Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese

Phillip B. Guingona

doi:10.1017/9781009359207.002

1 - Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese

Filipinos in Shanghai

from Part I - Mirrored Diasporas

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2023

Phillip B. Guingona

Show author details

Phillip B. Guingona: Affiliation:
Nazareth University, New York

Book contents

Summary

“Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese” situates the sojourning communities in their respective cities. This chapter highlights the precarious but important position Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai found themselves in, contrasting their lives with those of privileged colonizers, like the British, French, and Japanese in Shanghai; sub-imperial agents, like Sikh and Vietnamese police across the British and French Empires; and Asian settler colonists, like Japanese and Chinese migrants in Hawai’i. The first section explores Filipino contributions to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, comparing their willingness to defend the city with Chinese participation in Philippine revolutionary moments. The second section follows the steamships that linked the two cities and sojourning communities to explore how Chinese people supported one another and navigated exclusionist policies to establish themselves in Manila. Both sections dive into the demographics of the communities, examining how skewed gender ratios and mixed marriages impacted families and individuals. This chapter pioneers the bilateral model that centers Chinese and Filipino actors in the history of Asia that ensuing chapters adopt.

Keywords

migration Shanghai Manila Shanghai Volunteer Corps census

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: China and the Philippines
A Connected History, c. 1900–50
, pp. 29 - 43

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009359207.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023
Creative Commons: This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

1 Shanghai’s Filipinos and Manila’s Chinese Filipinos in Shanghai

In 1885, two unnamed “Manilamen” were assaulted by “lekin runners,” or Qing-government-sanctioned opium tax collectors, in the International Settlement in Shanghai. In response, a Scottish and a British member of the Shanghai Municipal Council exchanged letters with the German Senior Consul discussing whether this intrusion of the runners into the International Settlement breached the Treaty of Tianjin, one of the unequal treaties signed nearly thirty years beforehand. The Scot, who chaired the Council, noted that the presence of Chinese opium tax collectors and “a number of rowdies” created “serious ill-feeling and resentment.”Footnote ¹

The tone of the letters is telling. Two Filipinos, one of whom had his arm broken, were at the center of the assault, yet the letter carried a sense of bureaucratic apathy. The Filipinos were there, yet for the Council members, diplomats, and tax collectors alike, they appeared more like rhetorical devices to test the limits of the law than actual humans. Perhaps the lekin runners felt they had more leeway to enforce their sovereignty over fellow Asians, while the Municipal Council members felt conflicted on where to draw the line on “foreign” privilege in the international city.Footnote ² Council members eventually decided to ban lekin runners in the International Settlement altogether, but by the time they came to that decision, the Filipinos had faded from the conversation and the historical record.

The ethereal presence of Filipinos in these letters resembles the depiction of Filipinos in later histories of Shanghai. Filipinos sometimes appear in history monographs or research articles, but always in the background, never the center, and often voiceless. In some ways, this is understandable because many records of Filipino lives are difficult to trace, but the elision of the community by historians has largely moved from the realm of accidental oversight to subconscious erasure. Before addressing the erasure of Filipinos from Shanghai history, however, we will first restore that history.

City residents created the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (Figure 1.1), whose mobilization exercise began this chapter, in 1853 in response to the threat of the Taiping Civil War spilling over into the city.Footnote ³ Although Filipinos had served in mercenary armies around Shanghai during that time, the official Philippine Platoon of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was not founded until 1927. The platoon transformed into a full company of 100 soldiers five years later.Footnote ⁴ The creators of the Volunteer Corps envisioned an international organization that would mobilize during times of duress, coordinate with the Shanghai Municipal Police, and defend the city until foreign powers had time to send in their regular navies and armies.Footnote ⁵ At its maximum strength, the Corps boasted twenty-seven companies consisting of English, American, Russian, Japanese, Jewish, Chinese, Portuguese, and Filipino soldiers.Footnote ⁶

Figure 1.1

Members of the Philippine Company, Shanghai Volunteer Corps

The Shanghai Municipal Council activated the Shanghai Volunteer Corps on twenty-five occasions, but two mobilizations loom large over the others.Footnote ⁷ The first occurred during the Taiping Civil War and the second in response to the 1932 Japanese invasion of the Zhabei district of the city, also known as the January 28 Incident. This brief preview of World War II in Zhabei served as a catalyst for the conversion of the Philippine Platoon into a full company. Though the company suffered from similar recruitment issues as other companies during the Great Depression, it retained enough members to stay intact until the dissolution of the Corps in 1942 .Footnote ⁸

While Filipinos made up only one of the twenty-seven companies, their eager participation in mobilization exercises, Corps parades, and annual rifle competitions made them a visible presence in the cosmopolitan city. Historian of the Corps I. I. Kounin relates how Filipino “keenness is not confined to parades,” noting, “Filipino volunteers have won many honors on the rifle range.”Footnote ⁹ Newspapers corroborated this success, reporting on Filipino victories in individual and group competitions of the Municipal Challenge Cup, Trueman Cup, and Durban Cup.Footnote ¹⁰ Their precision on the rifle range likely gained them some measure of respect. In an era when military power reflected well on the general prosperity of a country and its people, the Filipino volunteers earned social capital through their martial displays on the firing range.

