Due to Manila’s role as a hub of global trade networks and a key locus of cultural exchange between the East and West in the early Spanish colonial period, material cultural exchanges between the two areas have been the subject of extensive research, and even linguistic interactions have emerged as a popular area of study in recent years. This article presents an understudied aspect of cultural exchange: the poetic exchange between the Sangleys and the Spaniards, based on three Chinese poems included in a Spanish manuscript compiled by Diego de Rueda y Mendoza (Illescas, 1573–Manila, tpq 1644). This manuscript is entitled Relación verdadera de las exequias funerals que la insigne ciudad de Manila celebró a la muerte de la majestad del Rey Felipe III y reales fiestas que se hicieron a la felice sucesión de su único heredero y señor nuestro Felipe IV (True account of the funeral rites that the illustrious city of Manila held upon the death of His Majesty King Philip III and the royal festivities that were held for the happy succession of his only heir and our lord Philip IV).

This study on the cultural exchange between Sangleys and Spaniards distinguishes itself for two reasons: first, the creation of these classical Chinese poems occurred in Manila, China’s periphery, which differs from previous scholarship that focused on the poetic creation by Jesuit missionaries—such as Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607), who published Chinese poems in China to enhance the effectiveness of their evangelisation—and the Chinese literati’s poetic fascination and curiosity about the Jesuit missionaries and their beliefs.Footnote ¹ Secondly, the authorship of these three Chinese poems suggests the existence of an unnamed group of Chinese individuals in Manila during the 1620s, engaging in intercultural exchange through their own networks—a phenomenon that remains largely undiscovered and understudied to date.Footnote ² Even the central figure, Rueda y Mendoza, the compiler of the manuscript, largely remains elusive to scholars.Footnote ³ Furthermore, Rueda y Mendoza’s other writings have not been located. There are big gaps in his biography that remain unknownFootnote ⁴ and his sympathies with the Dominicans and their work in Parian remain unclear, among many other issues.

Despite many uncertainties, this article starts with a factual note to contextualise the production of the three Chinese poems included in Rueda y Mendoza’s manuscript (Figure 1). Diego de Rueda y Mendoza wrote the manuscript to describe the funerals of the late King Philip III and the festivities to celebrate the ascension of Philip IV.Footnote ⁵ In his manuscript, there are a number of poems written by members of the Sangley communities of Manila (converted or non-converted, with or without long hair, etc.) that hint at the complexities of their levels of education, and their integration or lack thereof, thanks to the rhetoric they use to mourn the death of the Sun King, Philip III. The term Sangley, with the characters 常 来, was used by the Spanish to designate Chinese merchants and traders in Manila.Footnote ⁶ The analysis in this article reveals that the usual statements about the depiction of Sangleys as treacherous, manipulative, secretive, and untrustworthy, and who lived at the mercy of the few Spaniards governing and managing the colony and encomiendas, is biased thinking from the Iberians. Manel Ollé underscores this, in both Manila and the larger area of the South China Sea.Footnote ⁷ Ricardo Padrón’s writings about China have also shown the Sinophobia paradigm versus another current of more sympathetic writings. Rueda y Mendoza perhaps could be included among the Sinophile writers. He uses words such as ‘gentiles’ when referring to the non-Christianised Sangleys.Footnote ⁸ He openly portrays himself and his wife as Iberian patrons of a well-off Sangley at their wedding, which seems to include many indications of pagan practices. As Adrian Masters evidences through numerous examples, pagan practices were in the public view of everyone.Footnote ⁹ In fact, many elements of Manila society in the late 1500s and 1620s demonstrate strong Chinese characteristics in their architectural, cultural, religious, and other dimensions. In this sense, Manila was ‘Sinicised’. Peter J. Katzenstein’s proposal that we understand Sinicisation as the process of ‘making the world suitable to China and the Chinese’ is amenable to the idea of incorporating Manila into China’s Sinosphere.Footnote ¹⁰ The fact that Rueda y Mendoza himself and his family were deeply involved in the Chinese social network (e.g. becoming godparents for a newlywed Chinese couple) shows his flexibility in embracing Chinese traditions.

Figure 1.

