Race, Massacre, and Resurrection in Casaysay - Repatriating a Lost Library of the Spanish Pacific

Race, Massacre, and Resurrection in Caysasay

By Christina Lee

The spring-fed well was where two women saw the reflection of the Virgin of Caysasay, is now known as the Miraculous Well of Sta. Lucia. Juan Imbin helped build the protective arch. He was found under it after his resurrection.

The case at hand is an ecclesiastical investigation that validated a miracle performed by Our Lady of Caysasay, an image of the Immaculate Conception located in Caysasay, near Taal, not far from Manila.¹ More specifically, the miracle involves Our Lady of Caysasay’s revival or resuscitation of Juan Imbin, a Chinese migrant who had been executed in the Chinese massacre of 1639 in the Taal region.² This case is invaluable because it is one of very few extant documents that manifest the voice of Chinese migrants in the Philippines during the period of early Spanish rule. Unlike any of the other texts, which appeared in the form of communal petitions, this investigation gives us the rare opportunity to hear the voice of an individual Chinese migrant in a sustained manner.³ Juan Imbin’s miracle investigation, to my knowledge, is the only extant source that voices the story of the massacre from the point of view of the Chinese who were targeted by the order of extermination as well as the Tagalogs and Spaniards who were compelled to carry out the killings. The investigation was officially initiated on January 8, 1640, and concluded a month later, on February 18, 1640.⁴ This means that the investigation was conducted while thousands of Chinese migrants were still being killed and massacred elsewhere in the outskirts of Manila, especially in the region of Laguna de Bay.

yMap from 1741 showing Taal Volcano in the province of Batangas erupting. Caysasay, Taal is between the lake and the outer bay, to the east of the river outlet.

Historical context of the Document

The Chinese merchants and migrant workers, known as Sangleys, began to migrate in large numbers from the southern coast of China, especially the Fujian province, to the lowlands of Luzon and the Visayan islands with the opening of Manila as a permanent trading port in 1571.⁵ The Spanish galleon that arrived from Acapulco on most years lured Chinese merchants with its large shipments of silver from Mexico and Perú, which the Spaniards traded for Chinese silk, porcelain, precious stones, and spices from different parts of the Asia Pacific.⁶ Soon enough, the Chinese also found in Manila a reliable market for the sale of virtually all staples and daily necessities to the Spaniards. Chinese migrants, like Imbin, became quite skilled at learning how to fulfill the demands of the tastes of the Spanish, and made themselves indispensable as stonecutters, tailors, bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, silversmiths, silk weavers, ironworkers, and locksmiths.⁷ The Chinese were also the artisans of choice for the production of religious paintings, carvings, and sculptures. Pedro Chirino recalls that all the religious images that were placed in the first churches were produced by Chinese artisans. Bishop Salazar was so impressed with these artisans’ ability to reproduce European models that he thought that even the highly prized Flemish images would lose demand in the Philippines.⁸

As much as the Chinese merchants and migrants fulfilled the needs of missionaries and colonists, there was a tendency among the latter to view them with suspicion, contempt, and unease. While the number of Spaniards dwindled to about two thousand, the Chinese population burgeoned to up to thirty thousand in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Official decrees limited the number of Chinese residents to four thousand and then by six thousand. Notwithstanding these efforts, by the 1600s, there were up to thirty thousand Chinese residents living in Manila and the surrounding areas. Spanish officials made profits from the sale of residence permits and, when given a choice, opted for personal gain over enforcing the restrictions.⁹ Due to their significant numbers, the fear was that these “pernicious inhabitants” could ally with the Ming government or Chinese pirates, and overthrow the Spanish colony.¹⁰ As early as 1583, Salazar speaks of his Spanish peers’ anxieties about being killed in an insurgency led by the joined forces of Ming government and Philippine Chinese.¹¹

An early measure to control the movement of the migrant Chinese was to segregate them following the model of Jewish and Moorish ghettoes in medieval Iberia. Spanish authorities set up a district called the parián, which was placed outside the fortified walls of the city. Antonio de Morga, who spent eight years in Manila, first as lieutenant-governor (1595-1598) and then as a royal judge (oidor) in Manila’s court (1595-1603), echoed the dominant view. In his Sucesos de la Islas Filipinas [Events in the Philippine Islands] (1609), he disparaged the Chinese’s obsessive concern for only their immediate physical needs and asserted that despite their intelligence, they were idolaters, prone to homosexuality, and averse to true conversion. For Morga, the Chinese were naturally deceitful and untrustworthy because they were not ruled by any moral law and did not possess a conscience. Resounding the myth that homosexuality did not exist in the Philippine Islands in the pre-Hispanic period, he complains that the natives were “touched” with the unspeakable sin with the arrival of the Chinese because they “are given to this sin […] as it is well known.”¹²

Parián, a Chinese Settlement and Marketplace, in 18th-Century Manila. Juan Ravenet, 1789–1794, Malaspina Expedition, Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa

Juan Imbin was one of the baptized Chinese who was granted exceptional permission to live outside of the parián, pay lower taxes, marry native women, and be temporarily exempt from compulsory labor and tributes. These incentives appeared to have worked to some extent because the number of Chinese baptisms increased. In order to keep the converted Chinese away from their unconverted fellows, special districts were created, such as Binondo and Santa Cruz. Nonetheless, many of the Chinese lived outside the assigned districts due to labor demands. We learn, for instance, in Imbin’s miracle investigation, that some unconverted Chinese were living around the town of Taal because they were needed for construction projects. Stonemasons, like Imbin, were likely to be found all over the lowlands of Luzon where they were needed for building and maintaining houses, hospitals, monasteries, and churches. Salazar mentions that Chinese stonemasons were diligent, hardworking, and efficient while demanding low compensation. Chinese construction workers also mastered the production of a special lime made of local coral stones and the shells of large oysters abundant in the area.¹³ Imbin’s work in Caysasay was representative of what came to be known as Chinese stonemasonry. ¹⁴

Our Lady of Caysasay is an example of early stonmasonry in the Philippines, dating from 1639 and repaired many times over the centuries.

