational dimensions.
But much earlier there were substantial numbers
of Filipinos scattered globally, especially as sailors.
We are already aware that in the case of Chinese
people, global scattering is not really new. Indeed,
contemporary scholars of the history of China are
increasingly including the history of Chinese people
wherever they are or have been in discussions of
“Chinese history.” Could it not be the same for
Filipinos and the writing of Philippine history?
xxvi Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

What I have suggested are possibilities—ideas

stimulated by the new perspectives and methods we
find in these essays and in Chu’s other works. One
more thing, Chu asks: if the Chinese lived so closely
among the non-Chinese, how did they get separated
and how can they be reunited? His answer to the first
part of that question is to cite American policies of
the early twentieth century and Filipino and Chinese
nationalisms. One could add the policies of China.
But to educate us all to the point of reconciliation,
we need to know the details. By that I mean the
workings-out of the separation through the histories
of the Chinese and the non-Chinese schools in
the Philippines over the course of the twentieth
century. This is how we will fully understand how
Filipinos came to think of the Chinese as alien and
the Chinese to think of Filipinos as alien to them.
This is where we will find much of the basic story of
how the Chinese in the Philippines learned how to
be “Chinese” and how Filipinos in the Philippines
learned to be “Filipino.”

Edgar Wickberg