When I am in Hong Kong, I avoid the glitz of Kowloon, preferring to walk in the old part of Hong Kong and explore little alleys off the main streets to discover all sorts of stores. From the place where I usually stay on the western end of Queen?s Road, I find all kinds of dried seafood, including shark?s fin in various shapes and sizes. There are tea shops that sell infusions made from dried rose buds or chrysanthemum that provide not just a hot drink but an experience that adds touch, sight and smell to taste. On this side of Hollywood Road, you find feng shui supplies and most important essentials for funerals. There are wonderfully carved wooden coffins in the shape of ingots, and there are all sorts of embroidered cloth to cover every imaginable corpse and the pillow where the deceased will rest his or her head. Here you can also buy ?hell money? in denominations of millions and billions so that you can supply the dead in the afterlife. Aside from money, you can also buy paper cars, houses, and even Louis Vuitton bags to burn and make sure the soul is properly decked out in the next life.

I walk aimlessly along Hollywood Road and the former Cat Street (now divided and renamed Upper and Lower Lascar Road) because this is the center of the Hong Kong antiques and curio trade. I have never bought anything here, but I enjoy window-shopping because some objects are displayed so beautifully as in museums. You can enter the shops, handle the merchandise carefully and learn a lot.

One of my favorite shops is Wattis Fine Art on 20 Hollywood Road (entrance on Old Bailey Street) run by Jonathan Wattis and his Filipina wife Vicky. They sell old maps and prints of China and Asia. They always have a thematic exhibition of their stock and I learn a lot of history painlessly by looking at pictures. On-going is an exhibition on Old Hong Kong through postcards and illustrated articles from the 19th century Illustrated London News, whose artist also visited the Philippines.

Wattis showed me atlases with old maps and prints, wonderful for a collector but incomplete for a historian. I asked him where was the text, but he didn?t have them.

Over the years while collecting rare Filipiniana, I have come across the two-volume work on the Philippines by J. Mallat published in Paris in 1846, but never with the illustrated atlas. The National Historical Institute published a translation of Mallat, again without the atlas.

While looking at Philippine maps and prints, I cringe knowing that these were torn out of a book because the pictures by themselves cost more than the book.

There are a number of watercolor albums showing the costumes of 19th century Filipinos painted by Damian Domingo, Justiniano Asuncion and Jose Honorato Lozano. These albums are prized items in institutional and private libraries today, but whenever I see these pictures I ask where is the text. I handled one such album in the New York Public Library 25 years ago, and today some plates are downloadable from the Internet, but again without the text.

For example, a plate showing a man with a chicken has text that says:

?The fighting cock under his arm is very characteristic, for the two are inseparable quite [sic]. They are constantly training their cocks to fight, and as they meet in the street they always let their cocks have a little sparring. The peg attached to their leg is stuck in the ground when their owner is tired of carrying them, and they are allowed [the] range of the string. The natives like gambling better than work, and the Spanish government, instead of discouraging, does all it can to encourage them to gamble. In every town or village is a theater built by the government for the sole purpose of cockfighting, and upon every bird that enters they impose a tax which yields the government annually 10,000 pounds or 12,000 sterling.

?Cockfighting with spurs is allowed nowhere else but in one of these theaters; the days are feast days and Sundays when natives with their birds may be seen flocking to the theaters in every direction. The fight takes place upon a kind of stage raised a little above the floor, in the center of the building. As soon as a fight is arranged, the stakes are placed under the care of two rich natives, one of whom is willing to take all the bets against one of the birds and the other against the other. Such is the extent of gambling going on that at the conclusion of the fight, many hundreds of dollars have changed hands.

?When all the bets are made and the money staked, then commences the engagement, each owner having first securely tied the spur to his bird?s leg; the spur is about two inches long, pointed, narrow, and sharp on both edges. An engagement seldom lasts long; sometimes they are wounded so desperately as to be in a dying state. Of course, the one that keeps on his legs the longest is the victor. All throughout the battle, there is a deathlike silence; the effect that the excitement has upon the countenances of the natives is most amusing to watch. Immediately after the conquest, then the feelings of the people burst forth, according to their being winners or losers.?

We can only hope all these historical sources can be printed and be made more accessible to researchers and people interested in the Philippines? past.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu