Manila

city · earth

Founded as a Spanish city on Manila Bay in 1571 on the site of an existing Muslim settlement, and immediately the eastern terminus of the transpacific trade. Manila was not a producer of anything the galleons carried. It was an exchange point: Chinese junks brought silk, porcelain and manufactures from Fujian on the monsoon, Spanish American silver came in from Acapulco, and the two were traded within the walls of Intramuros and the adjacent Chinese quarter. The city therefore ran on a Chinese merchant and artisan community whose presence the colonial government simultaneously depended on and feared, a tension that produced repeated massacres. Manila is the clearest demonstration that the Spanish Pacific was not a colonial enterprise in the Atlantic sense at all — it was a bullion-for-goods counter placed where the winds allowed one.