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Aglipayan Church, Azcarraga Street, Manila

The Walled City.

The Walled City is the original Manila, of which every other part of the modern city is, historically speaking, a suburb. Its battlemented wall is a little over 2½ miles in circuit, and is still for the most part in an excellent state of preservation. The age of the walls is hard to state; its oldest existing portions were undoubtedly built before the end of the sixteenth century, but it has been continuously patched and added to, almost up to the present generation. Parts of it are from twenty to thirty feet in height and thickness. Considering everything, it makes this district one of the best examples of a mediæval walled town in existence.

Fort Santiago While in this Walled City, do not fail to visit Fort Santiago, the oldest part of Spanish Manila, long the citadel of the city, and now the headquarters of the United States Army in the Philippines. It probably stands very nearly on the site of the native fort which the Spanish reconnoitering expedition carried by assault in 1570. It has undergone comparatively little external change in three centuries. There are plenty of traditions connected with the old place—stories of cells below the river level for the “unintentional” execution of inconvenient persons, and of chambers found filled with dislocated skeletons. Though none of these places are now identifiable, it is a historical fact that one cell, either in the fort or in the wall to the east of it (since removed), was the scene, as late as the night of the 31st of August, 1896, of a tragedy much resembling that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Fifty-six out of sixty Filipinos who had been crowded into it, on being arrested on suspicion of complicity in the insurrection then raging, were the victims of the poisoned atmosphere or of the desperate struggle that took place within.