{ "id": "sangleyes-de-filipinas", "type": "entity", "name": "The law of the Sangleyes (Recopilación, libro VI, título 18)", "summary": "Thirteen laws on the Chinese of Manila: a cap of six thousand, a court of their own with appeal to the Audiencia, a ten-year tax holiday on conversion, an itemised catalogue of the bribes and swindles Spanish officials worked on Chinese ships, and an order that they be well treated — set beside the judge Antonio de Morga's account of the persecution that preceded the killing of 1603 and the hungry city that followed it.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "colonial-law", "legal-history", "philippines", "china", "migration", "trade", "spanish-empire", "human-rights" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "manila-galleon" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "reglamento-del-comercio-de-filipinas-1734" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "protector-de-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "solorzano-politica-indiana" } ], "questions": [ "Did the Chinese of Manila have legal rights under Spanish rule?", "What was the Parián of Manila?", "Was there a limit on Chinese immigration to the Philippines?", "Did Spanish law protect Chinese traders from abuse by officials?", "What happened to the Sangleyes of Manila in 1603?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "Libro VI of the Recopilación closes its run of títulos on the indigenous population with one on a foreign, largely non-Christian immigrant community: \"TÍTULO DIEZ Y OCHO. DE LOS SANGLEYES\", thirteen laws running from folio 337 to folio 341 of the second tome of the 1791 printing. Ley j, margined \"D. Felipe III en Ventosilla á 4 de Noviembre de 1606. En Madrid á 29 de Mayo de 1620. D. Felipe IIII á 31 de Diciembre de 1622\", holds that for the security of Manila the number of Chinos be very moderate and \"no exceda de seis mil, pues estos bastan para servicio de la tierra\", and complains that the Japanese of the city already pass three thousand.", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The same law names the crown's own officials as the cause of what it is trying to stop: the Chinos \"se han aumentado … por codicia de los ocho pesos, que cada uno paga por la licencia\". The governor and captain general is ordered to provide a remedy, \"teniendo consideracion á que las licencias no se dén por dinero, ni otro interes en su propio beneficio, ni de otros Ministros\", weighing only the public good, the security of the land, trade, and \"buena acogida de los extrangeros, y circunvecinos, y otras naciones, con quien se tuviere paz\". Its closing clause states the double posture exactly: those who remain are to live \"con quietud, temor, y sujecion, sin que esto sea parte para que no se les haga buen tratamiento\". Ley ij (1614, repeated 1625) puts the eight-peso licence money into the royal chest under a separate book, entered by name and description \"de forma que no pueda haber ocultacion\".", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The Sangleyes held a forum of their own. Against the attempt of the ordinary alcaldes of Manila to hear Chinese suits alongside the alcayde of the Parián, the crown (Ventosilla, 15 October 1603; El Pardo, 12 June 1614) confirmed first instance \"privativamente al Alcayde, con las apelaciones á la Audiencia\", and forbade any ordinary or commission judge — \"aunque sean Oidores de aquella Audiencia, haciendo oficio de Alcaldes del Crimen\" — to take cognisance of the civil or criminal cases of Sangleyes in first instance, or of price-postings, shop inspections and their dealings, save in a case so extraordinary that the rule must be limited.", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "Four laws work by inducement rather than command. Ley iij (Felipe II, 11 June 1594) orders that no fees be charged on the licences Chinese Christians needed to leave Manila and trade around the district, reasoning that they have no other means of livelihood and that the charge is \"muy grande impedimento, y estorbo para que otros se conviertan\". Ley iiij (San Lorenzo, 5 September 1620) directs the governor to impose no personal services on Sangleyes outside their own trade and to see them well treated, \"procurando que el buen tratamiento motive, y atrayga á otros á que se vengan á convertir\". Ley vij (Madrid, 14 June 1627) exempts converts from tribute for the first ten years, after which they pay as the natives of the Philippines do. Ley viij (San Lorenzo, 25 August 1620) would settle Chinese who marry Filipina women on vacant land as a farming town — they are \"bien exercitados\" at it, would stop dealing in provisions and the city would be safer \"aunque se aumente el número\" — and orders the governor to \"procure conservarlos, y mirar por ellos, con el cuidado que convenga\".", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "Ley x is a catalogue of what Spaniards were doing to Chinese traders, written into the law book as the reason for the law. The crown has been informed that the Sangleyes coming from China receive \"agravios, y malos tratamientos de los Españoles\": the guards set on their ships by royal officials demand bribes to let goods be landed; the ministers who go aboard to register take and skim the best merchandise, leaving what will not sell; when they say they will pay at the price the rest fetches they pay at the price of the worst; at valuation for duty they put the goods above their real worth, so the Chinese pay duty on figures the sales never reach; and the masts are taken out of their ships for use in the ships built in the islands, heavier ones given in exchange, \"que sus Navíos no los pueden sufrir, y vienen á perderse\". The stated motive for stopping this is candid: that they carry home good news of the trade, that others take a liking to coming, and that through the contact they receive Christian doctrine.", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "Three further laws show the same regime taking with one hand what it gives with the other. Ley xj (Madrid, 29 May 1619) abolishes a repartimiento by which