The first scientific map of the Philippines

How a map unearthed under a Newcastle housing estate may hold crucial evidence to land dispute between China and the Philippines

When an ageing Victorian culvert collapsed on land owned by the Duke of Northumberland in May 2012, the effects were immediate and serious: landslips and flooding which resulted in the residents of nearby blocks of flats being evacuated and some of the properties demolished.

But nobody could have predicted that the decay of an underground drainage system in a housing estate in the west of Newcastle would result in the unearthing of a crucial piece of evidence in a bitter land dispute between the Philippines and China.

The story, involving a hard-up English aristocrat, a wealthy Filipino businessman and a 281-year-old map, has yet to reach a conclusion but already reads like the script of a Hollywood film. Alnwick Castle, which is owned by the Duke of Northumberland and where scenes from Harry Potter were filmed, could even act as a ready-made backdrop to the drama.

After the culvert collapsed three years ago, the Duke was left facing a repair bill of up to £12 million to fix the damage. To finance the project, he agreed to sell around 80 family heirlooms at an auction in Sotheby’s in London.

Lot #183 was a map drawn up in Manila in 1734 by Pedro Murillo Velarde, a Jesuit priest, which the auction house’s catalogue described as “the first scientific map of the Philippines”.

Specialists at Sotheby’s set a price of between £20,000 and £30,000 for the 44 by 47-inch document, but it eventually sold for £170,500.

The buyer was Filipino businessman Mel Velarde, the president of an IT firm, who lodged the winning bid over the phone from a steakhouse where he was celebrating his 78-year-old mother’s birthday. Although he was initially interested in the map because he shared a name with the cartographer, he said winning the auction became a “personal crusade” when he realised that it may prove his country’s claim to the Scarborough Shoals. The Shoals, a group of rocks and reefs 120 miles west of the main Philippine island of Luzon, are labelled as “Panacot” on the map, which also shows them as forming part of Philippines territory. The ownership of the rocky islands has long been disputed, with both China and the Philippines laying claim.

Asked why he was so keen to secure the map, Mr Velarde said: “In a true-to-life movie, there’s a part for everybody. There’s a bully in the neighborhood. He already took over our land. Then, this map is owned by a Duke in a Harry Potter castle. It’s like you wanting to play your part in the movie.”

The businessman has now given a copy of the map to the Philippine government, where it will be put to use by officials during legal debate at the UN’s Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. A final judgement on the row is not expected until March next year.

The Philippine government are hopeful that the map may tip the balance in their favour. “China’s claim is about historical title. This old map would certainly present the side of the Philippines when it comes to any historical basis,” said Edwin Lacierda, a spokesman for the country’s president Benigno Aquino III.

The Philippines accused China of seizing the Shoal in 2012, when ships of the two nations were involved in a stand-off. When the smaller Philippine force had to withdraw, the Chinese occupied the islands.

In 2013, the Philippines requested international arbitration in the case, and submitted a 4,000-page dossier to support its claim of sovereignty. China has so far ignored requests to take part in the legal process.

The “Murillo Map”, as it is now known, also contains a series of 12 engravings, depicting the various different ethnic groups which lived on the islands at the time. A Filipino supreme court judge has described it as the “mother of all Philippine maps”, as it also appears to cast doubt on the so-called “nine-dash-line”, which marks out China’s claim to 90 per cent of the South China Sea.

A spokeswoman for the Duke of Northumberland told The Independent that he did not want to comment on the affair. “He’s a very private person and it all happened after the map was sold anyway,” she added.

The map

The “Murillo Map”, as it is now known, was drawn up by the Jesuit priest and cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde in 1734 and published in Manila. According to some historical accounts, it was removed from the Philippines in 1762 by invading British troops.

The map eventually ended up in the possession of the 12th Duke of Northumberland, Ralph Percy, who sold it off alongside around 80 other heirlooms to pay for the damage caused when a Victorian culvert collapsed on his land, causing flooding and landslips.

