A New Embassy from Taiwan: The Zheng Regime as Extraterritorial Arbiter of Ethnic Peace in Manila, 1662–1683

In 1662, shortly after conquering Taiwan, Zheng Chenggong wrote to the Spanish governor of Manila, threatening to invade the Philippines if the Spanish did not swear vassalage to his new regime. Although the Spanish refused, Chenggong died before he could carry out his threat, and his successor Zheng Jing wrote a second letter offering terms for peace. These exchanges provide some of the only surviving direct recordings of the Zheng leaders’ beliefs regarding the rights, responsibilities, and boundaries of “Chinese” identity, in particular the relationship between Sangleys and Chinese rulers. Both Zhengs claimed rulership over Manila’s Chinese, but where Zheng Chenggong stated a right to direct rule over this population, Zheng Jing compromised by requesting changes to the Spanish laws which governed his “subjects” in the Philippines. These demands recall modern notions of citizenship and extraterritoriality, and provide a rare contemporary Chinese perspective on colonial Manila’s policies of ethnic segregation. The Zheng state’s active pressure, by contrast to Ming and Qing emperors’ customary disinterest in overseas Chinese, forced the Spanish to reduce their oppression of and reliance on the Chinese, but this also involved expelling thousands of migrants and enforcing long-ignored legal limits on immigration. I argue that this period of conflict clarified the Spaniard’s notion of where chinos fit into their empire’s particular ethno-legal system. This episode thus shows how the Chinese experience in the Philippines was shaped not just by European attitudes, but also by the nature of the Sangleys’ political links to China.