the Chinese of Manila had to supply the president, oidores and officials of the Audiencia a fixed number of hens each week below the current price, with penalties on those who failed and the governor of the Chinos drawing as many again at that price — \"en que se les hace notable agravio\" — leaving each free to buy what he needs at what he can find. Ley xij (1627) governs the Sangleyes' own chest of three keys, into which each pays twelve reales a year for the charges of royal service, ordering that any surplus stay in it and reduce the next year's levy. Ley xiij (Madrid, 6 May 1608) forbids any vecino of Manila to keep Sangleyes in his house and bars them from sleeping inside the city, the Juez de los Extrangeros to punish breaches \"con rigor, y graves penas\".", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "Antonio de Morga, who sat on the Audiencia of Manila, describes what the títulos regulate. The Parián was \"a large closed silk-market, with many streets, at a considerable distance from the city walls, close to the river\", with a commandant of its own, his court and prison, and officials who administered justice and watched the quarter day and night; those who could not fit lived across the river at Baybay and Minondoc under the alcalde of Tondo and the Dominicans, who learned Chinese in order to work there. He records two monasteries, \"a good hospital for the cure of Sangleys\", and a separate settlement of about five hundred baptised Chinese with their houses and families. He also records the other side of the licence system: those without a trade were put aboard the returning ships for China \"with much force and pressure\" — and he calls the converts \"despicable people, restless and vicious\", whose baptism he ascribes to comfort rather than belief.", "sources": [ "morga-philippine-islands-1868" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The same witness records what the law did not prevent. In the months before the Sangley rising of 1603, Morga writes, Spaniards began \"to persecute the Sangley men by word and deed, both in the city and in the country districts\", depriving them of their property and ill-treating them, \"calling them dogs of traitors\" and telling them the governor was preparing to kill them all first; and he draws the conclusion himself — \"this alone was sufficient motive for the Chinese to find themselves in the necessity of doing what they had not thought of doing\". After the fighting, he reports, the city had neither food to eat nor shoes to wear at any price, because there were no Sangleys left to exercise the trades and bring the provisions, and the Spaniards lived in fear that a fleet would come from China \"to avenge the death of the Sangleys\"; the governor's letters to Canton and Chincheo gave an account of the outbreak \"which obliged the Spaniards to kill them\". The compilation printed in 1680 carries none of this.", "sources": [ "morga-philippine-islands-1868" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "What these sources cannot show. The título is law as gathered in 1680 and reprinted in 1791: it records what was ordered, by whom and on what date, not what was done. Nothing in it establishes how many Sangleyes lived in Manila at any date, whether the cap of six thousand was ever enforced, what the Parián court's judgments looked like, or whether the hen repartimiento stopped in 1619. The repetition itself cuts both ways: a prohibition compiled and reprinted is evidence of the practice as much as of the ban. Morga is not a neutral witness either — he was a senior officer of the government whose conduct in 1603 was at issue, and the text read here is an English translation of 1868 at one remove from his Spanish.", "sources": [ "recopilacion-indias-1791-t2", "morga-philippine-islands-1868" ], "confidence": 0.8 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Coverage of the Chinese in Spanish Manila splits into two literatures that rarely meet: the massacres, and the galleon trade. Neither quotes the law. This object gives the whole título from a digitised printing — the six-thousand cap and the eight-peso licence the crown blames its own officials for selling, the Parián's separate first-instance court with appeal to the Audiencia, the ten-year tribute exemption, the ban on charging fees that deterred conversion, and above all ley x, which lists the bribes, the skimmed cargoes, the inflated valuations and the swapped masts as the crown's own account of how its ministers treated Chinese shipping — and sets against it the oidor Morga's report that Spaniards drove the Sangleys to the rising of 1603, and that the city starved without them afterwards.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-16", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/sangleyes-de-filipinas", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/sangleyes-de-filipinas.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The law of the Sangleyes (Recopilación, libro VI, título 18)", "description": "Thirteen laws on the Chinese of Manila: a cap of six thousand, a court of their own with appeal to the Audiencia, a ten-year tax holiday on conversion, an itemised catalogue of the bribes and swindles Spanish officials worked on Chinese ships, and an order that they be well treated — set beside the judge Antonio de Morga's account of the persecution that preceded the killing of 1603 and the hungry city that followed it.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/sangleyes-de-filipinas", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-16", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias … Quarta impresión — Tomo Segundo (Libros IIII a VIII)", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=Lt41mzCz8zEC&pg=PP5" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China, at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, by Antonio de Morga", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=gIFWAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP7" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The law of the Sangleyes (Recopilación, libro VI, título 18)" } }