If we take a brief detour to the Philippines to preview the next section in this chapter, we find that many Chinese living there, like their Filipino counterparts in Shanghai, volunteered for military service, fighting in the Philippine wars against Spain, the United States, and Japan.Footnote ¹¹ Jose Ignacio Paua, who was perhaps the most famous Chinese volunteer, reportedly recruited 3,000 Chinese fighters to fight in the 1896 revolution against Spain.Footnote ¹² According to historian Richard T. Chu, however, most Chinese “seem to have taken a wait-and-see attitude” during the revolution.Footnote ¹³ Chinese in the Philippines took a more proactive role during World War II. Japan, which invaded the Philippines in 1942 in the middle of their eight-year war with China, targeted Chinese political activists in the archipelago, causing many to go underground, where they split into left- and right-leaning guerilla movements.Footnote ¹⁴

The Filipino volunteers in China and the Chinese volunteers in the Philippines demonstrated a willingness to join in the collective protection of their new ecosystems. While the skeptic would be correct to point out that the fighter-volunteers also defended their own interests when taking up arms, this observation does not detract from the overarching contributions of the volunteer fighters.Footnote ¹⁵ Ultimately, they made the choice to fight. As a result, unlike the “sub-imperial” Sikh soldiers and officers, who became “a surrogate target for Chinese resentment of Euro-American imperialism,” Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai, as volunteers, largely avoided direct association with white and Japanese imperial power.Footnote ¹⁶

In some ways, however, the participation of Filipinos in the defense of China and the participation of Chinese in defense of the Philippines is obscured in historiography and popular memory.Footnote ¹⁷ In his groundbreaking article on the Chinese Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, for example, Xu Tao does not mention the Philippine Company despite their sharing many commonalities with the Chinese Company. Members of the Chinese and Philippine companies had to overcome racial discrimination and prove their worth through physical displays of aptitude.Footnote ¹⁸ Yung Li Yuk-wai, in her work on Chinese mobilizations against Japan in the Philippines during the Second World War, noted how she had to work against stereotypes that depicted Chinese “not just as grasping and disloyal, but as essentially cowardly.”Footnote ¹⁹

“Huaqiao warriors” in the Philippines and Filipino Corpsmen in Shanghai did not belong to an overarching imperial mission, and, as a result, did not appear consistently in any specific archive. In the gardens of historical records, they are visible for all to see, but without labels, historians have trouble identifying them.Footnote ²⁰ By contrast, historians have traced in some detail the contributions of Indians in the “British world.”Footnote ²¹ Even if Filipinos and Chinese acted in their own interest when volunteering to defend their host countries, they were clearly not furthering the goals of Chinese or Philippine empires, which sets them apart from Sikh, Vietnamese, Javanese, and other Asian imperial migrants.

If Filipinos were not traveling to Shanghai as sub-imperial agents or colonizers, why did they uproot themselves and move to the city? There is no simple answer. Their participation in the Volunteer Corps hints at their visibility in and relationship with the city, but it does not divulge their reasons for coming. It turns out that some Filipinos, like the Russian and Jewish refugees who began to crowd the city by the 1930s, came as political refugees from the wars for independence at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ²² Others just traveled to the city on vacation, like Mrs. Marcos Roces, Isabel Roces, and Ontonia Roces of the famous media mogul family.Footnote ²³ Dr. Riego de Dios, a registered physician, came to Shanghai to practice.Footnote ²⁴ Another Filipino operated a casino that served the Filipino community in the city.Footnote ²⁵

The brothers Jose, Vicente, and Julian Cobarrubias worked for an American import–export firm. At least one of the brothers also volunteered for the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. Vicente Alobog owned a hat store on Nanjing Road near what would become the Philippine Consulate in 1947.Footnote ²⁶ Captain Honorio Evangelista, the leader of the Philippine Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, served as the city’s sole Filipino veterinarian.Footnote ²⁷ Other “Manilamen” worked on vessels that prowled the Yangtze.Footnote ²⁸ In other words, as historian Gregorio F. Zaide observes, “Filipinos went to China in search of commercial profits, new homes, and adventure.”Footnote ²⁹

In many ways, Honorio Evangelista, Riego de Dios, Vicente Alobog, and other Filipinos lived uniquely Shanghai stories. Shanghai – the “demon capital,” “paradise of adventurers,” “pleasure capital,” and “Paris of the Orient” – was a vibrant metropolis and open port known for cultural innovation, leading universities, student and worker activism, industrial production, and capital flows.Footnote ³⁰ It was no accident that Filipinos decided to establish roots in the city. Like many cities at the time, Shanghai contained sharp contrasts, with countless residents living in dire poverty while others commuted in gold-plated sedans.Footnote ³¹ The city’s diverse industries, including construction and entertainment, attracted all types of people.Footnote ³² Filipinos, like the city’s Russians, Sikhs, Jews, Americans, Portuguese, and Japanese, leveraged their talents to carve out a community, becoming one of the largest foreign contingents in the megacity.Footnote ³³

Determining the overall population of Filipinos in Shanghai in the early twentieth century is a daunting task because they had no consulate until 1947 and no Philippine imperial archive to accumulate their records afterward. According to the official census of the International Settlement, 382 Filipinos lived in the city in 1930.Footnote ³⁴ But censuses are capricious creatures. Recent debates about the categorization of people of Southwest Asian or North African descent in the United States hint at the uncertainty involved in categorizing and counting people.Footnote ³⁵ Uncertainty grows during periods of greater racial and political malleability like in the early twentieth century when competing and overlapping ethno-nationalist movements cropped up across the world.

