Doctrina Christiana

Also known as: Doctrina Christiana, en lengua española y tagala — full title of the 1593 Tagalog-Spanish edition · Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua China — the companion 1593 Chinese-language edition · The first book printed in the Philippines (standard designation in bibliographies since Medina)

Society

Definition

The Doctrina Christiana is the conventional name for the Doctrina Christiana, en lengua española y tagala — the catechism printed at Manila in 1593 that is accepted as the first book printed in the Philippines, and one of two doctrinal books issued there that year alongside the companion Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua China prepared for the Chinese of the Parián. (Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana, Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay) The Tagalog-Spanish volume was printed by the xylographic method — each page pulled from a single hand-carved woodblock, worked in the Chinese manner and without a conventional press — on paper made from the paper mulberry, and its text appears in three parallel forms: Spanish, Tagalog romanized in Gothic letters, and Tagalog written in the baybayin script. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay) Governor-General Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas licensed both Doctrinas and reported them to King Philip II by letter of June 20, 1593, enclosing “one in the Tagalog language, which is the native and best of these islands, and the other in Chinese”, priced by his order at four reales apiece. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)

The title-page reads that the book was “corrected by the religious of the orders” and printed “with license, in S. Gabriel, of the order of S. Domingo” — placing its production at the Dominican mission of San Gabriel, which ministered to the Sangley Chinese outside the walls of Manila, under the supervision of the Dominicans Domingo de Nieva and Juan de San Pedro Mártir; the Tagalog text descends from the Franciscan Juan de Plasencia‘s approved doctrinal writings, and the Chinese version was the work of the Dominican Sinologist Juan Cobo. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana) The sole known copy of the Tagalog Doctrina is held by the Library of Congress, to which the collector Lessing J. Rosenwald presented it in 1946 after the New York dealer William H. Schab secured it from a Paris bookseller; the sole known copy of the Chinese Doctrina is in the Biblioteca Vaticana. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana)

Identities

Authority	Value
Wikipedia	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrina_Christiana
Wikidata	Q2576737
DBpedia	http://dbpedia.org/page/Doctrina_Christiana
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings	N/A
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A
Google Scholar	N/A
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Doctrina Christiana, en lengua española y tagala — full title of the 1593 Tagalog-Spanish edition
Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua China — the companion 1593 Chinese-language edition
The first book printed in the Philippines (standard designation in bibliographies since Medina)

Examples and Analogies

A woodblock rather than a press: where a European printer set movable type page by page, the Doctrina was cut whole — every page a single carved block inked and rubbed by hand, a technique borrowed from the Chinese book trade whose craftsmen lived in Manila, so that the Philippines entered printing history through East Asian technology, not European. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)
A trilingual catechism: the book is a working example of the mission press’s method — the same doctrine cast in Spanish for the friar, in romanized Tagalog for the literate in the Latin alphabet, and in baybayin characters for readers of the native script, making one book serve three reading communities at once. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)
Verified bibliographic data:
Printing: Manila, first half of 1593, before June 20, 1593 (date of the Dasmariñas letter reporting both Doctrinas)
Imprint: “en S. Gabriel, de la orden de S. Domingo” — the Dominican mission of San Gabriel
Method: xylographic, one block per page, without a conventional press; title-page woodcut of St. Dominic
Format: quarto of 38 leaves ( gatherings of 12, 10, 10, and 6 ), 74 pages of text; unbound leaves measuring about 9⅛ by 7 inches
Paper: Chinese-made, from the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera), described by Pardo de Tavera as the common “China paper” of the islands
Price: four reales set in the Dasmariñas letter; two reales in the contemporary valuation signed by Juan de Cuellar on this copy
Surviving copies: Tagalog edition — Library of Congress (Rosenwald copy); Chinese edition — Biblioteca Vaticana
Recognition: inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Regional Register (Asia and the Pacific) in 2024

Usage Scenarios

1. Studying the Origins of Philippine Printing

The Doctrina is the fixed starting point of Philippine printing history: the bibliographies of Medina (1896) and Retana (1897) placed it first among Philippine imprints, and the survival of the Rosenwald copy settled questions of date, method, and imprint that scholars had argued over from hearsay for three centuries. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)

2. Reading Early Tagalog and Baybayin

Because the same doctrine is given in Spanish, romanized Tagalog, and baybayin, the book is a primary witness to Tagalog as written in the 1590s — Wolf noted that Hervas y Panduro extracted a Tagalog Ave Maria from a copy in 1785 — and to the syllabary that opened the volume. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana)

