Rags to Riches from Rome to the China Seas

The hot Roman summer sun can ignite daydreams and, a few weeks ago, while visiting a friend at an art gallery on the Via Giulia, I walked by the nearly half-a-millennium old Palazzo Sacchetti and pondered the fate of the families who owned it, lost it, sold off parts of it and passed into history. My colleague Adrian Wooldridge has written columns about contemporary European and Italian dynasties and their effective stewardship of family businesses. But my thoughts were all about the romance of declines and falls — and what lessons there might be for today. The musings took me from Rome across 6,000 miles to the south China coast and a little beyond.

I’ve never been to Zhangli village in Fujian province, just outside the city of Quanzhou, which the Venetian merchant Marco Polo described as one of the world’s greatest ports in the 13th century. I’m not taking you that far back in time, just to the middle of the 19th and the construction of a set of 23 red brick mansions, arranged along five rows and spread across 16,300 square meters became lords of a commercial empire of their own, encompassing a sprawling bazaar in Manila as well as farming, forestry and construction interests.

Also known as Chua Chengco, my great-great-grandfather was dubbed “Mariano Velasco” by the colonial administrators who hoped the “honor” would tie him — and his money — even more closely to the regime. Because there was a local Spaniard with the same name, he was referred to as Mariano Velasco el Chino. Still, it kind of worked: To this day, around the world, there are scores of Velascos of Chinese descent very proud of their Spanish apellido. I like to think of Spain as one of my “old countries” — along with China and the Philippines.

The money, however, has long dissipated. The Zhangli village property — built with repatriated wealth and exotic material from the family’s plantations in the Philippines — needs both conservation and renovation. The provincial government would like to turn it an open-air museum. But that requires financing, and there really isn’t a paterfamilias among the existing Velascos to take charge of the legacy. In fact, tracking what became of the Velasco wealth is a genealogical headache. In terms of business, there is a department store that can claim some descent from the old bazaar. The physical house that Velasco built in Manila may actually have been larger than the Zhangli complex, but it has vanished. With his two wives, Don Mariano had nine sons; and inherited assets diminished as they were divided among succeeding generations. Add in the depredations of the Spanish flu pandemic, the Great Depression, the Pacific war that left Manila a charred wreck… Sic transit gloria mundi. 

The Velascos are a chapter in the long sojourn of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, escaping poverty and chaos in the Middle Kingdom to win prosperity and influence in a new world. The historical experience involves questions of assimilation and integration as I’ve noted in a previous column.

Some of the lessons are rags-to-riches sagas familiar to every culture. For example: A huge fortune will be hostage to many heirs, even if a clearly documented will exists. When the Indonesian industrialist Eka Tjipta Widjaja — born Huang Yicong in Quanzhou, China — passed away in 2019, some of his children sought control of the corporations he founded in addition to what had been left to them from his estimated $9.3 billion fortune. Sometimes, the feuds break out even before the dynastic founder is gone, as evidenced by the father-son battle in Singapore’s Kwek family. It remains to be seen whether this age of “high net worth family offices” — an industry that’s growing dramatically among rich ethnic Chinese families — can discipline the human drive to bag the biggest inheritance.

Most Chinese migrants learned that life in a new country was better with new names. Most didn’t wait — as I assume Mariano Velasco did — until the authorities realized their worth and rewarded them with a culturally integrated moniker. They just took what they thought would help them with their prospects and careers, just as F. Scott Fitzgerald had James Gatz transform into Jay Gatsby in his famous novel about social climbing. They chose names that looked less foreign, that sounded more like the languages of their adopted lands. Hence, Huang became Widjaja in Indonesia. In the Philippines, the businessman Carlos Palanca — whose surname now graces the country’s most prestigious literary award — was originally Chen Liulai . In the late 19th century, the Fujian-born migrant cadged the name of a Spanish diplomat who’d been briefly assigned to Manila a couple of decades before and wasn’t around to contest the steal. Palanca’s wealth was founded on a distillery that also had a distinctly Iberian name, La Tondeña .

They also learned to avoid politics — there’s a long history of xenophobic riots and massacre against foreign-born merchants who order locals around or who are perceived as a threat to the prevailing status quo. Indeed, the political dynamics of contemporary Malaysia are based on racial tensions among the native Malay and the descendants of Chinese and Tamil migrants.

That didn’t mean that rich Chinese families didn’t support politicians. Often, they supported all the major parties simultaneously, spreading their bets to cover all eventualities. They preferred to be kingmakers rather than kings. And so, many ethnic Chinese clans look askance at the billionaire and former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra as he and his clan are rocked back and forth by political controversy stirred up as they try to dominate Thailand. In Singapore, while the political legacy of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew is nowhere as turbulent , the family honor was still stained by an unseemly squabble among his heirs over a house he left them. That’s spilled over into politics, with the ambitions of Lee Hsien Yang — who says he has won political asylum in the UK — now aimed at his older brother and former prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. Aiyah, as they say in Singapore.

In the Philippines, ethnic Chinese still shy away from personal involvement in politics. Being too closely tied — even as a financier — to politicians is risky. The plutocrat Lucio Tan was an influential player in the administration of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, but that didn’t save the billionaire from scrutiny after Estrada was ousted in a civilian coup in January 2001. 

Still, many descendants of Chinese migrants in the Philippines do engage in politics. For the most part, that’s because they’re members of the Chinese mestizo class — which, from generation to generation and every intermarriage, is less and less Chinese. The most successful example is the sprawling Cojuangco family, a clan founded by an immigrant from Fujian who made his fortune in sugar. The family’s most famous politicians were Corazon Cojuangco Aquino and her son Benigno Aquino III, both of whom held the office of president. I have politicians in my family now. I’m particularly proud of my first cousin Josefina “Joy” Belmonte, who is in her third term as mayor of Quezon City, a constituency of nearly 3 million people. Our grandmother — our mothers’ mother — was the Velasco. For the Chinese, mestisaje is a poignant survival mechanism: preserving one’s genes but slowly forgetting the ways of one’s ancestors.

I hope to one day visit Zhangli village and see what’s left of the estate of Mariano Velasco. I wonder if my thoughts will then turn to Rome and the the Palazzo Sacchetti. There are echoes. It was designed by its first owner, a man named Antonio Cordiani. He’d grown up poor in Florence and moved to the city of the popes to apprentice with his uncles. Eventually he took their surname — Sangallo, which is still what Romans call the street by the Tiber next to the palazzo. The house didn’t stay in his family for long. The building still stands. But the people who lived in it and their riches have faded away. It’s almost Chinese.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

The name-changes did not prevent calumnies. There is one theory that Don Mariano was the basis for the greedy and manipulative Chinese merchant Quiroga in El Filibusterismo, a novel by Jose Rizal, the Philippines’ national hero.

News reports of the anti-Chinese pogroms in California and the western US states as I noted in this column reinforced the anxieties of Chinese in Southeast Asia.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine. 

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