Pasig
Pasig, officially the City of Pasig, is a highly-urbanized city in the National Capital Region of the Philippines. According to the 2024 census, it has a population of 853,050 people.
It is located along the eastern border of Metro Manila and it borders Rizal province, the city shares its name with the Pasig River. A formerly rural settlement, Pasig is primarily residential and industrial, but has been becoming increasingly commercial in recent years, particularly after the construction of the Ortigas Center business district in its west. The city is home to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pasig, based in Pasig Cathedral, a landmark built around the same time as the town's foundation in 1573.
Pasig was formerly part of Rizal province before the formation of Metro Manila, the national capital region of the country. The seat of government of Rizal was hosted in Pasig at the old Rizal Provincial Capitol until a new capitol was opened in Antipolo, within Rizal's jurisdiction in 2009. On June 19, 2020, President Rodrigo Duterte signed Republic Act No. 11475, which designated Antipolo as the official capital of Rizal. However, it remained as the de jure, or official capital of the province until July 7, 2020.
Etymology
The city's name, Pasig, is a Tagalog word which means, "a river that flows into the sea" or "sandy bank of a river".Etymologically, it is derived from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *pasiR. Its cognates include Tagalog dalampasigan, Pangutaran Sama pasil, and Malay pasir.
History
Early history
There are no surviving firsthand accounts of the history of Pasig before Spanish colonizers arrived in 1573 and established the settlement, which they called the Ciudad-Municipal de Pasig.However, surviving genealogical records and folk histories speak of a thriving precolonial barangay on the banks of the Bitukang Manok River, which eventually became modern-day Pasig.
The creek was given the name Bitukang Manok. The Bitukang Manok was once a principal tributary of the Marikina River. The Spanish colonizers called the creek Rio de Pasig; however, the natives still called it the Bitukang Manok.
The first stretch of the Bitukang Manok became known as the "Pariancillo", where its shoreline was once settled by ethnic Chinese and Malay merchants to trade their goods with Tagalogs until it developed up to the 1970s as the city's main public market. Likewise, the creek contributed enormously to the economic growth of Pasig during the Spanish colonial era through irrigation of its wide paddy fields, and by being the progressive center of barter trade.
The Bitukang Manok, also known as the "Parian Creek," had once linked the Marikina River with the Antipolo. Before the Manggahan Floodway was built in 1986, The Parian Creek was connected to the Sapang Bato-Buli Creek, the Kasibulan Creek, the Palanas Creek, the Bulaw Creek, and the Hinulugang Taktak falls of Barangay Dela Paz, thus being the detached and long-abandoned Antipolo River.
Spanish colonial era
Since the early 1600s up to the period of Japanese Imperialism, over a thousand Catholic devotees coming from "Maynilad", "Hacienda Pineda", "San Juan del Monte", "Hacienda de Mandaloyon", "Hacienda Mariquina", "Barrio Pateros", "Pueblo de Tagig", and "San Pedro de Macati", followed the trail of the Parian Creek to the Pilgrimage Cathedral on the mountainous pueblo of Antipolo, Morong.The Antipoleños and several locals from the far-reached barrios of "Poblacion de San Mateo", "Montalban", "Monte de Tanhai", "Santa Rosa-Oroquieta", and "Punta Ibayo", had also navigated this freshwater creek once to go down to the vast "Kapatagan" of lowland Pasig. Even the Marian processions of the Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage passed this route back and forth eleven times.
In the 1600s, Fr. Joaqin Martinez de Zuñiga, conducted a census of Pasig City based on tributes and each tribute representing an average family of 5 to 7, and found that it totalled 3000 tributes, half of which were Indios and the other half were Sangleys These tributes were policed by a company of Mexican soldiers under command by a handful of Spanish, patrolling the Pasig river from nearby Fort Santiago which has the Pasig river snake through it. The years: 1636, 1654, 1670, and 1672; saw the deployment of 22, 50, 86, and 81 of these Latin-American soldiers from Mexico at Fort Santiago patrolling along the Pasig. Some of these Mexicans, after being discharged from their duties, had settled in Pasig and other nearby areas. So that they would be close to the Mexico-made image of Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage in nearby Antipolo. Indian Filipinos that had later settled in nearby Cainta, Rizal also visit Pasig on their way to the capital.
The creek has been also used during the British Occupation of Manila in 1762 to 1764 by the Royal British army, under the leadership of General William Draper and Vice Admiral Sir Samuel Cornish, 1st Baronet, to transport their red troops upstream to take over the nearby forest-surrounded villages of Cainta and Taytay. They even did an ambush at the "Plaza Central" in front of the Pasig Cathedral, and turned the Roman Catholic Parish into their military headquarters, with the church's fortress-like "Campanilla" serving as a watchtower against Spanish defenders sailing from the walled city of Intramuros via the Pasig River.
