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By Go Bon Juan
Editor’s Note: The Sixth Dr.
Jose P. Rizal Awards for Excellence awarding ceremony will be held
on June 14, 2008, 7 p.m., at the Kaisa-Angelo King Heritage Center
on Anda and Cabildo Streets, Intramuros, Manila.
That’s exactly what early
Chinese migrants in Davao believed. And it took a fellow migrant,
Lim Juna (pronounced hun-a), to prove them wrong.
Lim Juna’s story is recounted
in the book Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory
written by Prof. Macario D. Tiu of the Ateneo de Davao University.
The book won the 2006 National Book Awards for Best in History.
“Through
the Spanish Jesuit letters, we learn of the presence of Chinese
traders in Davao as early as in the 1860s. But we do not know
exactly how many Chinese were around. During the American period, at
least six Chinese names appeared in a 1904 list of 45 important
planters in Davao prepared by District Governor Edward C. Bolton.
One of the names was Juna Padda.” (Let me add that based on 1903
census, there were 14 Chinese in Davao in a population of 6,059.)
Juna Padda is Francisco Villa-Abrille
Lim Juna of Lim Juna (Lim Chuan Jun). The name Juna must have come
from the third character. Although his real Chinese name is Jun, he
became more known as Juna as Chinese are fond of addressing people
by adding “a’ to the last character of one’s name.
Lim Juna was to become famous in
Davao with several places named after him. Juna is the name of a
classy subdivision in Matina, Davao City. In addition, his baptismal
name, Villa-Abrielle, is a street name in downtown Davao.
Excerpts from Tiu’s account
on Juna:
Lim Juna (Lim Chuan Jun) was born
around 1850 in Tong Sua, Fukien, China. Family tradition says he
came to the Philippines at the age of 12 years, but it is not clear
as to where he went first when he first arrived in the Philippines.
One tradition says he went to Manila first before proceeding to Jolo,
while another says he went directly to Jolo. Whatever the case may
be, it is said that in Jolo, he worked for a Spanish master, and
having saved money, started his own pearl diving business.
In 1882, at the age of 32 years,
Juna and his wife, Tan Sippo, moved to Davao. By the time, he had
earned a name as one of the few moneyed pearl traders in Jolo, and
was now prepared to move on to Davao, “a more progressive town.”
His first business venture was a sari-sari store in Piapi, now on
Quezon Boulevard. He sold general merchandise, including fishing
paraphernalia and beans, corn, rice, tobacco and abaca.
According to family tradition,
Juna acquired his vast tracts of land when a Spanish official who
was leaving Davao forced him to buy the land that the Spanish owned.
When Juna purchased land in the
downtown area, the other Chinese residents joked about it among
themselves. Most of the Chinese migrants thought of their stay in
the Philippines as only temporary. After earning some money, they
planned to go home to China. They did not think of Davao or any
place else as their permanent home and therefore thought it foolish
that a Chinaman would be buying land which he would not bring back
to China.
Of course, Juna made Davao his
permanent home. He died in 1943 during the Japanese Occupation, at
around 93 years old.
Juna bequeathed to his children
vast tracts of land that did not only benefit his immediate family
but also the entire residents of Davao through his generous
donations of land for roads, schools, a hospital and other sites for
public use. To mention a few, parts of the land of Ateneo de Davao
University (at the Matina campus), the Philippine Women’s College,
and the Davao Central High School (formerly the Davao Chinese High
School) were donated by Juna. The lots occupied by the Davao Chapter
of the Philippine Boy Scouts and the Davao General Hospital (now the
Mental Hospital) were also donated by Juna.
For his contributions that helped
in hastening the development of Davao, Francisco Villa-Abrielle Lim
Juna was posthumously given by the Datu Bago Award in 1969. The Datu
Bago Award is the highest honor that the city of Davao can give to a
resident of Davao. A Chinese migrant who dared the rigor of pioneer
life in Davao and helped make it grow. Lim Juna indeed belongs to
Davao.
The significance of the story of
Lim Juna of Davao is that it demonstrates how an early migrant
Chinese identified himself and eventually rooted in Philippine soil
and became part of our land and our country. So whenever Tsinoys buy
land in their country, it is a good indication that they treat the
land as their home. And no other sojourner Chinese will think it
foolish.
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