Diego de Rueda y Mendoza, Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales que la insigne ciudad de Manila celebró a la muerte de la majestad del Rey Felipe III y reales fiestas que se hicieron a la felice sucesión de su único heredero y señor nuestro Felipe IV, Manila, 1625, MS HC-397-501, Hispanic Society of America, folios 102v–104r.

Diego de Rueda y Mendoza is an elusive player to modern scholars. In the scanty extant documents, he is also referred to as Second Lieutenant Diego de Rueda, or sometimes as Diego de Rueda y Mercado. We know that he was born in Illescas, Toledo, as a legitimate son of Simón de Rueda and Inés de Mendoza. When he was 25, some inquiries were conducted concerning his petition to become an escribano real in Mexico. In 1600, by a royal provision, he was given the title of a notary of the Indies. In August 1622, he was present for the exequies of Philip III in Manila, who had died in 1621. In 1623, he and his soldiers from the Fort of San Felipe oversaw the theatrical representations celebrating Philip IV’s ascension to the throne. The soldiers wrote three plays.Footnote ¹¹ In 1625, Second Lieutenant Rueda was still in charge of the Fort of San Felipe in Cavite when he signed the manuscript of the Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales, dedicated to Diego Lucio Luchero, who was a licenciado employed in the Royal Council of the Indies, in the hopes that the manuscript would be published.Footnote ¹² Unfortunately, Diego Lucio Luchero died in April 1625, four months before the completion of the manuscript in August 1625. The death of his patron in the Council of the Indies might have been a setback in his career. In 1627, by order of the Royal Audiencia in Manila, Second Lieutenant Diego de Rueda was assigned to the fort in Taiwan (Isla Hermosa) as accountant, paymaster, custodian, and distributor of Royal Treasury provisions. Before one year had passed, he relinquished his position as minister of royal properties and later was officially relieved. His relinquishment made the transition difficult, as finding a qualified professional for the job proved difficult.Footnote ¹³ In 1636, he was in prison for permitting the publication of a pamphlet against the Jesuits.Footnote ¹⁴ The Hispanic Society Library and Museum indicates that he died in Manila in the year 1636; yet, in 1644, there are three certifications signed by the contador Diego de Rueda y Mendoza in Manila. The images in Figures 2 and 3 show that the signatures in 1625 and 1644 are consistent.

Figure 2.

Rueda y Mendoza’s signature in 1625 at the end of the dedication to Diego Lucio Luchero. Source: Diego de Rueda y Mendoza, Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales que la insigne ciudad de Manila celebró a la muerte de la majestad del Rey Felipe III y reales fiestas que se hicieron a la felice sucesión de su único heredero y señor nuestro Felipe IV, Manila, 1625, MS HC-397-501, Hispanic Society of America.

Figure 3.

Rueda y Mendoza’s signature in 1644. Source: ‘Tres certificaciones de Diego de Rueda y Mendoza, contador, en favor de Juan de Olaso y Achotegui, Manila, 6 de julio de 1644’, in Papeles de méritos y servicios del maestrescuela Juan de Olaso y Achotegui, Manila, 1644. Ms. FILIPINAS,85, N.98, doc 6.

We have not been able to find more news about Diego de Rueda y Mendoza after 1644; therefore, until more data are recovered, the year 1644 is the terminus post quem of his death.

In the Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales (1625), which Miguel Martínez does not hesitate to call the first poetry book of the Spanish Philippines, Rueda collects an impressive number of poems written for public display in Manila.Footnote ¹⁵ Six of these poems were written by Sangleys.Footnote ¹⁶ In Diego de Rueda y Mendoza’s prose, the Sangleys appear somewhat incorporated into the memorial observances and well organised. From the analysis of the poems, we deduce that the Sangleys were conscious of the significance of their attendance at the displays of mourning for Philip III, as Rueda y Mendoza was aware of the importance to his career to write this report and have it published in Spain. When proceeding to analyze the six Sangley-authored poems, we add comments on Rueda y Mendoza’s prose summary of the poems and his introduction to the Sangley communities in Luzon. Rueda y Mendoza’s manuscript follows this sequence: contextualisation of the Sangley communities;Footnote ¹⁷ the three poems in Chinese;Footnote ¹⁸ Rueda’s summary of the previous Chinese poems;Footnote ¹⁹ two poems in Spanish by the non-Christianised Sangleys; one poem by the converted Sangleys;Footnote ²⁰ and, finally, more perspectives on the Sangley community, including the description of Chinese Mandarins, the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, a Sangley wedding with the rituals of patron–client, and the staging of chuanqi theatre, among many others.Footnote ²¹

