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BOOK REVIEWS
Iyer," a revised transcription of a UNESCO radio broadcast in April 1959. This was the origin of both the book and its title.
PHILIP SHEN
Chung Chi College
The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
THE CHINESE IN PHILIPPINE LIFE 1850-1898, Edgar Wickberg. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1965. 280 pages.
For students and scholars interested in Southeast Asian studies this is an illuminating book. It discusses the Chinese in the Philippines during the period from the date of the changed Spanish policy on the status of Chinese in 1850 to the end of Spanish rule in the Philippines in 1898.
The limited number of serious studies that have previously been made of the Chinese in the Philippines have concentrated on the problems of the twentieth-century community. However, since many important features of Philippine economy and society are traceable to developments in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this period comprises the formative years of modern Philippine economic and social life.
Professor Wickberg's book is the first exhaustive research on a period of significant change of the Chinese in the Philippines. It concentrates on their institutions, and on their relations both with their host society and with China. The fully documented book is supplemented by maps, showing Manila and other areas in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and includes reproductions of paintings, vividly showing the dress fashions of Chinese and Chinese mestizos in the mid-nineteenth century. There is a glossary of Chinese names and terms, and a comprehensive bibliography listing published works in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese, on Chinese both in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and on other topics relative to Southeast Asian studies. The sources of unpublished material used are also listed.
The book begins with a lucid narrative of the Philippine Chinese before 1850. The Chinese had early contacts with the Philippine Archipelago and were directly involved in the economic and social affairs of the Philippines long before the arrival of the
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