Early Finance in the Philippines
[PHILIPPINES – HONGKONG AND SHANGHAI BANKING CORPORATION.]
Photographs of Manila and Iloilo City banks and staff. [Baguio, Manila, Cebu, and elsewhere, 1911.]
Oblong 8vo, 41 gelatin silver prints and other prints, each c. 980 x 730 mm, tipped in along upper edges only on 24 ff. of stiff card, with manuscript annotations (one dated) in pencil on versos; bound in half sheep with green pebbled cloth sides, stationers ink stamp ‘DAL London’ to rear pastedown; slight wear at extremities of spine and corners.
An album documenting the first branches of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation to open in the Philippines as well as HSBC employees and the building site for a new bank in Baguio – probably compiled by an HSBC staff member.
The HSBC building in Iloilo City and the Manila branch are depicted, as well as portraits of the manager in Manila, A. M. Reith, sometimes with a likely colleague, J. Kennedy Gibson. W. P. Craig is seen by the Iloilo branch, where according to records he was an employee. The compiler has carefully recorded information on the versos of the prints, for instance about the later extension of a street by the Iloilo branch.
HSBC opened its first branch in the Philippines on 90 Rosario Street in Binondo, Manila in 1875, as the first foreign bank in the country. This was followed by the opening of a second branch in 1883 in Iloilo in the Philippines’ Western Visayas region. HSBC established itself in the country to support the Philippines’ growing sugar industry and the early success of the corporation meant it could play an active role in supporting the country’s economic infrastructure. Between 1899 and 1910, it took part in stabilising the country’s monetary system, and in 1906 financed a 150-mile extension of the Manila–Dagupan railway.
Several prints show a site in Baguio which was earmarked for a new bank. We have not established whether this was an HSBC branch, or that of another banking institution. Baguio is a hill station on Luzon, established following the arrival of American colonial forces in 1900 and then underwent a period of growth and construction. The town became well known for its pine forest and cool climate, being billed as the ‘Switzerland of the Orient’ to Western visitors. The album contains two views of the historic Pines Hotel health resort and its staff.
The album also records many natural and architectural highlights that would have been of interest to the foreign traveller, including the Mount Mayon volcano, the Pasig River, architecture in Antipolo and Cebu, and Buddhist carvings and temples in Lopburi, Siam.