Moving beyond the census only muddies the waters. Although a period guidebook, All about Shanghai, registered zero Filipino residents in the French Concession, the Concession hosted a “Manila Road,” and Philippine Consul General Mariano Ezpeleta reported numerous Filipino residents in the former Concession in 1947.Footnote ³⁶ Estimating the aggregate population of Filipinos in Shanghai in 1947, Ezpeleta wrote, “The Filipinos number over one thousand.”Footnote ³⁷ In fact, his first major task as Consul General was to do what the British, Japanese, French, and Americans leaders in the city had felt little incentive to do when they ran the city – track down and properly document Filipinos.

Tallying the Filipino population no doubt proved difficult for Ezpeleta considering that many Filipinos in the city had not registered marriages or births, while those who had registered often did so with the incorrect consulate.Footnote ³⁸ If Ezpeleta’s number of 1,000 is accurate, though, then the number of Filipinos in the city approached the French and German communities, both of which totaled around 1,400 residents in 1935.Footnote ³⁹ Considering the Philippine Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps had nearly 100 members, pinning the overall population at above or around 1,000 does not seem far-fetched.

While censuses are problematic, they can still reveal some telling information. According to the 1935 census, for instance, reflecting the general pattern in Shanghai, males accounted for 63 percent of the adult Filipino population in the International Settlement, with 169 men and 99 women.Footnote ⁴⁰ Curiously, the census revealed a similar imbalance with Filipino children, with seventy-one boys and forty-eight girls, which might suggest that families sent daughters back to the Philippines or removed them through some other means. The gender skew of the adult population mirrored global patterns during this era of “proletarian mass migrations.”Footnote ⁴¹ Anecdotal evidence suggests that some Filipinos found local partners.Footnote ⁴² Captain Honorio Evangelista of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, for example, married Shanghai native Nancy Ting Evangelista, who unfortunately left a sparse paper trail.Footnote ⁴³

Though likely an exaggeration, according to Consul General Ezpeleta, “most Filipinos married Chinese girls.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This situation no doubt created the same types of legal uncertainties that confronted Chinese–Filipino couples in the Philippines, where Filipino women could lose their citizenship or American national status by marrying a Chinese national. In Shanghai, where the Municipal Mixed Court and separate national courts and consulates complicated jurisdiction and jurisprudence, as we saw with the case of the Filipinos and lekin runners at the start of this chapter, cases regarding disappearance, divorce, and domestic violence with mixed families must have been complicated and contentious.Footnote ⁴⁵

Legal ambiguities aside, children of mixed families appear to have faced issues of identity and belonging. One mixed Filipino-Chinese lad in Shanghai, for instance, felt obligated to prove he was truly a Filipino when acting as a trilingual translator for visiting Filipinos. Consul General Ezpeleta assured Filipino readers of his memoir that the young man participated in Filipino social gatherings and was “one of us.”Footnote ⁴⁶

To move beyond the surface and dig out topics like wages, community, and family, we will utilize the records of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, but before we continue with the Filipino experience, let us hop aboard a steamer and take a closer look at the lives of Chinese in the Philippines.

Chinese in Manila

What is currently a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Shanghai-Pudong Airport to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila was a three- to four-day voyage in the 1930s. Though it might seem like an endless journey by today’s impatient standards, back then it was a breeze. By contrast, it required at least three weeks to travel to Europe or the United States from either city. Xiamen to Luzon is even closer, measuring only seven hundred miles as the bird flies, or about the same distance as New York to Chicago. As historian Andrew Wilson observes, “steaming from Xiamen to Manila was perhaps as mundane as my morning commute and probably carried about as much political consequence.”Footnote ⁴⁷ More important than distance, however, is connectedness, and multiple lines from several steamship companies linked Shanghai, Xiamen, and Manila (Figure 1.2).

Entrepreneurs catered to passenger, post, and commercial transportation needs in Asian waters. The Dollar Steamship Company, founded by American businessman Robert Dollar, ran several passenger liners from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Manila.Footnote ⁴⁸ Five main Dollar Steamship routes served American imperial and business interests, and two of them, the Round the World and Trans-Pacific lines, connected Shanghai and Manila.Footnote ⁴⁹ Competitors from Russia, Japan, and Canada also plied the Shanghai–Manila route. In other words, China and the Philippines were bound by the “helix of imperial and global power,” as historian Antoinette Burton theorizes in a different context, and this helix brought Chinese to Manila just as it brought Filipinos to Shanghai.Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 1.2

Route of the world-famous president liners

Like Shanghai, “Manila was one of the world’s most spectacular emporia with cosmopolitan sensibilities and a genuinely global outlook.”Footnote ⁵¹ A thrice-colonized city as opposed to a co-colonized city like Shanghai, it also absorbed foreign populations and new ideas. Through the early Maynila sultanate, Spanish colonial period, First Republic, and American colonial period, one factor remained constant in the city: a sizable and aspiring Chinese community. Yet while the Chinese community has received deserved if uneven scholarly attention, the city itself “is a place remarkably deficient of comprehensive urban historical analysis.”Footnote ⁵² Whereas Shanghai flourishes in a well-fertilized field of scholarship, Manila has weltered in the dusty margins of obscurity.Footnote ⁵³

When Manila appears in historical scholarship, it often fills the role of a trade waystation or an axis of conflict. Many scholars, for instance, have tracked the famed Manila galleons along their route between Acapulco and Manila.Footnote ⁵⁴ This highly profitable and surprisingly durable luxury route budded when what Spanish officials called “the China Enterprise” – a euphoric dream of Spanish conquest and Christianization of China – came to a rapid and inglorious end, and Spanish officials in Manila instead became increasingly reliant on the growing Chinese community in the city to supply luxury goods for new and old Spain.Footnote ⁵⁵ Chinese traders engaging in the lucrative “triangular trade” between China, Japan, and Manila, meanwhile, viewed the archipelago as a reliable port, if not a promised land.Footnote ⁵⁶