3. Teaching the Evangelization of the Philippines

The Doctrina shows how the friars operationalized the Synod-approved doctrine of the 1580s for two audiences at once — Tagalog converts and the Sangley Chinese of the Parián — its very existence the material proof of the joint ministry of the orders at San Gabriel. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)

Strategies

License first, print second: the crown’s licensing regime — the cedulas of 1556 and 1560 forbidding unlicensed printing about the Indies — frames the book’s documentary trail; the researcher traces Philippine print origins through the Dasmariñas license rather than through surviving presses. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)
Follow the textual lineage: the Tagalog text is understood not as a single author’s work but as the end product of the Talavera-Plasencia-Oliver tradition of Franciscan linguistics, edited by the Dominicans “corrected by the religious of the orders,” as the title-page itself discloses. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)
Provenance research through Europe: because both known copies surfaced in Europe — Paris in 1946 for the Tagalog copy, Rome for the Chinese — the search strategy for further copies runs through Spanish and Vatican libraries rather than Philippine ones. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana)
Use the facsimile: the Library of Congress’s 1947 facsimile edition with Edwin Wolf 2nd’s essay makes the unique copy studyable worldwide without travel to Washington. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)

Security and Safety Measures

Custody of the unique copy: the sole Tagalog Doctrina rests in the Library of Congress’s rare-book collections under museum-grade protection, its fragility — browned, brittle mulberry paper — the direct reason access runs through facsimiles and photographs. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)
Documentary recognition: inscription in the UNESCO Memory of the World Regional Register in 2024 formally acknowledged the book’s documentary-heritage status and the need to safeguard Philippine printed heritage. (UNACOM press release)
A warning from the record: Wolf’s essay notes that the fires of 1603, which burned the Dominican convent and Binondo, destroyed the records of the early mission presses — the argument for protective custody of what little survives. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)

Historical Context

Printing reached the Philippines through the Dominican ministry to the Chinese. The order arrived in 1587, took charge of the Sangley mission, and by 1590 operated the church of San Gabriel near the Parián; Juan Cobo, its leading Sinologist, was acting superior of the province when plans for bilingual doctrinal books took shape, and Domingo de Nieva — praised by Aduarte for his mastery “of that language, as well as that of the Indians” — carried the work through the press. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay) In the first half of 1593 the two Doctrinas issued from San Gabriel, cut by Chinese craftsmen whose names the record does not keep; one copy of the Tagalog book was sent to Philip II that same year. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)

The book then vanished from view for three centuries. Hervas y Panduro printed Tagalog texts from a copy in 1785; Medina listed the Doctrinas first in La Imprenta en Manila (1896); Retana resolved the contradictions in the sources by deducing that the 1593 books were xylographic while typography began only in 1602 with the Binondo printer Juan de Vera, whom Aduarte called “the first printer in these islands.” (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay) In the spring of 1946 Schab found the Tagalog Doctrina in Paris, Rosenwald bought it and gave it to the Library of Congress, and Wolf’s 1947 essay — with the facsimile it introduced — confirmed at last every physical detail the bibliographers had surmised; in 2024 UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme inscribed the book on its Asia-Pacific regional register. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, UNACOM press release)

Challenges and Controversies

Who Cut the Blocks?

No document names the Chinese craftsmen who carved and printed the Doctrina of 1593. Wolf concluded that “who cut the blocks — that is exactly what Chinaman — we do not know,” while holding the supervision to have lain with Nieva and San Pedro Mártir at San Gabriel; the attribution of the Chinese edition to the printer Keng Yong rests on later scholarship. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana)

Whose Text Was It?

The title-page’s “corrected by the religious of the orders” deflects authorship to an editorial collective. Wolf traced the Tagalog text to the Talavera-Plasencia-Oliver corpus approved at the Synod of 1582 and supervised at press by Dominicans; Wikipedia’s article attributes the work to Plasencia himself. The two accounts agree that no single author can be named with certainty. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay, Wikipedia — Doctrina Christiana)

Was Anything Printed Earlier?

Beristain’s 1819 bibliography credited a Manila Arte y Vocabulario of 1581, and Pardo de Tavera as late as 1893 denied that any press existed before 1610. Retana dismissed the 1581 claim for want of evidence, and the 1593 documents — the Dasmariñas letter and the Indies archive account — plus the surviving book settled the sequence; Wolf left open only the unlikely possibility of an earlier xylographic tract now lost. (Wolf 2nd — LC facsimile essay)