Binondo Church

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the heart of the world's oldest Chinatown stands the church the Dominicans founded in 1596 for Chinese converts, and here, around 1594, a boy named Lorenzo Ruiz was born to a Chinese father and a Filipina mother, served at this very altar, and wrote documents as the parish escribano. Falsely accused of a crime in 1636, he fled with Dominican missionaries and landed in Japan in the fury of persecution; arrested and tortured at Nagasaki, he refused to renounce his faith and died a martyr in September 1637. Canonized in 1987 as the first Filipino saint, whose feast the Church keeps today, he is now the patron of Filipino migrants, and his statue watches over the plaza that bears his name. The church itself shared his trials: bombarded by the British in 1762, rebuilt in granite by 1852 with an octagonal bell tower that nods to the pagoda towers of its parishioners' homeland, gutted in the Second World War down to its facade and tower, and raised again, today a minor basilica where Mass is offered in Filipino, Mandarin, Hokkien, and English.