The stable profits of the Manila trade ensured that Chinese would continue to sojourn there throughout the Spanish colonial period despite numerous obstacles placed by Chinese and Spanish authorities. The Spaniards implemented a long-standing tripartite policy of taxation, control, and conversion.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1581, only ten years after Miguel López de Legazpi first set foot in the already-thriving port, the fourth governor general, following a new global pattern of segregation, established the segregated Parián neighborhood in Manila, requiring non-Christian Chinese to reside within its borders. For many centuries afterward, Chinese lived in segregated communities in the Parián and Binondo neighborhoods of Manila.Footnote ⁵⁸ Together, these neighborhoods served as the fulcrum for trade and specialized industries in Manila and beyond.Footnote ⁵⁹

Throughout the Spanish colonial period, the Chinese maintained a tenuous relationship with Spanish authorities. With the China dream dead and decayed for Spaniards, the Philippine dream of Chinese people dominated the relationship. However, Spaniards feared the influential, connected, and sizable Chinese community, which had quickly grown to outnumber theirs. Periodic pogroms and expulsion orders that threatened the foundations of the Chinese community defined the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Chinese feared the arbitrary justice and reactionary blindsides of Spanish authorities, but they consistently reestablished themselves after pogroms despite staggering casualty figures, such as the estimated 23,000 who perished in 1603.Footnote ⁶¹

To compensate for their insecurity and uncertainty as non-colonizing and non-native members of the Manila community, Chinese turned to numerous strategies, including organizing the community through the Chamber of Commerce and cabecilla, or community leader; establishing and invoking hometown or qiaoxiang (僑鄉) ties; maintaining lines of credit with powerful Spaniards; and fostering extra-consanguine family ties such as compadrazgo, or co-parenthood and padrinazgo, or godparenthood.Footnote ⁶² Like their Filipino counterparts in Shanghai, to whom we will return in the next chapter, in times of duress, Chinese people came together as a community to help one another.

Much of the community cohesion stemmed from shared linguistic and hometown ties, with most residents hailing from a few towns in southern Fujian, or Minnan. Scholars have noted how these Hokkien speakers became “undisputed leaders in seafaring enterprises.”Footnote ⁶³ In this regard, one could argue that they shared more in common with seafaring “Manilamen” than their Chinese peers.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet for all of its advantages as a seafaring region, southern Fujian faced the dual dilemma of severe shortage of arable land and a bumper population.Footnote ⁶⁵ Fortunately for them, the Philippines, like much of Southeast Asia before the twentieth century, remained comparatively underpopulated. This led many Fujianese to try their luck in Manila, which Richard T. Chu describes as a “magnet to many Minnanese.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Just like today, Manila served as the economic, cultural, and political center of the Philippines. Local Chinese opened a branch of the Protect the Emperor Society, a famous Qing loyalist organization, in Manila in 1899.Footnote ⁶⁷ Likewise, nationalist-minded activists established the first Philippine branch of the Tongmenghui, Sun Yatsen’s (Sun Zhongshan 孫中山) anti-Manchu revolutionary organization, in Manila right before the revolution.Footnote ⁶⁸ As we will explore in more detail in Chapter 6, leading community members also established the Philippine Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the China Banking Corporation, and other prominent Chinese business ventures in Manila. As historian Edgar Wickberg notes in his work, “Unlike other parts of the archipelago, Manila had a Chinese population that was constantly being replenished.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Like Filipinos in Shanghai, Chinese in Manila mingled and interacted widely with the city’s diverse denizens, forming business partnerships, lasting friendships, and intimate relationships.Footnote ⁷⁰ According to censuses, the gender ratio skewed even further out of proportion for the Chinese community in the Philippines than it did for the Filipino community in Shanghai, with only 194 women out of a total of 66,000 in 1886 and 3,098 women out of 43,802 in 1918.Footnote ⁷¹ While this data, as mentioned earlier in the Filipino case, was almost certainly incomplete, the official tally is quite shocking for its implications on family life.

With fewer than 100,000 Chinese residents for most of the American colonial period, and only half of them residing in Manila, the Chinese community remained more compact than comparable Chinese or Indian communities in Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁷² So, while the Chinese population in the Philippines, and in Manila in particular, was significantly larger than the Filipino population in Shanghai, which we pinned at approximately 1,000, perhaps Chinese in Manila had more in common with Shanghai’s Filipinos than appears at first glance. If we consider the overall population of China, which was approaching 500 million, and the overall population of the Philippines, which had just passed 10 million, the emigration numbers, or outward flow of migrants, were similar percentage-wise but clearly on a different scale.Footnote ⁷³

With a gender ratio of 92.9 percent male to 7.1 percent female in 1918, there must have been many cases of underreporting, sojourning, or informal relationships. As Richard T. Chu notes, the 7.1 percent tally in the census also included Filipino women who married male Chinese nationals because citizenship became linked with the husband after the extension of exclusionary policies to the Philippines.Footnote ⁷⁴ On the flip side, this meant that if a Chinese woman were to marry a Filipino man, which was no doubt quite rare given the demographics, she would face legal limbo. A commentator in a Singaporean newspaper observed that in such cases, the Chinese woman would lose her Chinese citizenship and but could not acquire Philippine citizenship due to exclusionist laws.Footnote ⁷⁵ Lawmakers heaped these legal obstacles on Chinese people to disincentivize migration and complicate their lives, and we will explore this topic in more detail in the next chapter.

The census, which recorded a sizable mestizo or “half-breed” population, as the census labeled them, also shows a glimpse at the long history of intimate relations between Chinese and Filipinos.Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, many Filipinos with Chinese heritage did not even report their Chinese background to census takers. The well-known author José Rizal, whose family famously rejected their Chinese heritage, supposedly for tax purposes, is a case in point.Footnote ⁷⁷ Church records and anecdotal evidence generally corroborate the long history of intermarriage.Footnote ⁷⁸ In other words, Chinese in the Philippines, like their Filipino peers in Shanghai, despite the many societal pressures and legal barriers designed to hinder such unions, adjusted to the new soil in these cosmopolitan cities by forming intimate partnerships .

Unlike the Filipino community in Shanghai, the Chinese community had clear and traceable leadership and organizational structures. Of course, these organizations sometimes masked underlying divisions within the community, and we will return to those divisions in Part III. By the twentieth century, the Philippine Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which theoretically only dealt with financial affairs, had replaced earlier Spanish-era institutions as the de facto community governing body.Footnote ⁷⁹ Coupled with a vibrant Chinese press, which shapes Part IV, and a semi-independent school system, which we touch upon in Part II, the Chinese community was well defined and comparably unified. This unity allowed for a quick resolution of issues, such as a 1922 incident that entangled the Chinese community in Manila and Filipino one in Shanghai.

The incident began when “news flashed from Shanghai, stating that Filipino colonists, mostly musicians and their families, who were living in that city were being maltreated by the Chinese there.”Footnote ⁸⁰ According to historian Eufronio M. Alip, Filipinos in Manila responded to this news by harassing local Chinese residents until Philippine Senator Manuel Roxas intervened to quell the riots.Footnote ⁸¹ Just as American transplants in China suffered in the anti-American exclusion-inspired riots of 1905, Chinese residents in the Philippines suffered when rumors spread regarding ill treatment toward Filipinos in China.Footnote ⁸² In other words, the Chinese and Filipino diasporas were not just similar; they were also intertwined.

Footnotes

¹ Claude Lapham, “China Needs American Bands,” Metronome (July 1936): 13.

² Vicente Villamin, letter to General Frank McIntyre, June 23, 1921, in Chinese Migrations, With Special Reference to Labor Conditions, by Chen Ta (New York: Paragon Book Gallery, 1967), 191.

³ “Shanghai Volunteer Corps,” file U1-14–953, Shanghai Municipal Archives, 35. From this point forward, I refer to the Shanghai Municipal Archives as “SMA” in the footnotes. For the extended anecdote in the introduction, I draw from two reports: “Shanghai Volunteer Corps Mobilisation Exercise,” December 16, 1934, file U1-14–953, SMA; and “Shanghai Volunteer Corps: Mobilisation Scheme,” 1937, file U1-14–806, SMA.

⁴ “Shanghai Volunteer Corps,” file U1-14–953, SMA, 35.

⁵ For more on the Shanghai Volunteer Corps at the Battle of Muddy Flats, see I. I. Kounin, Eighty Five Years of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps (Shanghai: The Cosmopolitan Press, 1938), 13–14. For more on Filipino participation in the Ever-Victorious Army, see Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr., Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 37–39; Caleb Carr, The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China (New York: Random House, 1992); and Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 238 and 328. For more on the Taiping rebellion, see Stephen Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); and Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

⁶ “Shanghai Volunteer Corps,” file U1-14–953, SMA, 38.

⁷ The story of the Filipino soldiers of the Ever-Victorious Army and their lives in China afterward has likewise not been fleshed out in any detail, and it would be a great topic for future researchers to pursue.

⁸ Engseng Ho describes this phenomenon of separating trade and state protection in Asian mobile societies as “disaggregation-reaggregation.” See Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies,” 919. Wang Gungwu refers to Chinese migrants as “merchants without empire,” and Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini describe how Chinese “third cultures” emerged to support “Chinese transnationalism.” See Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, “Introduction: Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Donald M. Nonini and Aihwa Ong (London: Routledge, 1997), 12–16; and Wang Gungwu, “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 400–421.

⁹ For more on Sikh police in Shanghai and elsewhere, see Yin Cao, From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Isabella Jackson, “The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty-Port Shanghai,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (2012): 1672–1704; and Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 102–135. English-language research on Vietnamese in Shanghai is much more limited. For a brief introduction, see Christine Cornet, “The Bumpy End of the French Concession and French Influence in Shanghai, 1937–1946,” in In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai Under Japanese Occupation, ed. Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 265. For more on “martial races,” see Heather Streets-Salter, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

¹⁰ For more on settler colonialism, see Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2005), 2–8; Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 3–8; and Sidney Xu Lu, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 7–10.

¹¹ See, for instance, Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013); and Eric Tagliacozzo, “An Urban Ocean: Notes on the Historical Evolution of Coastal Cities in Greater Southeast Asia,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 6 (2007): 911–932.

¹² Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 15. See also Elizabeth Sinn and Christopher Munn, eds., Meeting Place: Encounters Across Cultures in Hong Kong, 1841–1984 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017).

¹³ Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts,” 914–917.

¹⁴ Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17. See also James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–338; Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Chinatowns and Borderlands: Inter-Asian Encounters in the Diaspora,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012), 425–451; and Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

¹⁵ For more on “imperial formations,” see Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007). For more on imperial or sub-imperial “spheres,” see Robert J. Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: The Definition, Delineation and Dynamics of the Indian Sphere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Joshua Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino–Japanese Relations in Space and Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

¹⁶ For more on competition, copying, and entanglement, see Jeremy Adelman, “Mimesis and Rivalry: European Empires and Global Regimes,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (2015), 77–98. For inter-imperial cooperation and engagement, see Jeppe Mulich, In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia: Colonialism and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

¹⁷ For more on “new” imperial history, see Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ghosh, “AHR Forum: Another Set of Imperial Turns?” For imperial biographies and microhistories, see David R. Ambaras, Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (New York: Manchester University Press, 2006); and David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

¹⁸ See, for instance, Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Kleeman, In Transit.

¹⁹ The term Huaqiao was inspired by the story of elite Chinese families who fled to southern China during the Jin dynasty (420 CE). For more on the origin and use of the term, see Shelly Chan, Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 9–11; and Wang, The Chinese Overseas, 47 and 54. For an example of the use of Feiqiao, see “Lühu Feiqiao juxing duli qingzhu dahui 旅滬菲僑舉行獨立慶祝大會 [Shanghai Filipinos Organize Independence Celebration],” Wen you 文友 [Literature Companion] 12, no. 12 (1943), 25. In what was sure to cause confusion, some writers also referred to Chinese from the Philippines as Feiqiao.

¹ Municipal Council, Shanghai: Report for the Year Ending 31st December 1885 and Budget for the Year Ending 31st December 1886 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh Limited, 1886), 150–152.

² J. J. Keswick, the Scottish Chair of the Municipal Council, for his part, described the Filipinos as “foreigners” and “Spanish subjects”; see Municipal Council, 1885–1886, 152.

³ For a general history of the Corps, see Kounin, Eighty Five Years.

⁴ J. R. Jones, letter to the Commandant of the SVC, June 2, 1932, file U1-1–363, SMA, 86; and Kounin, Eighty Five Years, 240. See also “ Shangtuan baogao: zuzhi Feilübin dui 商團報告:組織菲律賓隊 [International Merchant Militia Report: Organization of the Philippine Company],” Shanghai gonggong zujie gongbuju gongbao 上海公共租界工部局公報 [Shanghai International Settlement Ministry of Works Gazetteer] 3, no. 23 (1932), 256.

⁵ Xu Tao, “The Chinese Corpsmen of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps,” in The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Toby Lincoln and Xu Tao (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 24.

⁶ Li Guang 李光 and Xu Tao 徐涛, “Shanghai tanshang de ‘daweiwang zhi xing’ – jindai Shanghai Wanguo shangtuan Youtai fendui yanjiu 上海滩上的 ‘大卫王之星’ – 近代上海万国商团犹太分队研究 [On the Judaic Business Group of Shanghai Volunteer Corps in Modern Shanghai],” Shilin 史林 [Historical Review] 4 (2010): 44.

⁷ For a list of mobilizations, see Shanghai Volunteer Corps Centenary Dinner held at The Royal Hongkong Yacht Club on Friday, 2nd April, 1954 (Hong Kong: Ye Oldé Printerie, 1954).

⁸ See Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, 1933, file U1-1–946, SMA, 60; Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, 1934, file U1-1–947, SMA, 50; Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, 1935, file U1-1–948, SMA, 76; and Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, 1936, file U1-1–949, SMA, 55.

⁹ Kounin, Eighty Five Years, 241.

¹⁰ “Annual Pistol Shooting,” The North-China Herald [Zilin xingqi zhoukan 字林星期周刊], May 17, 1933, 267; “The S.V.C. Annual Rifle Meetings,” The North-China Herald [Zilin xingqi zhoukan 字林星期周刊], May 9, 1934, 199; and “Results of the Annual Rifle Meeting of S.R.A.,” The North-China Herald [Zilin xingqi zhoukan 字林星期周刊], May 29, 1935, 356.

¹¹ For an overview of Chinese participation in the Philippine Revolution, see Teresita Ang See and Go Bon Juan, Ethnic Chinese in the Philippine Revolution (Manila: Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran, 1996).

¹² Eufronio M. Alip, Ten Centuries of Philippine–Chinese Relations (Manila: Alip & Sons, 1959), 46; see Teresita Ang See, Tsinoy: The Story of the Chinese in Philippine Life (Manila: Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran, 2005), 90–91; and Andrew Wilson, Ambition and Identity: Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1880–1916 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 158–162.

¹³ Richard T. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture, 1860s–1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 86.

¹⁴ Yung Li Yuk-wai, The Huaqiao Warriors: Chinese Resistance Movement in the Philippines, 1942–45 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995), 30–152.

¹⁵ Footnote Ibid., 15–30.

¹⁶ Jackson, “The Raj on Nanjing Road,” 1691. For “sub-imperial,” see Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 30–31; Blyth, The Empire of the Raj, 2–10; Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 102–135; and Anjali Gera Roy, “Band Le Gandari (Tie Up Your Bundle): Unpartitioned,” in Sikh Diaspora: Theory, Agency, and Experience, ed. Michael Hawley (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 68–69.

¹⁷ In an interesting and telling parallel, the same could be said of Korean involvement in the Japanese imperial army and navy. See Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 4 and 18.

¹⁸ Xu, “The Chinese Corpsmen,” 29–30.

¹⁹ Yung Li, The Huaqiao Warriors, ix.