The Sepoys backstabbed their abusive British lieutenants and sided with the combined forces of the Spanish Conquistadors, local rice farmers, fisherfolk, and even Chinese traders. After the British Invasion, the Sepoys remained and intermarried with Filipina women, and that explains the Hindu features of some of today's citizens of Pasig, especially Cainta and Taytay.
In 1742, an Augustinian friar named Fray Domingo Diaz, together with a group of wealthy "Mestizos de Sangley" from Sagad, ordered a construction of a marble, roof-tiled cover bridge across the creek in the style of an oriental pagoda. It was named "Puente del Pariancillo", and a few years later, it changed to "Puente de Fray Felix Trillo", dedicated to the dynamic parochial curate of the Immaculate Conception Parish. Edmund Roberts visited Pasig in 1832.
On the night of May 2, 1896, more than 300 revolutionary Katipuneros, led by the Supremo Gat. Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Jacinto and Pio Valenzuela, secretly gained access in this very creek aboard a fleet of seventeen "Bangkas" to the old residence of a notable Valentin Cruz at Barangay San Nicolas, and formed the "Asamblea Magna".
Three months later on Saturday evening, August 29, about less than 2,000 working-class Pasigueños, armed with coconuts, machetes and bayoneted muskets, joined the Katipunan and made a surprise attack at the "Municipio del Gobernadorcillo" and its adjacent garrison of the "Guardias Civil", situated near the border of barangays Maybunga and Caniogan.
That was the first and victorious rebellion ever accomplished by the Katipunan, and that particular event was popularly known as the "Nagsabado sa Pasig". After they had managed to successfully out-thrown the seat of Spanish government on Pasig, the Katipuneros fled immediately and advanced towards a "Sitio" located at the neighboring "Ciudad de San Juan" called "Pinaglabanan", and there they launched their second attempt to end the numerous cases of corruption made by the greedy Castilian "Encomenderos" and "Hacienderos", which shall be commemorated as the Battle of San Juan del Monte.
American invasion era
On June 11, 1901, during the Philippine–American War, the province of Rizal was created through Act No. 137 of the Philippine Commission. Pasig was incorporated into the province of Rizal, and was designated as the capital of the new province.In 1939, the barrio or sitio of Ogong, which includes the present-day Libis area, was separated from Pasig to form part of the newly established Quezon City.
Japanese occupation era
After World War II, the Bitukang Manok was slowly exposing its ecological downfall. It resulted in water pollution due to rational ignorance. The worst came to the Bitukang Manok in the late 1960s when the disappearing waterway, instead of being revived was totally separated from the Marikina River, and was converted into an open sewage ditch, with its original flow now moving in reverse towards the direction of the Napindan Channel, to give way to public commercial facilities.Philippine independence
The Martial Law era
Pasig was home to a number of prominent human rights advocates who became prominent during the administration of Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986. One of these advocates was lawyer and publisher Augusto "Bobbit" Sanchez, whose publication The Weekly Post was so uncompromising in its coverage that Pasig politicians came to refer to it as the "Weekly Pest." Another human rights advocate who was an early critic of Marcos' policies was opposition figure and Liberal Party member Jovito Salonga, a Pasig native who was elected representative of Rizal's second district in 1961.When Ferdinand Marcos' economic policy of using foreign loans to fund government projects during his second term resulted in economic crises at the beginning of the 1970s, numerous Pasigueños participated in the various protests of the time, which eventually came to be known as the First Quarter Storm. This included brothers Eman Lacaba and Pete Lacaba, who lived in nearby Pateros but studied at the Pasig Catholic College where their mother was a teacher.
When Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1971 and eventually declared Martial Law in September 1972, students were unable to congregate. In Pasig, one of the prominent residences that sheltered them and allowed them to meet together was the Bahay Na Tisa in Barangay San Jose. Because the house was also the venue of meetings of prominent Pasig leaders who were pro-Marcos, it came to be known as Pasig's "Freedom House." The house has since been declared an Important Cultural Property by the Philippines' National Museum.
Another prominent site in Pasig which was affected by Martial Law was the Benpres Building, which was shuttered by the Philippine Constabulary when Marcos' declaration closed down all media outlets on September 23, 1972.
After the fall of the dictatorship, one of the first properties to be surrendered by a Marcos crony to the PCGG was the "Payanig sa Pasig" property, at the confluence of Ortigas, Meralco and Doña Julia Vargas Avenues, whose title businessman Jose Yao Campos said he was keeping under the name of the Mid-Pasig Land Development Corp in lieu of Ferdinand Marcos. This was eventually sequestered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government as part of the Unexplained wealth of the Marcos family.