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It was this year when Spanish colonial rule officially ended and American colonial rule began. While this periodization may seem logical, past scholars have unfortunately also used what was a political change to describe changes in ethnic classifications in the Philippines. In other words, when the Americans established new citizenship laws in the Philippines that divided its people into “Filipinos” and “aliens” (thereby removing the three-way classificatory system of sangleys, Chinese mestizos, and indios instituted by the Spanish government in the Philippines), these scholars have sought to explain the changes in the ethnic identities of the Chinese and Chinese mestizos in the Philippines to support what were legally-imposed categories, instead of analyzing how the affected people negotiated these changes.

As an indication of a growing interest among scholars to explore and study the interaction between southern China and Southeast Asia, different panels on this topic have been included in the annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies since 2003. The National University of Singapore’s Chinese in Southeast Asia Research Cluster under the Department of Chinese Studies has also been emphasizing research and publications on China-Southeast Asia interactions. Books that focus on this topic include Douw et al.

Where do most of the Chinese in Manila trace their ancestors’ origin? What factors brought their ancestors to the country? In order to answer these questions it is necessary to go back in time and examine the conditions in the Minnan region of southeastern Fujian province. As we will see, Minnan in the middle to the latter part of the nineteenth century was home to a population of people with a long history of maritime trade and cultural interaction with peoples from Southeast Asia, including the Philippines (cf.