²⁰ A few scholars have begun to explore “overlapping imperialisms,” “intercolonial connections,” and the “connected history of empires.” See, for example, Ballantyne and Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global; Espiritu, “Inter-Imperial Relations”; and Ghosh, “Burma–Bengal Crossings”.

²¹ See, for example, Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, eds., The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003); and Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

²² Jesus I. Yabes, ed., The Philippines in Shanghai: The Philippines–China Relations [Feilübin he Shanghai de youhao zhi lü 菲律宾和上海的友好之旅] (Shanghai: The Philippine Consulate General of Shanghai, 2005), 21. For more on the refugee communities in Shanghai, see Irene Eber, ed., Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Marcia Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

²³ “Well Known Manilans Are Sailing This Afternoon on the ‘Hoover,’” The Tribune, September 26, 1931.

²⁴ Margie Quimpo-Espino, “Octogenarian Is Insurance Industry’s Best Kept Secret,” Inquirer, July 29, 2007, http://business.inquirer.net/money/topstories/view/20070729-79280/Octogenarian-is-insurance-industrys-best-kept-secret.

²⁵ “Filipino–Spanish–Portuguese ‘Monte Carlo’ of Shanghai No More,” Philippines Free Press, September 3, 1923.

²⁶ Mariano Ezpeleta, Memoirs of an Ambassador (Quezon City: New Mercury Printing Press, 1973), 23.

²⁷ Yabes, The Philippines, 21.

²⁸ J. D. Clark, Sketches in and around Shanghai, Etc. (Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury and Celestial Empire Offices, 1894), 140–141.

²⁹ Gregorio F. Zaide, Philippine History and Civilization (Manila: Philippine Associated Publishers, 1939), 212. See also Phillip B. Guingona, “The Sundry Acquaintances of Dr. Albino Z. Sycip: Exploring the Shanghai-Manila Connections, circa 1910–1940,” Journal of World History 27, no. 1 (2016): 45–46.

³⁰ Liu Jianhui, Demon Capital Shanghai: The “Modern” Experience of Japanese Intellectuals, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Portland, ME: Merwin Asia, 2012), 5. See also Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments (London: Routledge, 2009).

³¹ For wealth and glamor, see Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Wen-Hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). For Shanghai’s underbelly, see Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

³² For Shanghai as opportunity, see Robert A. Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Lilaine Willens, Stateless in Shanghai (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2010).

³³ For more on Shanghai’s foreign communities, see Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot, eds., New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Ristaino, Port of Last Resort; and Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之, ed., Shanghai de waiguoren 上海的外国人, 1842–1949 [Foreigners in Shanghai, 1842–1949] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe 上海:上海古籍出版社, 2003).

³⁴ The Municipal Gazette, December 5, 1930, file U1-1–995, SMA, 520.

³⁵ Yousef H. Alshammari, “Why Is There No MENA Category on the 2020 US Census?” Al Jazeera, April 1, 2020, www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/mena-category-2020-census-200401114334500.html.

³⁶ For the Shanghai guidebook, see Henry J. Lethbridge, All about Shanghai: A Standard Guidebook (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36. For Manila Road, see Go Bon Juan, “Manila Road in Shanghai,” Manila Times, May 28, 2008. For Expeleta’s comments, see Ezpeleta, Memoirs of an Ambassador, 21. According to Gregorio Zaide, there was also an earlier Filipino merchant settlement across the river from the Bund in what is now Pudong. See Zaide, Philippine History and Civilization, 213.

³⁷ Ezpeleta, Memoirs of an Ambassador, 21. See also Mariano Ezpeleta, Red Shadows over Shanghai (Quezon City: Zita Publishing Corporation, 1972), 7.

³⁸ Footnote Ibid., 22.

³⁹ Lethbridge, All about Shanghai, 36.

⁴⁰ Bryna Goodman, noting that women made up only 30–36 percent of the city’s inhabitants, writes, “In the predominantly male sojourner city of Shanghai, women in public were rather exotic.” See Bryna Goodman, “The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic,” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 1 (2005): 90.

⁴¹ This is the opposite case for Filipinos and others in diaspora more recently, where women dominate. For more, see Nana Oishi, Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), esp. 50–54 and 64–66; and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2008). For “proletarian mass migrations,” see Katharine M. Donato and Donna Gabaccia, Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to Global Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), 74–95.

⁴² Tamara Loos notes that intra-Asian relationships were more numerous and visible than white European–Asian unions in Southeast Asia, and the same likely held true in China. For more on intra-Asian unions, see Tamara Loos, “A History of Sex and the State in Southeast Asia: Class, Intimacy and Invisibility,” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 1 (2008): 27–29.

⁴³ House of Representatives. Honorio Canciller and Nancy Ting Evangelista, 81st Congress, 2nd session, February 7, 1950, Report No. 1578, 1.

⁴⁴ Ezpeleta, Memoirs of an Ambassador, 23.

⁴⁵ For debates over jurisprudence in Shanghai, see Isabella Jackson, Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 136–139; and Frederic Wakeman, Jr. Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 70–72.

⁴⁶ Ezpeleta, Memoirs of an Ambassador, 23.

⁴⁷ Wilson, Ambition and Identity, 21. For more on the shrinking of distance in the age of steam, see Yrjö Kaukiainen, “Journey Costs, Terminal Costs and Ocean Tramp Freights: How the Price of Distance Declined from the 1870s to 2000,” International Journal of Maritime History 18, no. 2 (2006): 17–64.

⁴⁸ For a brief account of the S. S. Coolidge, see Peter Stone, The Lady and the President: The Life and Loss of the S. S. President Coolidge (Yarram: Oceans Enterprises, 1999).

