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unwilling to extend their circle of foreign intercourse. An abortive attempt of another body of Franciscans to obtain a footing in China—an attempt which owed its failure largely to the treachery of a Portuguese-speaking Chinaman—was followed by the only official embassy that Spain sent to China before the nineteenth century. This occurred in 1580. The ambassador, Martin Ignatius, met with a series of misfortunes. Driven by adverse winds to a point northward of Canton, his landing suggested groundless apprehensions to the local authorities, so that he and his suite were imprisoned and did not recover their freedom until the Portuguese governor of Macao intervened in their behalf.

But although the Spaniards neglected their opportunities of trading with China, their treatment of Chinese immigrants in Manila furnished an object lesson of terrible impressiveness. It fell out in this way. The Spaniards in Manila receiving large supplies of silver from Mexico and paying it out for Chinese imports, against which they had virtually no exports to exchange, an idea gradually gained currency in China that Manila—or "Luzon," as the Chinese then called the Philippines and do still call them—possessed great stores of the precious metals. Thus the people of the Middle Kingdom began to grow inquisitive and the Spaniards suspicious. It has been shown that the outcome of Chinese suspicion was simply to send away the suspected persons.