How Binondo, world's oldest Chinatown, welcomed the Year of the Water Snake

A mix of lucky charms, dragon and lion dances, sticky tikoy cakes, and the color red greeted the hundreds of foreign and local tourists that gathered at the oldest Chinatown in the world last weekend to welcome the Chinese New Year.

 

The famous Binondo in Manila was established in 1594 by the Spanish Governor Luis Perez Dasmariñas as a place where Chinese Catholic merchants and their Filipino wives can reside.

 

Even before the Spanish colonizers arrived in the country, the Chinese and the Filipinos were already engaged in barter trade which centered in Binondo.

 

Today, hundreds gather in Binondo, not to barter for goods, but to experience a culture akin to Filipinos for centuries.   

During Chinese New Year, tourists feast on sumptuous Chinese delicacies that include the tikoy, that lucky sticky Chinese rice cake. The Chinese consider the cake lucky which also symbolically represents the “sticking together” of a family. The tikoy's Chinese name nian gao is a homonym for “higher year.”

 

Dragon and lion dancers liven up the streets of Binondo as tourists circle them to watch the cultural display to the beat of drums. 

 

Everywhere you look, ambulant vendors sell lucky charms, enticing them with amulets and mini statues of Chinese deity or animals to counter the bad luck in the Lunar New Year. 

 

Like other New Year celebrations, this year's Chinese New Year celebrations in Binondo was capped by a fireworks display, dazzling the crowd with a spectacle of colors as the Year of the Water Snake was ushered in.

 

Binondo will be the same old Binondo, with its bustling crowd, streets full of merchants, and captivating display of culture, a Chineseman's home away from home and a tourist’s Chinese experience, with a hint of Filipino, outside China. —KG, GMA News