Although Rueda’s summary is supposed to be a Spanish prosification of the Chinese poems, he goes beyond a simple synopsis. In fact, Rueda y Mendoza seems to establish a dialogue with all six Sangley-authored poems in which he shows both his cultural fluidity and his paucity of knowledge. How much Rueda y Mendoza actually knew about the Chinese language is not directly stated anywhere, but, on the verso of folium 116, he makes some comments on the Chinese language while praising Juan Cobo’s ability to preach in Chinese and Miguel de Benavides’s linguistic ability to address a Chinese Mandarin.Footnote ²² He shows a very acute understanding of the tonal system as a fundamental carrier of lexical meaning, as well as an awareness of the usefulness of characters to disambiguate the meaning of allophonic syllables.Footnote ²³ Yet, he adds that Chinese has an intricate difficulty and a never resolved obscurity—‘su intricada dificultad y nunca aclarada obscuridad’—and explicitly recognises that he cannot understand Chinese theatre when represented, even dismissing its value as ridiculous fables of love, loneliness, and war: ‘On stage, there were many ridiculous figures, who made many courteous gestures and grimaces, and represented plots of love and disdain, of solitude and wars; all of which seemed to me performed with cold and impertinent movements (as I did not understand them).’Footnote ²⁴

The play lasted for at least 14 hours and Rueda y Mendoza neither mentioned the title nor described the plot. Clearly, he was referring to a southern musical play, chuanqi 傳奇, which, in Chinese performance tradition, could last for three or four days if performed in its totality. His blunt, critical assessment of the value of chuanqi indicates his linguistic limitations with the Chinese language. Nevertheless, Rueda y Mendoza’s inclusion of poems written in Baybayin, Japanese, and Chinese indicates a certain openness to Manila’s linguistic diversity. This linguistic diversity is closely linked to the Spaniards’ approach to economic transactions: a contract can be signed in any language. This phenomenon was common in other Spanish monarchies, and not exclusive to Manila.

The following are the transcription, translation, and analysis of the three Chinese-language poems titled ‘I dare to ask what things are like when an emperor dies’, followed by ‘What makes my heart tremble and startles me in my dreams’, and finally ‘Who obscures the sun and makes its light dim?’Footnote ²⁵ The first two poems are in the style of ‘seven-syllable rhymed verses’ (qiyan lüshi 七言律詩), each consisting of eight lines, with rhymes on the ending characters of lines 2, 4, 6, and 8. The third poem is in the style of ‘five-syllable rhymed verse’ (wuyan lüshi 五言律詩), with rhymes on the ending characters of lines 2, 4, 6, and 8. Each of these poems seems to be the work of an educated writer, as evidenced by the scholarly kaishu 楷 書 calligraphy. Of course, the transcriber was not necessarily the author, as the poems were initially on public display in Manila and later transcribed into the manuscript. The writer or writers of these poems seem to be cultured in the convention of classical Chinese poetry composition, which is fundamental to Chinese classical education, and it remained a crucial skill that candidates needed to cultivate in preparation for their civil examinations.Footnote ²⁶ At the same time, the linguistic features—especially the rhyme patterns in these poems that incorporate both a regional vernacular and the official guanhua 官話—reveal that the author or authors were also speakers of the Hokkien dialect. As most of the Chinese immigrants in Manila were from Zhangzhou 漳州—a district in the province of Fujian on the south-eastern coast of China—their dialect, Hokkienese, was known among the Spanish in Manila as ‘Lengua de Chio Chiu’ (language of Zhangzhou). The rhymes for the three poems are /o/, /ing/, and /ong/, respectively, according to Hokkien pronunciation of the rhyming words: 多, 窩, 刀, and 高 in the first poem; 萌, 星, 情, and 清 in the second poem; and 皇, 芳, 忙, and 濃 in the third poem.Footnote ²⁷ Another hint at the poet’s linguistic and cultural background in the first poem is the term Liao shen 寮神 to refer to God in Catholicism. In Bian zhengjiao zhenchuan shilu 辯正教真傳實錄 (Testimony of the True Religion), Juan Cobo (circa 1546–1592), a Dominican friar assigned to be in charge of the parish of Parian in Manila, observed the linguistic variety and instability in the initial phase of translating Catechism into Chinese languages:

The terms Liao shi 寮氏, Lihu shi 禮乎氏, and Yaomu 遙目 are transliterations of the Spanish sound of Dios, Deus, and Jehovah into the Hokkien dialect, respectively. Thus, the temporally and spatially specific term Liao shen points to the poet’s identity as a Chinese Hokkien speaker residing in early seventeenth-century Spanish Manila.

The first poem says:

The first line raises the poem’s theme—an inquiry of how the world is impacted by an emperor’s death, informed by the expression huangbeng 皇崩. Imperial Chinese society was highly hierarchical. Distinct euphemistic death expressions were used to indicate different social statuses of dead people.Footnote ²⁹ The expression beng 崩 was only allowed to be used for the death of emperors. In their analysis of the Chinese poems, Stuart M. McManus and Dana Leibsohn argue that the use of the expression indicates that the poem presents Philip III as a Chinese emperor to whom the Chinese poet displays his devotion.Footnote ³⁰ However, such a statement cannot be made in haste. If we look deeper into the poem’s imagery, we find a profound influence of Chinese literary and philosophical traditions that strengthen the poet’s Chinese cultural identity instead of that of a Chinese vassal loyal to the Spanish king.

The first poem depicts transformations in the natural world from a devout Buddhist point of view on morality and religion. The second couplet addresses changes in the natural world due to the death of an emperor through the metaphors of lichen dissolving in water and mountains collapsing into the valley. Together with the opening question, these two couplets evoke a strong sense of koan (gong’an 公 案) in Zen Buddhist discourse.Footnote ³¹ A koan is a riddle that is meant to be a teaching tool; it usually has no solutions to the raised question, but is useful in inducing enlightenment through meditation. An awareness of formlessness underscores the meaning of emptiness in life, which is the fundamental Buddhist philosophical worldview. Here, the question intends to lead readers to ponder the traditional bifurcation of things, such as form and formless, life and death. Through meditation and visualising the changes in the natural world, people will realise the meaning of nothingness, and that there is no difference between life and death. Furthermore, in line 7, the expression baoshu 寶樹 refers to ‘the Tree of the Seven Jewels’, which is where Gautama Siddhartha became enlightened. The seven jewels are the seven chakras. This strong Buddhist undercurrent can be detected throughout the first poem, which speaks to the deeply embedded influence of Buddhism on a Chinese poet.

It is true that the first poem primarily describes transformations in nature when a king or emperor dies, which metaphorically and poetically elevate the king’s virtues. The hardness of rocks (shida 石 大) and the loftiness of mountains (shanggao 山 高) evoke a king’s positive qualities. The canopies of clouds and intertwined tall trees are the protection offered by a virtuous king. With such protection, even uprooting ‘the precious tree’ cannot harm the branches. The last two couplets offer the Sangley poet’s interpretation of the relationship between a virtuous king and his subjects, which reflects Chinese ethical values by placing the relationship between subject and king as the most important. Linguistically and philosophically, due to the poet’s upbringing in mainland China, he conveys a complex Chinese cultural reflection to mourn the passing of a Spanish king in Manila.

In the second poem, there are several notable aspects concerning the poet’s attempt to draw a parallel between the Chinese administration and that of the Spaniards in Manila, extending to the royal court in Spain:

This second poem starts with the poet’s foretelling of the emperor’s death before the news was announced, then moves to the Chinese practice of astronomical observation to predict potential omens. In line 2, the expression bei xiang meng 北 先 萌 explains that the emperor’s death is interpreted through an unusual phenomenon involving the Polar Star (Beiji xing 北极星), which symbolises the emperor in Chinese astrology. In lines 5, 6, and 7, while mourning the emperor, the poem transposes the Chinese military (sanjun 三軍), religious (Wuyuan 五院), and imperial court (liaoting 僚廷) to Manila, or even the whole realm of the Spanish empire. The term sanjun 三軍 originated during the spring and autumn periods (circa 770–481 BCE) and refers to the military structure of a vassal state, which can be divided into three sections: shangjun 上军, zhongjun 中军, and xiajun 下军.Footnote ³² Later, the term became a metonymy for military in general. Wuyuan 五院, on the other hand, evokes the Buddhist monasteries built on China’s five sacred mountains, which are Putuo shan 普陀山, Wutai shan 五台山, Jiuhua shan 九华山, E’mei shan 峨眉山, and Xuedou shan 雪窦山. This term also mirrors the structure of the Catholic Church in Manila, as it was used by an anti-Christian Chinese writer, Huang Tingshi 黃廷師, in his essay ‘Straight words to expel the barbarians’ (‘Quyi zhiyan’ 驅夷直言, 1638) to refer to the five religious orders in Manila: the Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Recollects.Footnote ³³ This second poem praises the virtue of the emperor, like the first poem. ‘Water’s purity’ in line six is a metaphor for a sage king’s governance; it alludes to the chapter ‘Water and Earth’ in the Guanzi 管 子—an ancient Chinese political and philosophical text that uses water’s quality as a metaphor for a sage king’s governance.Footnote ³⁴ This reflects the important cosmological and cosmogonic role that water played in early Chinese thought.Footnote ³⁵

The poem also offers a contrast in emotions between before and after an emperor’s death is announced. The ending line highlights the contrast between sorrow, indicated by the ‘furrowed eyebrows’ (choufeng 愁峯), and joy. But why joy? Joyfulness seems contradictory to what a loyal Chinese subject in Manila should feel about his Spanish emperor’s passing. We will revisit this point when we analyze Rueda y Mendoza’s prose summary, which equates Philip III to a saint.

In the third poem, birds, fish, flowers, and plants join the poet in mourning. The effects of grief are conveyed through a series of animistic expressions. In line 3, ‘Birds and fish become saddened, and their colors fade’, which alludes to the story ‘Xiang River Spirit playing zither’ (‘Xiangling guse’ 湘灵鼓瑟), which originally appears in Chuci 楚辞 (Song of the South), an ancient Chinese poetry anthology of the lyrics of the Chu. It is said that the zither music played by the Xiang River Spirit is so sad that it made River God Feng Yi dance in vain and the travellers were so utterly sad that they could not bear to hear it.Footnote ³⁶

The second and third Chinese poems—‘What makes my heart tremble and startles me in my dreams?’ and ‘Who obscures the sun and makes its light dim?’—seem to respond to each other more closely than to the first poem ‘I dare to ask what things are like when an emperor dies’. They both hinted that the news of Philip III’s death reached them in a dream that startled the poetic voice. In Manila, the exequies for Philip III started in August 1622, but the king had died in 1621. The time-lapse can be explained by the fact that Luzon was the most remote outpost of the Hapsburg empire. ‘What makes my heart tremble and startles me in my dreams?’ and ‘Who obscures the sun and makes its light dim?’ utilise abundant natural mourning signs in the South China Sea of the unannounced death of the Sun King in Spain: the blackening of the Sun and stars, diminishing fish and bird pigmentation, fading fragrance of flowers and plants, the sombre crying of the cranes, and the melancholic bells of the five convents. Both poems praise the virtues of the king: one for their loftiness and the other for their scale. And both end with the same tone, expressing the shared experience of joy to follow proper mourning.

The Chinese poems were followed in the text by Mendoza’s Spanish prose (Figure 4). At times, one can perceive that Rueda’s prose does not faithfully translate the content and style of the Chinese elegies. However, the prose does echo the beauty in the Chinese poems and draws from the content in other poems that appear immediately after the prose. After the three poems in Chinese characters, Rueda y Mendoza summarises:

The prose of which translated into our vulgar says: Your absence, saintly King, has been so great/ that if the elements, the beasts/ from the wild, the birds from the air, and the fish from the sea could/ leave their flows, houses, rooms and caves, and could join with all of us to lament the immense/ loneliness we have without you because our/ bright sun of the east has darkened, whose rays/ bathed these western lands in light and/ vivified us = It is God’s will/ so your afflicted subjects may find solace/ before your relics disappear/ we beg that you show us/ the quiet happiness, the suave consent of the/ repose that you enjoy, so those of us who stay in this/ exile may awaken from the heavy dream in which/ the body …. and we are able to imitate your life/ and follow your saintly steps so that in our last/ breath we see you happy in the house of the/ sun = meanwhile, we are greatly consoled/ that you left behind your portrait, with so many saintly habits, which promises us fair weather/ in this stormy sea of life; imitating you will be a strong shield, a brilliant/ torch shedding light upon the rest of the world that is in darkness.Footnote ³⁷

Figure 4.