⁴⁹ The others were transatlantic or American-only, see “Schedule No. 5: Dollar Steamship Line,” 1925–1926, Robert Dollar Papers, 69/113C, Box 21, the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA.

⁵⁰ Antoinette Burton, “Getting Outside the Global: Re-Positioning British Imperialism in World History,” in Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present, ed. Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 205. See also Frances Steel, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

⁵¹ Raquel A. G. Reyes, “Flaunting It: How the Galleon Trade Made Manila, circa 1571–1800,” Early American Studies 15, no. 4 (2017): 713.

⁵² Ian Morley, “Philippines Cities, Their History, Development, Culture, and Governance,” Journal of Urban History, 45, no. 5 (2019): 1050. Morley attempts to correct this situation with his book, Cities and Nationhood: American Imperialism and Urban Design in the Philippines, 1898–1916 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021).

⁵³ For other books that buck this trend, see Daniel Doeppers, Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); Robert Ronald Reed, Colonial Manila: The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and Cristina Evangelista Torres, The Americanization of Manila, 1898–1921 (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press Diliman, 2010).

⁵⁴ See, for example, Arturo Giráldez, The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

⁵⁵ Giráldez, The Age of Trade, 62.

⁵⁶ Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan in Manila; and Birgit M. Tremml, “The Global and the Local: Problematic Dynamics of the Triangular Trade in Early Modern Manila,” Journal of World History 23, no. 3 (September 2012): 555–586.

⁵⁷ Wickberg, The Chinese, 9.

⁵⁸ The ninth governor general established the adjacent Binondo neighborhood for Chinese converts to Catholicism. See Teresita Ang See and Richard T. Chu, “An Overview of Binondo’s History,” in Manila: Selected Papers of the 20th Annual Manila Studies Conference, July 28–29, 2011, ed. Marya Svetlana T. Camacho (Manila: Manila Studies Association, 2012), 206–228; and Eufronio M. Alip, The Chinese in Manila (Manila: National Historical Commission, 1974), 16–19.

⁵⁹ Lucille Chia, “The Butcher, the Baker, and the Carpenter: Chinese Sojourners in the Spanish Philippines and Their Impact on Southern Fujian (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006): 515–516.

⁶⁰ Chia, “The Butcher,” 510 and 515–519; see Ang See, Tsinoy, 59–62; and Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 15–19.

⁶¹ Alip, Ten Centuries, 39; and Gregorio F. Zaide, History of the Filipino People (Manila: The Modern Book Co., 1974), 65.

⁶² Richard T. Chu, Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2010); Joshua Kueh, “Adaptive Strategies of Parián Chinese: Fictive Kinship and Credit in Seventeenth-Century Manila,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 61, no. 3 (2013): 362–384; Wilson, Ambition and Identity; and Zhuang Guotu, “The Social Impact on Their Home Town of Jinjiang Emigrants’ Activities during the 1930s,” in South China: State, Culture and Social Change during the 20th Century, ed. Leo Douw and Peter Post (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996), 169–181.

⁶³ Chin-keong Ng, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast 1683–1735 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), 1.

⁶⁴ For seafaring Filipinos, see Aguilar, “Manilamen and Seafaring.”

⁶⁵ Chen Ta, Chinese Migrations, 23–28; Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 34; and Zheng Zhenman, Family Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming and Qing Fujian, trans. Michael Szonyi (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 11 and 45.

⁶⁶ Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 53.

⁶⁷ Wilson, Ambition and Identity, 164.

⁶⁸ Antonio S. Tan, The Chinese in the Philippines, 1898–1935: A Study of Their National Awakening (Quezon City: R.P. Garcia Publishing Co., 1972), 118–122.

⁶⁹ Wickberg, The Chinese, 35.

⁷⁰ Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 142.

⁷¹ Census Office of the Philippine Islands, Census of the Philippine Islands: Volume II: Population and Mortality (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1921), 15; Josephine M. T. Khu, “José Tan Sunco (Chen Guangchun 陳光純),” Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): 5; and Wickberg, The Chinese, 174.

⁷² By contrast, Adam McKeown estimated that 29 million Indians and 19 million Chinese people migrated to Southeast Asia from 1846 to 1940. See Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004): 157.

⁷³ Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 86; and Census Office, Census of the Philippine Islands, 13.

⁷⁴ Census Office, Census of the Philippine Islands, 36; and Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 333.

⁷⁵ The author described how such women would become “stateless bitter people.” See “Yu jia Feiren zhi Hua nüzi zhuyi 欲嫁菲人之華女子註意 [Chinese Women Who Want to Marry Filipinos Please Take Note],” Nan guang 南光 [Southern Light] 1, no. 4 (1928): 17. For more on this citizenship conundrum for Chinese people, see Emma Jinhua Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 80–81.

⁷⁶ Census Office, Census of the Philippine Islands, 15.

⁷⁷ Wickberg, The Chinese, 34.

⁷⁸ For more on church records, see Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 15; and Kueh, “Adaptive Strategies of Parián Chinese,” 363.

⁷⁹ The comparable Spanish-era institutions were the Gremio de Chinos, which was a type of guild, and Tribunal de los Sangleyes, which was a type of small-claims court.

⁸⁰ Alip, Ten Centuries, 47.

⁸¹ Footnote Ibid.

⁸² For the anti-American boycott, see Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Figure 1.1 Members of the Philippine Company, Shanghai Volunteer Corps

Figure 1.2 Route of the world-famous president liners

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