Beautiful Philippines: A Handbook of General InformationPhilippine Islands. Commission of Independence
History
Beautiful Philippines: A Handbook of General Information
Philippine Islands. Commission of Independence
Philippines -- Description and travel; Philippines -- Economic conditions
The Walled City is the original Manila, of which every other part of
the modern city is, historically speaking, a suburb. Its battlemented
wall is a little over 2 1/2 miles in circuit, and is still for the
most part in an excellent state of preservation. The age of the walls
is hard to state; its oldest existing portions were undoubtedly built
before the end of the sixteenth century, but it has been continuously
patched and added to, almost up to the present generation. Parts of it
are from twenty to thirty feet in height and thickness. Considering
everything, it makes this district one of the best examples of a
mediæval walled town in existence.
[Fort Santiago]
While in this Walled City, do not fail to visit Fort Santiago, the
oldest part of Spanish Manila, long the citadel of the city, and now
the headquarters of the United States Army in the Philippines. It
probably stands very nearly on the site of the native fort which the
Spanish reconnoitering expedition carried by assault in 1570. It
has undergone comparatively little external change in three
centuries. There are plenty of traditions connected with the old
place--stories of cells below the river level for the "unintentional"
execution of inconvenient persons, and of chambers found filled with
dislocated skeletons. Though none of these places are now identifiable,
it is a historical fact that one cell, either in the fort or in the
wall to the east of it (since removed), was the scene, as late as the
night of the 31st of August, 1896, of a tragedy much resembling that of
the Black Hole of Calcutta. Fifty-six out of sixty Filipinos who had
been crowded into it, on being arrested on suspicion of complicity
in the insurrection then raging, were the victims of the poisoned
atmosphere or of the desperate struggle that took place within.
Pursuing your travels around Manila you see an admixture of the
quaintly native, of the mediæval, and of the strictly modern. In
architecture, you see splendid examples of Grecian, Moorish, Spanish,
Renaissance, Gothic, and Byzantine. Likewise you see many native nipa
houses, small yet cool and cozy, and exceedingly appropriate for the
needs of the climate.
[Three Manilas]
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