SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE
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Philippines was a colony within a colony, being financed and administered not from Madrid but by the government of Nueva España in Mexico. The islands produced little except small quantities of wax, ginger, cinnamon and gold, and the entire Spanish military and administrative establishment had therefore to be subsidised from Mexico. Apart from the missionaries, who were scattered fairly widely over the archipelago and later became the principal landowners in the Philippines, there were no Spanish settlements of any consequence outside Manila and the colony's sole economic—as opposed to spiritual—justification was the existence of Manila, which therefore grew rapidly and soon became the metropolis of the whole archipelago. Its excellent harbour facilities and its proximity to the rich rice-producing hinterland of central Luzon had made it a natural centre for government and commerce in the first place. By 1650 the population of the Spanish walled city of Intramuros and the suburbs where the Chinese and Filipinos lived was about 42,000.
For about 200 years the Manila galleon sailing between Manila and Acapulco in Mexico was the economic mainstay of the Spanish colony in the Philippines. The galleon trade was based on the exchange of Chinese silks, for which there was an almost limitless demand in Mexico, and Mexican silver, for which, as we have seen, there was an equally insatiable demand in China.
To the galleon trade the substantial Chinese immigration into the Philippines, which has significantly altered the ethnic composition of the Filipinos, must also be attributed. Already by the 1580s the Sangleys, as the Chinese settlers were called, had been assigned a separate quarter of the city—the Parian or market place—which soon became the commercial centre of Manila. The Chinese rapidly gained a virtual monopoly of retail business in the city and dominated the craft trades. The galleons also brought to the Philippines the clergy needed for the propagation of Christianity in the islands and many new crops and animals from the New World, including maize, cattle, goats and horses.18
The voyage across the Pacific was made almost annually from the foundation of Manila and in 1593 was regulated at two ships a year from Acapulco to Manila. This pattern was maintained more or less continuously right up till the end of Spanish rule in Mexico. Very large ships were used for the voyage; vessels of up to 1000 tons are recorded from 1614,19
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