Chinese cemetary

Last weekend Neil and I headed town to Binondo – Chinatown. Manila has quite a strong history of Chinese involvement, Chinese make up a high proportion of the city’s business elite and our apartment complex for example has a lot of Chinese residents. We had a great lunch at a large Chinese restaurant called President Restaurant which was delicious.




After lunch we went to Binondo Church which is one of the older structures in Manila dating back to 1596 and then had a walk around Chinatown, which isn’t too big itself, but is generally pretty clean and pretty interesting. There are quite a lot of old European churches around Manila. Most of the really old ones were bombed to the ground during World War II, only a couple survived the war, many more were rebuilt out of the ashes.

We made it over to the MRT train station and headed north to check out the Chinese cemetery. The Chinese cemetery is filled with mausoleums with crystal chandeliers, air-conditioning, hot and hold water, kitchens and flushing toilets for the mourning families. Most of the mausoleums were nicer than many of the surrounding Philippino houses in the area. It was pretty amazing.

posted by batik billy @ 9:06 am