5. Manila’s Sangleys and a Chinese Wedding (1625)

Abstract

This excerpt from Diego de Rueda y Mendoza’s True Account of the Funeral Exequies that the Illustrious City of Manila Celebrated to the Death of His Majesty Philip III (1625) provides an eye-witness account of a Catholic Chinese wedding celebrated in Manila during the early seventeenth century. It provides tantalizing glimpses of transculturation among Manila’s small Spanish ruling class, as well as insights into the culture of the sangleys, the Chinese residents whose numbers exceeded those of the Spanish by several orders of magnitude. Miguel Martínez places Rueda’s account of the wedding within the context of the broader pseudoethnographic work carried out by the True Account, as well as the early history of Manila’s sangleys.