Muralla cor Recoletos Sts. Intramuros, Manila 1002 P.O. BOX769

Monday through Saturdays 8am – 5pm

En route to dreamland, I pass in review reminders of past and present. They’re in and around cabinets crammed with odds and ends that I’ve been picking up since I was a kid, including seashells and my life savings of one-centavo coins.

The oldest object is maybe 770,000 years old and the newest, four months old. In between are things treasured from the time the very first Filipinos—the very first humans—reached these shores.

The 770,000-year-old objects are a couple of tektites, natural glass objects that look like black pebbles. Scientists believe that long before humans evolved, a giant meteorite fells somewhere in Kazakhstan or Siberia with such force as to liquefy everything down to the earth’s mantle and blasted the molten rock so high into outer space that it fell as glass pebbles onto our part of the world. They have been found in Mandaluyong (hence Tektite Towers in Ortigas Center), Bicol, and possibly elsewhere. Ancient Filipinos called them taing bituin (literally star poop) and wore them as amulets.

The newest object is inside a red velvet box, the souvenir medal (made of light metal and enamel) I got during PBBM’s inauguration on June 30.

On my balcony table is a sampling of in-between stuff before a side table with a medium size early 20th-century image from Samar of San Jorge (Saint George, England’s patron saint) dispatching a dragon that looks like the offspring of a buaya and a dalág:

The above items reside in a cabinet together with other articles that illustrate one or another aspect of Filipino life.

There are religious items: small wood images of the Immaculate Conception mostly from Bohol; ivory pieces also of the Virgin carved in Goa, India that were brought here in the 18th century; several silver pax that deacons would hold to be kissed by the faithful on important feast days; small 200-year-old paintings depicting the Nazareno, San José, and San Juan Evangelista; a couple of saints’ heads (one dated 1819); a silver dish used during the offertory at Mass; and a set of four small figures from a Cordillera mumbaki’s ritual box.

Then there are a Wedgwood powder box probably brought here in the 1800s by the wife of a Brit running a trading house; several anting-anting; excavated Song Dynasty and Sawangkhalok jarlets; blown glass figures of a couple in mid-1800s costume; landscapes painted on mother-of-pearl shells; a pair of silver mosquito net hooks; and quite a few more.

Note: Europeans came to discover the land and peoples of the New World, Africa, Asia, and Australia during the 1500s and formed rooms that displayed the owner’s collection of minerals, birds, and small animals, shells, textiles, weapons, jewelry, relics, small paintings and sculpture, and other unusual (to Europeans) objects.

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