The Chinese migrant who ignites the investigation of the miracle of Our Lady of Caysasay is identified as Juan Imbin. To the surprise of the residents of Taal and neighboring areas, Imbin appears on the grounds of the church of Caysasay four days after he had been executed by Spanish-led forces and declares: “My name is Juan Imbin, and I am one of the Chinese who was killed at the fort [of Taal].”¹⁵ Speaking through a bilingual Chinese translator, Imbin gives the following testimony in the following order. He had worked in the church of Our Lady of Caysasay, as a stonemason for about three years. He had built a vault over the “sacred” spring near the church, and he had been in the process of cutting some stones to build a fence in the backyard of the church at the time he was captured and later executed along twenty-eight other Chinese.

Representation of the massacres of 1603 in the Bahay Tsinoy Museum, Intramuros, Manila. Photo by Diego Javier Luis

Imbin claims that he was woken up by the Castilian Juan de Cabrera, who tied his hands and took him to the Fort of Bombon [Taal]. At the fort, his hands were re-bound on a pole that was placed on his neck and shoulders and was kept in the prison with the other Chinese, who were physically restrained in the same fashion. On the next day, at around five in the afternoon, the mayor of the province (of Balayan), [Diego Maldonado Bonal], told the Chinese imprisoned at the fort that they were all going to die “because they had the order from the Señor Governor of these islands that they should be killed due to the uprising of the Sangleys.”¹⁶

**Detail of the statue** of Our Lady of Caysasay

Imbin stated that he gave confession to the priest and then entrusted himself to Our Lady Mary of Caysasay, pleading that she release him from death because he had served in her church for such a long time. He was then removed from the fort and, with a neck brace and his hands still bound, escorted to a nearby shore. Once he arrived at the shore, he saw the scattered corpses of the Chinese who had been led out of the fort before him. Imbin then kneeled and lowered his head. A native man struck his neck with a machete and he lost consciousness. But that night, Imbin recalled that he felt as if he had awakened from a dream in which he found himself at sea on top of a white leaf. He then saw a little girl [niña pequeña] the size of the statue of Our Lady of Caysasay, who was very resplendent and was pulling the leaf [on which he was lying] towards the shore. The little girl told him that he should return to Caysasay to continue his construction labor at the church. When he replied that he did not know how to get there, she guided him towards the town of Bombon [Taal]. He lost consciousness for a third time. Upon waking again, Imbin saw that the girl was floating in the air as she was pulling him through the Bombon river and then down a hill to finally place him next to the vault of the sacred spring in Caysasay. He was found and rescued by a native man who had gone to the spring to fetch some water.

"The little girl told him that he should return to Caysasay to continue his construction labor at the church. When he replied that he did not know how to get there, she guided him towards the town of Bombon [Taal]. He lost consciousness for a third time. Upon waking again, Imbin saw that the girl was floating in the air as she was pulling him through the Bombon river and then down a hill to finally place him next to the vault of the sacred spring in Caysasay. He was found and rescued by a native man who had gone to the spring to fetch some water."

— Juan Imbin testimony, 1639
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The nineteen witnesses who testified in this case were composed of twelve Tagalogs and seven Spaniards. Both Spaniards and Tagalogs described the order to kill all the Chinese in Taal and surrounding areas as the direct mandate of the governor of the islands. Unprompted, all of the witnesses who had been involved in the slaughter repeated some variant of the statement that the order from the governor was to kill and slit the throats of all of the Chinese, Christians and non-Christians, in this province. They expressed remorse for taking part of the cold-blooded killing of the Chinese. In fact, many of the witnesses said that Imbin had been an exemplary Christian and a devout follower of Our Lady. Given the sparse numbers of Chinese living in the region of Taal, we also assume that the soldiers recognized the identities of the other twenty-eight Chinese laborers they had killed. The Chinese had not presented a problem for the residents of Caysasay and Taal, so for their Tagalog and Spanish neighbors who knew the condemned Chinese, the order could have been perceived to be unjustified. A Tagalog witness by the name of Francisco Magpiguil, who had not been involved in the massacre, described the event as an outside attack. From Magpiguil’s point of view, Juan de Cabrera was an intruder who forcefully entered Caysasay in order to take their Chinese and for an insurrection in which they had not been involved. ¹⁷

What was presupposed in Our Lady of Caysasay’s miracle was that the killing of Imbin—and possibly of other Chinese—had been an error. To tell the story of the miracle was an implicit way of expressing one’s disapproval of the Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera’s project of ethnic cleaning. In short, the miracle that revived Imbin proved to the Spaniards and the Tagalogs that the order to indiscriminately kill all the Chinese had failed to render justice. For the devotees of Our Lady of Caysasay, the miracle called attention to the significance of their Virgin and garnered greater devotion to the shrine. To the Tagalogs in particular, the miracle also validated their belief in the healing properties of the spring water, whether they attributed it to the power of our Lady of Caysasay, to the numinous characteristic of the spring itself, or to both. ¹⁸

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