Manila

Manila began as Maynila, a fortified settlement of Tagalog rulers at the mouth of the Pasig, trading with Brunei, China and the Malay world, with Tondo on the opposite bank. Miguel López de Legazpi took it in 1571 and declared it the capital of the Spanish colony, building the walled city of Intramuros on the south bank while Chinese merchants settled first in the Parián and later in Binondo, founded in 1594. For 250 years the Manila galleons crossed to Acapulco with silk and porcelain and returned with Mexican silver, making the city the hinge of a trade route between Asia and the Americas. Britain occupied it from 1762 to 1764.

The 19th century opened Manila to world commerce and produced an educated Filipino middle class; José Rizal, executed at Bagumbayan in 1896, became the national hero, and his death helped set off the revolution against Spain. The United States took the Philippines in 1898, and American administrators remodelled the capital, commissioning Daniel Burnham to plan boulevards, parks and civic buildings, several of which now house the national museums.

The Second World War ended that city. Japanese forces occupied Manila in 1942; in February and March 1945 the battle to retake it killed about 100,000 civilians and flattened Intramuros, leaving San Agustin Church standing almost alone. Reconstruction was rapid and largely unplanned. Government offices, business and wealth moved outward to Quezon City, Makati and later Bonifacio Global City, leaving the old core poorer and more crowded, while the metropolis grew into sixteen cities and one municipality. Recent decades have brought reclamation along the bay, rail extensions, and a long effort to restore Intramuros and the surviving pre-war buildings.

Manila is where Filipino popular culture is made. The national film industry, television networks and recording studios are based in the metropolis, and singing is close to a civic habit: karaoke machines stand in bars, living rooms and street corners, and the city has produced singers known across Asia. Basketball is the sport that matters, played on courts squeezed between houses and followed professionally with real intensity, and boxing is followed closely.

Catholicism runs through daily life. The Feast of the Black Nazarene each January brings one of the largest religious gatherings anywhere, with barefoot devotees pressing to touch the image as it passes through Quiapo. Christmas begins in September by common consent, with carols in shops and parol lanterns in windows, and ends with the nine dawn masses of Simbang Gabi. Alongside this, Quiapo's market sells herbal remedies and amulets, and the district holds one of the city's mosques, serving a Muslim community from Mindanao.

Manila is also a Chinese-Filipino city. Binondo's families have been here for four centuries, and their cooking, business networks and festivals are part of the city's fabric. Manners are gentle and hierarchical: elders are greeted with a hand to the forehead, called mano, voices are kept level in disagreement, and a great deal of meaning is carried by indirectness. Hospitality is nearly compulsory, and visitors are fed before anything else is discussed.

About 1.9 million people live in the City of Manila itself, packed into some 43 square kilometres, which makes it one of the densest cities on earth; the wider metropolis holds roughly 14 million. The city is the seat of national government, the port and the old commercial core, while Makati, Ortigas and Bonifacio Global City hold the banks, head offices and the call centres that employ large numbers of young people on night shifts aligned to American hours.

The day is shaped by traffic. Commutes of two hours each way are ordinary, and people leave before dawn to beat them; jeepney and rail queues form early, and air-conditioned malls serve as meeting places, offices and playgrounds. Street life is intense and informal — sari-sari shops selling in single sachets, vendors, tricycles, basketball games — and inequality is visible street by street, with towers above and informal settlements along the rail lines and estuaries.

Water is the city's other constant. The Pasig, heavily polluted for decades, is slowly being cleaned, and ferries run along it again. Monsoon rains flood low-lying districts each year, and reclamation projects in the bay are argued over for their effect on flooding and fishing. Many households depend on remittances from relatives working abroad, and the departure and return of overseas workers at the airport is one of the metropolis's routine sights.

Manila eats often: three meals with merienda between them, at stalls, canteens called carinderias, and malls. The standards are Filipino comfort dishes — adobo, meat stewed in vinegar, soy and garlic; sinigang, a sour soup soured with tamarind or other fruit; kare-kare, oxtail in peanut sauce with fermented shrimp paste on the side; crispy pata, deep-fried pork knuckle; and lechon, whole roast pig, the centrepiece of any celebration. Rice comes with everything, breakfast included, usually fried with garlic.

Binondo is the city's great eating quarter, and four centuries of Chinese settlement have shaped what the whole country eats: pancit noodles, lumpia spring rolls, siopao steamed buns, dumplings and the flaky bean-filled pastries called hopia all came through here. Roast duck, hand-pulled noodles and Hokkien-style soups are the district's own specialities, and stalls open early for breakfast congee.

Street food is its own category — grilled skewers of pork and offal eaten with vinegar, balut, a fertilised duck egg, taho, warm soft tofu with syrup and tapioca sold from buckets in the morning, and fishballs fried on carts. Sweets run to halo-halo, shaved ice with beans, jellies, leche flan and purple yam ice cream, and to the rice cakes known collectively as kakanin: bibingka baked in banana leaf and puto bumbong, purple rice steamed in bamboo, appear outside churches in December. Coffee is drunk sweet, and the local beer and rum are both widely exported.