Diego de Rueda y Mendoza, Relación verdadera de las exequias funerales que la insigne ciudad de Manila celebró a la muerte de la majestad del Rey Felipe III y reales fiestas que se hicieron a la felice sucesión de su único heredero y señor nuestro Felipe IV, Manila, 1625, MS HC-397-501, Hispanic Society of America, folios 105r–106v.

La prosa de lo cual trasuntada en nuestra vulgata dice: A nos sido tu ausencia santo Rey tan grande/ que si tuvieran capacidad los elementos, los brutos/ del campo, las aves del aire y peces del mar de/ jaran sus cursos, casas, habitaciones y cavernas, y vinieran todos con nosotros a llorar la mucha/ soledad con que sin ti quedamos porque se nos a/ oscurecido el sol claro del oriente que con sus Ra/ yos daba claridad en estas partes del poniente y/ nos vivificaba = Justos juicos son del altísimo/ porque en algo se consuelen estos afligidos súbditos/ tuyos antes que se nos oculten tus Reliquias te/ suplicamos muestres por señales inteligibles la/ alegría quieta, el consentimiento suave del des/ canso que gozas para que los que quedamos en este/ destierro despertemos del pesado sueño en que la/ carne nos …. Y procuremos imitar tu vida/ y seguir tus santos pasos para que en el último de/ nuestro aliento te veamos alegre en la casa del/ sol = y en el ínterin nos queda con gran consuelo/ que nos dejas un Retrato tuyo con tan santas/ costumbres que nos promete grandes bonanzas/ en este mar de la vida tan borrascosa que con tu imi/ tacion nos ha de ser un fuerte escudo, una antorcha/ resplandeciente que ha de alumbrar el resto del/ orbe que está en tinieblas.

Comparing the Chinese poems and Spanish prose, Rueda’s rendering, with the help of a translator (probably a ladino Sangley or a Dominican friar, or both) who knew both Chinese and Spanish, stands out as a rather freestyle translation in which, on the one hand, the form of classical Chinese poetry is lost; on the other hand, some topoi and metaphors are present in both versions, while others are overlooked. Many of the ideas in both the prose and the poems are related to the topoi of dreams, and the mutability of life, nature, and sorrow; yet, at times, his translation is fairly unfaithful to the original Chinese poems. When the other three poems in Spanish penned by members of the Sangley communities are read, a more complete intertextual dialogue emerges. In fact, the Sangley-authored poems and Rueda’s prose are in constant dialogue with each other through metaphors and imagery.

Shared topoi, such as the mutability of life and nature, the protection offered by the virtuous/saint king, and the joy and solace in thinking of the great example set by the virtues of the deceased king, are part of that dialogue. However, the poetic imagery and metaphors in the poems and prose are not completely the same. By comparing them, we gain better insight into the cultural practices, understanding of the king–subject relationship, and people’s faith in God at the time. The following will analyze the metaphors used to express the mutability of life, the cosmological importance of the king’s patronage, emotions of sorrow and hope, and the righteousness in the king’s governance, which are prominent in the Chinese and Spanish poems and Rueda’s prose in Spanish.

The first poem in Chinese, the first poem in Spanish, and Rueda’s summary present their awe before life’s imperfectability and mutability, even for the Sun King of Spain, ‘our/ bright sun of the east has darkened’.Footnote ³⁸ The rhetorical question in the first Chinese poem (lines 1 and 2), ‘I dare to ask what things are like when an emperor dies. There are many transformations, all because of God’, is responded to in multiple echoes in which Rueda tries to translate the Chinese characters’ meaning:

Yet, the poems in Chinese never talk of elements, beasts, birds, or fish in these terms. The Chinese couplets evoke fishes’ and birds’ colour fading, cranes emitting melancholic sounds, etc. This rendering by Rueda seems to echo the second poem in Spanish, when it says:

Close reading here reveals how Rueda y Mendoza’s ‘trasunto’ in prose transports imageries and symbols from the actual Chinese and Spanish texts. All of them were allegedly written by Sangleys, but the levels of Sinicisation and de-Sinicisation vary if we look at the three different expressions about the mutability of life. The poems in Chinese seem to be penned by highly educated Chinese, whereas those in Spanish look like baroque poems by a highly Hispanicised Sangley; finally, Rueda’s prose rendering is closer to the Hispanicised Sangley poems. To what extent those Sangley are de-Sinicised is up for debate, even within Rueda’s writing. He sometimes asserts that Chinese communities keep leaving Manila according to their own calendars and rules. For instance, there is a fantastic description of the Chinese New Year festivities in both Mainland China and Manila, helping to introduce information about the Mandarins. The concomitance and overlapping of the information about the Spring Festival (Chunjie 春節) and Chinese officials in Manila during the festivities and normal times is quite striking, as the Chinese population’s level of assimilation seems low. Rueda himself indicates that the authorities have not been able to suppress the celebrations, only to give more glory to the deeds of Dominican friar Bartolome Martínez, who, after the reconstruction of the church in Parian, was able to influence the celebrations through painting crosses on Chinese lamps, building shrines in the streets, organising processions through the Parian dedicated to the Virgin Mary, etc. During the 1600s, the Chinese also celebrated a certain ‘idolatrous festivity they call the Arpaio, along with the festival of the Cûrgūan or Salty Mandarin’.Footnote ⁴¹ This rather puzzling mention might refer to the ritual welcoming of the Kitchen God, Zaojun gong 灶君公, from Heaven at the beginning of the New Year. The picture of Chinese and Christian celebrations’ cohabitation is very unstable.

Returning to the poems in Chinese, Rueda’s version misses the importance of the Buddhist imagery. While he seems to create rhetorical games about the Chinese couplets’ meaning, there are metaphors for the change of state in both the Spanish and Chinese poems, but Rueda does not include them in this ‘traslado’ in prose. The imagery of the strength of the rock against the sea is commonplace, presented in two of the poems that Rueda does not include in his summary. The first Chinese poem says: ‘when a tide rushes to big rocks, lichen’s body will be destroyed’ 石大衝潮苔滅體.Footnote ⁴² The same imagery is present in the first Spanish poem, ‘No esta el grande peñasco asegurado’, when the opening quartet declares:

Rueda left it out, much as he did the imagery of the mountain in the fourth line of the first Chinese poem and in the first Spanish poem.Footnote ⁴⁴ The second couplet in Chinese and half of the Spanish sonnet are concerned with imagery of the mountains’ mutability, the mountain being a metaphor for the king, and yet the ‘traslado’ does not incorporate these details. The voice of the manuscript seems to take over the subaltern voices. But the subaltern voice here is extremely important because, as said before, those two couplets have a profound connection with Buddhist meditation techniques that aim to train to see nothingness beyond the appearance of forms. In this case, the lichen and the mountain are an appearance, and the verses are directed to see through death and help to comprehend the real transformed nature of the king.

The topic of royal patronage, as said before, is recurrent in three of the poems: the first Chinese poem (lines 5 and 8) and the first and second Spanish poems. The main patronage symbol is the tree and its shade, which is present in several lines of the first Chinese poem with an allusion to the Buddhist iconography of the Tree of the Seven Jewels—‘Who is going to uproot the Tree of the Seven Jewels?’ 誰將寶樹連根徙.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the Spanish poems, it is an inverted tree related to theological justifications for monarchy. This first Spanish poem mentions the tree in a substantially different way:

Both metaphors of the king’s soundness are animated by religious subtexts. One of them is the Buddhist visualisation of the seven jewels in the tree of enlightenment; the other refers to the upside-down tree rooted in the heavens. Once again, Rueda does not include this imagery in the second paragraph of his rendering.