As might be expected the sizeable wall map, which measures 112cm by 120cm, it is not in the best condition. Notes accompanying the lot when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in November 2014 warned potential buyers: “linen splitting, one panel detached, light browning”.

However, the auction house also described it as “a landmark in the depiction of the islands” and “the first scientific map of the Philippines”. Two side panels contain 12 engravings, portraying a series of native costumed figures, a map of Guam and three city and harbour maps, including Manila.

Source: Independent

Why Victorian houses look so haunted

There are some surprising reasons we often feel creeped out by the ornate 19th-century style

The features that define Victorian architecture — bright colors, intricate woodwork, dramatic roofs — sound cheerful enough. So why has the style popularized in the 19th century become so thoroughly linked to horror? With the menacing secrets of Norman Bates’s house in “Psycho,” the more slapstick spookiness of “The Addams Family” mansion and more, the visual language of the haunted-house genre is undeniably intertwined with the turrets, trims and nooks of the Victorian.

Sarah Burns, a professor emerita at Indiana University, is probably the foremost expert on how Victorians became “an enduring icon of the haunted,” as she puts it. “It goes all the way from cinema to architecture to mass culture,” she says. “You see these attitudes toward the Victorian manifest in every medium.”

Here’s why.

Creepy construction

The layout of a Victorian is about as far from an open floor plan as a house can get. Every level is divided into many rooms, each with a distinct purpose, and rarely with sightlines into another one.

The effect is “almost an infinite labyrinth,” says Adam Lowenstein, author of “Horror Film and Otherness” and a professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh. The luxuries of ample space and a room for every occasion can easily turn into a “nightmare version of the utopian idea,” he explains: “a labyrinth of spaces that are out to get you rather than out to serve you.”

On a practical level for filmmakers, the corners and long hallways of the Victorian create opportunities for jump scares — or at least the threat of them. Laurin Kelsey is the production designer for “The Midnight Club,” the new Netflix thriller set in a Victorian manor called Brightcliffe. She created a layout for the home with “long hallways and creepy hallways,” she says. “The main hallway in Brightcliffe has these big round arches all the way down, … and behind each of those arches is enough space for someone to hide.”

Building materials favored in the Victorian era, such as dark wood, also help conjure a macabre atmosphere. “The rooms felt really heavy and dark and kind of foreboding,” Kelsey says. The era’s characteristic stained glass and thick draperies added to the ominous vibe, but they actually had a utilitarian purpose, too: They protected elaborate furniture and decor from the sun. In urban dwellings, the curtains helped insulate interiors from street odors.

Another nightmarish thing about Victorians is the intense maintenance required to keep up such grandiose homes. For the burgeoning middle class that favored the look in the 19th century, it was a flex to be able to hire servants who could dust and polish all the ornate details. But when the style’s popularity waned and those homeowners moved on, the neglect was all the more apparent. Cue the cobwebs and crumbling exteriors that have become horror-movie touchstones.

“Victorian houses don’t age well,” Lowenstein says. “The image of the haunted Victorian house probably has real reference in all kinds of American neighborhoods where these ornate houses lost their wealthy tenants and became sort of neglected, derelict houses that looked haunted because they weren’t being taken care of.”

In England, where Victorian homes became the preferred setting for 19th-century ghost stories, shoddy construction added to the impression that many of them were haunted, says Simon Cooke, senior editor of the Victorian Web. He explains that the period’s rapidly growing cities and lack of building regulations led to poor workmanship that could be misconstrued as supernatural.

Mysterious banging and groaning inside the walls, for example, could be a restless spirit — or perhaps badly installed pipes. The creaking of floorboards might be footsteps from beyond the grave — or the expanding and contracting that occurs in poorly built structures. Doors that popped open by themselves could have been pushed by phantoms — or maybe they just didn’t fit properly in their frames.

The potent gas used to light the houses, coupled with the lack of ventilation, might have led to another ghostly effect. “[The homes were] full of toxins,” Cooke says. “Ingest too much of that in an enclosed space, it’s not implausible you could suffer delusions.”

