270 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS [VOL. 5° 



Spaniards rather than have the hands of the Spaniards laid on them. 

 In vain now were Acuha's efforts to restore peace. It was already 

 an open secret that the Chinese had fixed the uprising for Saint 

 Francis Day (October 4). A Tagal woman had learned this from 

 her Chinese husband, and betrayed it to her father-confessor, who, 

 of course, had nothing more urgent to do than to inform the Gober- 

 nador. Fierce combats during eighteen days followed between the 

 Spaniards and the Chinese, which are full of romantic incident and 

 teeming with merciless massacres. The lives of twenty-three thou- 

 sand Chinese, according to the Spanish accounts, were sacrificed in 

 the name of His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain, and 

 twenty-five thousand according to the "Ming shih ;" but in 1604 

 Chinese trade again flourished, and in 1605 six thousand Chinese 

 again inhabited the parian. 1 



Let us now turn to the account of the Ming Annals, which runs 

 thus : 



In 1602 two adventurers, Yen Ying-lung and Chang-Yi, came forward with 

 the assertion that there was a mountain, Ki-i-shan, on Luzon containing gold 

 and silver ore. An exploitation of these mines, so they said, might yield 

 yearly ten thousand taels, or ounces, of gold and thirty thousand taels of 

 silver. This rumor reached the ears of the Emperor Wan-li, who issued an 

 edict that a commission be sent to Manila to verify the truth of this startling- 

 news. The court was highly amazed at this decree ; and the President of the 

 Imperial Censorate in Peking, Wen Shun-su, was bold enough to memorialize 

 the Throne, and to attempt to dissuade the Emperor from such an erratic 

 act. 2 He clearly set forth the danger of the Emperor's eccentric plan, and 

 pointed out that it would provoke the Spaniards to acts of aggression. "I have 

 heard," he said, "that the city of Hai-ch'eng has a highly developed maritime 

 trade, which amounts to at least thirty thousand taels a year. Its inhabitants 

 make every effort to seek commercial advantages, and it would therefore be 

 utterly unreasonable to sail over the sea to Ki-yi, where I am sure gold and 

 silver are not everywhere to be found, and to employ people there to mine 

 the gold. The disadvantage arising from the carrying out of the imperial 



1 F. Blumentritt, Die Chinesen auf den Philippinen, pp. 26-29. 



' The Censorate is one of the most curious institutions of administration in 

 China. It is, so to say, a substitute for our modern idea of a constitution. 

 The censors exercise a certain supervision over all deeds of court and pro- 

 vincial officials, and freely denounce to the Emperor any defects in their con- 

 duct. They receive, for delivery to the Emperor, appeals either of the people 

 against their officials or of officials against their superiors, and they even have 

 the right to accuse the sovereign and to send him warnings and admonitions. 

 They are inviolable, and cannot be called to account for their official doings. 

 Among the memorials of Chinese censors to the Throne, we find a great 

 many documents which breathe a dauntlessness and frankness of speech 

 worthy of a Cato. 



