Asian Silk, Porcelain and Material Culture in the Definition of Mexican and Andalusian Elites, c. 1565–1630

Abstract

By the end of the sixteenth century, the monarchy of Philip II had spread beyond the Atlantic and the Americas. In 1565 Castilian troops had conquered the Philippine Islands. That year one of the most famous commercial routes between the Atlantic world and Asia was opened. Between one and four “Manila galleons” (galeones de Manila), or “China vessels” (naos de China), as they were known in the Hispanic world, provided a commercial connection between Acapulco, on the northwestern coast of the Americas, and Manila with annual journeys across the Pacific Ocean from 1565 to 1815. In 1565 the conqueror Miguel Lopez de Legazpi sent the galleon San Pedro from the Philippines to Acapulco with a small cargo of cinnamon and Chinese manufactures such as silk and porcelain. In the late 1580s, trans-Pacific trade escalated, and huge quantities of Asian manufactured products, mostly Chinese silk and also Chinese porcelain and Japanese furniture, among other products, were shipped in the Manila galleons from the Philippines to the American viceroyalty of New Spain.¹ The aim of this chapter is to gauge how Asian manufactured goods were integrated into the material culture of elites of the Spanish Empire, and the role American elites played in such an integration.