The predominant emotions expressed are sorrow/melancholy and joy/solace. The transition between sentiments is a sequence of references to the virtue and even sanctity of the king, who left a great example to be followed by his vassals in Luzon. Poems in Chinese and Spanish express virtue, with metaphors about light and darkness in references to the Sun. Philip III, to distance himself from his father’s heritage, tried to build his image as the Sun King. Nevertheless, Rueda, once more, in his second paragraph, and mostly in the third, does not include a single reference to the metaphors of light, darkness, and Sun. What he does include is a reference to the ‘portrait’ that the king leaves behind: ‘Meanwhile, we are greatly consoled/that you left behind your portrait, with so many saintly habits.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The portrait of the virtue and sanctity of the monarch operates as a metaphor for a model of life.

In understanding the Sangley communities that were at the heart of the Manila colony’s economic life, all the poems and the ‘traslado’ give bits of information on the complexity of Manila society and the Sangleys’ role regarding religious orthodoxy and patron–client systems. For instance, in the last octava written by the non-Christianised Sangleys, ‘gentile Sangleys’,Footnote ⁴⁸ the poetic voice is clearly Chinese when referring to offerings to ‘our gods’:

In theory, offerings to Chinese gods were forbidden. Rueda y Mendoza says it himself during his description of the Chinese New Year festivities. This type of information is fundamental to completing our vision of Luzon, which might supplement what has been said on the topic of Eurocentrism and Sinophobia.Footnote ⁴⁹

Finally, concerning the delayed announcement of the king’s death, we find ourselves confronted with animism and premonition. King Philip III died on 21 March 1621, but the funeral exequies in Manila were in 1622. There was a one-year time-lapse for the news of the king’s death to reach the common public from Spain to its farthest colonial outpost. This is partly due to the long voyage; it usually took more than six months to travel from New Spain to Manila at the beginning of the galleon trade.Footnote ⁵⁰ The delay in receiving the news is expressed in the second and third Chinese poems; for instance, the second line of the second poem says ‘The death of the King has not been announced; a premonition is already shown’, while the third poem elaborates more on the same idea in the seventh line by saying ‘In my half-sleep, the true words were conveyed’. The ‘true words’ refer to the confirmed news about the king’s death. Instead of showing the feeling of a dejected subject towards his king, both poems either explicitly or implicitly refer to a premonition, drawing sufficient signs from the natural world to correspond to the poet’s presentiment about the king’s death. The reversal in the temporal order of events signals a belief in animism, especially in the third Chinese poem. The nuanced contrast between the poet’s presentiment and the belated news is not maintained in Rueda’s Spanish prose version. The ‘traslado’ made by Rueda y Mendoza misses, as indicated on several occasions, the cultural importance of Buddhist imagery and references to premonition. These two Chinese cultural markers played important roles in the first phase of the Sino-European cultural translation concerning Chinese thought. Both Dolors Folch and Xiao Yin have amply demonstrated the existence and circulation of Chinese books on those two topics in Manila.Footnote ⁵¹ Rueda y Mendoza was not alone in his omissions. For instance, the Dominican friar Juan Cobo, whom Rueda y Mendoza mentions in his report, had great difficulty in finding ways to accommodate these seemingly pagan beliefs in his translations of Chinese literature and thought in the 1590s.Footnote ⁵²

To conclude, this article provides sufficient examples within poetic production to demonstrate that Europe’s impacts on Manila’s life were not one-sided. The Spaniards’ efforts to de-Sinicise the Chinese through evangelism and colonialism went together with Chinese settlers’ efforts to assimilate their cultural heritage with their new political, economic, and cultural surroundings, which, to a certain extent, Sinicised the Europeans. During the period of 1593–1622, despite military confrontations, Spaniards seemed to have a rather tolerant attitude towards the Chinese in terms of their use of the Chinese language, celebrating traditional festivities, and even publicly worshipping Chinese religious idols. All the poems discussed in this article show the level of accommodation from the Spaniards to the linguistic and cultural comforts of the Chinese. In Rueda’s manuscript, the existence of a strong Chinese heritage can be found in the constant references to Chinese administrative systems, ethical values, and Buddhist philosophy in the poems written by Chinese to mourn the death of Philip III. Despite the Spanish colonial administration’s military violence and the missionaries’ ardent effort to evangelise the Chinese population in Manila, Chinese culture, religion, and beliefs were not simply subservient to the Christian ones; instead, they showed the power of reverse diffusion and incredible influence on their counterpart. This is most evident in the references to Buddhist philosophy, Chinese cosmology, and other oddities in the Chinese poems, such as divination, animism, and illumination.