Chapter 12 The Colonial Period 445growing suspicions, the daimyo warrior Hideyoshi executed six Franciscans,
three Jesuits, and 17 Japanese converts in 1597, thus beginning four decades of
persecutions. In 1638, 37,000 Christians led by five samurai took refuge in an
old feudal castle in Shimabara. They held out for two months but were finally
overtaken, and all but 105 were killed. This was virtually the end of Christian-
ity in Japan. After 1640 no foreigners remained except a handful of Dutch who
were practically imprisoned at Nagasaki and became Japan’s sole source of
knowledge about the outside world (this knowledge thus was called “Dutch
Learning”) until Perry arrived in 1853.
The Spanish were, of course, cheating on the Treaty of Tordesilla when
they established a presence in Manila, but politics back home—uniting the
crowns of Portugal and Spain—made all that moot. They named the Philip-
pines after Philip II of Spain and made themselves welcome in Asia by sending
shiploads of Mexican silver across the “Spanish lake,” the Pacific. By the end of
the sixteenth century, 72 metric tons of silver were arriving every year from the
New World on the famous “Manila galleons,” and Mexican dollars became the
de facto standard currency in international trade, the role of the US dollar in the
twentieth century. In the Philippines no strong state had emerged on the order
of China or Japan, and the many small-scale tribal societies were unable to fend
off the Spanish. Thus the Philippines became the first Asian region, aside from
the small Portuguese coast towns, to succumb to colonial dominance.
Half a century after Japan’s ill-fated encounter with Europeans, the Italian
Jesuit Matteo Ricci was granted residence in Beijing, and for 125 years, until
they were banned from China in 1725, Jesuits were a conduit for knowledge of
China in Europe and of European learning in China. Europe was having its
own form of Enlightenment (not the Buddhist one), and the learned Jesuits
were the right monastic order to bring this new learning to China. Jesuits trans-
lated Euclid’s geometry, over a hundred treatises on Western science and tech-
nology, and many Christian works into Chinese. The Chinese emperor Kangxi
(1661–1722), a man of tremendous energy and curiosity, was particularly favor-
able to the Jesuits, especially to Ferdinand Verbiest, with whom he endlessly
discussed science and religion (Spence 1974). The Jesuits wrote back to Europe
that China was ruled by “philosopher-kings” (they meant the Confucian
scholar-official class), provoking great admiration for China among Europe’s
intellectuals. “Chinoiserie” came into vogue with Chinese-style furniture, fab-
rics, and ceramics ornamenting mansions and pagodas rising from lavish gar-
dens. But the Catholic mission to China self-destructed in much the same way it
did in Japan, and in 1724 Christianity was banned from the Middle Kingdom.
During the sixteenth century, Portuguese were also stopping along Viet-
nam’s long coastline to buy raw silk, and soon they were followed by Jesuits.
Again Jesuits had great success in converting the people. The Vietnam elite, the
Nguyen dynasty, had begun its conquest of Vietnam from their central capital
at Hue, gradually taking over the Mekong delta and establishing a Confucian
state on the Chinese model. They organized an examination system for select-