Creepy cultural context

During the Victorian era, spiritualism came into vogue thanks to acts such as the Fox sisters, whose career performing public seances began with convincing neighbors that their home was haunted. At the same time, a literary tradition of setting ghost stories inside ordinary houses emerged, with Charles Dickens among its leaders.

It’s not as if spooky stories didn’t exist before, Cooke says, but they would have often been set in places such as castles. During the Victorian period, audience preferences began to shift: “Most of the readers were middle class, and they didn’t know anything about aristocratic castles. … People wanted to read about ghost stories in their own homes.”

When Victorian architecture fell out of fashion, its eerie associations only became more pronounced. During her research into the archetype of the haunted Victorian, Burns, the Indiana University professor emerita, focused on the period in the 1920s when Edward Hopper painted “House by the Railroad” and other artists were rendering similar works. Hopper’s famous piece “has a presence, and it seems a bit, well, creepy, to use that good adjective — looming over the tracks with its mansard roof and all the Victorian embellishments,” Burns says. “And I just wondered, ‘Why a Victorian house? What did this painting mean?’ ”

She dug into the cultural tastemakers of the time, such as magazine writers and architectural critics, and discovered a nearly unanimous disdain for Victorian homes: “The terms in which they described them and condemned them were so, so very negative and so scornful and so anxious,” Burns says. They also tended to cast the style as feminine and foreign, attributes that held a negative connotation then, as they frequently still do.

A smattering of the descriptions Burns found: “piles of excrement,” “an abyss of taste” and “ostentatious and arrogant ugliness.” Architect Joy Wheeler Dow characterized the 1870s as a “reign of terror” when it came to home aesthetics.

Why such over-the-top disgust? These critics drew a connection between the Victorian period and the Gilded Age, which they considered a time of corruption and immorality. By the 1920s, “there was a drive towards efficiency and economy and hygiene, all of which come together in the increasing phasing out of the Victorian house and, ultimately, the fear and loathing of the Victorian house,” Burns says.

As people with means moved out of Victorians, many of the homes became boardinghouses for the lower and working classes, which further cemented them as cultural markers of decline. Any chance of a reputation rehab for the style all but vanished in 1960 — the year that Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” debuted.

The fact that the threat inside Norman Bates’s house was human, not supernatural, made Victorians even more terrifying, says Lowenstein, the film professor. In his view, the house in the movie became a symbol of the way the past can trap us in obligation to “things that are no longer there in a living sense, but are very much there in a sort of haunted psychological sense.”

“There’s an architecture,” he says, “for every nightmare.”

Better for Haunts” Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination

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Source: Washington Post

Stricter Requirements and Penalties for Contractors Imposed

This article talks about Republic Act No. 11711 which amended the old Contractor’s License Law, and increased the fines and penalties, clarified the validity of license to operate and granted longer renewal periods for contractors in good standing.

Republic Act No. 4566, or the Contractor’s License Law

Republic Act No. 4566, otherwise known as the Contractor’s License Law, was recently updated with bigger and bolder fines and requirements. The update merely dealt with an increase in the penalties and fines stated under the Contractor’s License Law, which was passed in 1965.

Republic Act No. 4566 is certainly still good law, with only a few provisions revised or repealed. This law defines a contractor as synonymous with the term “builder”, and includes general engineering contractors, general building contractors, and specialty contractors.

The Contractor’s License Law covers individuals, firms, partnerships, corporations, associations or other organizations, who undertake or offer to undertake or purport to have the capacity to undertake or submit a bid to, or does himself or by or through others, construct, alter, repair, add to, subtract from, improve, move, wreck or demolish any building, highway, road, railroad, excavation or other structure, project, development or improvement, or to do any part thereof, including the erection of scaffolding or other structures or works in connection therewith. The term contractor includes subcontractor and specialty contractor.

Amendments to the Contractor’s License Law Introduced by Republic Act No. 11711

Among the changes introduced to the Contractor’s License Law under Republic Act No. 11711 which the covered “builders” will appreciate, is the clarification that the license to engage in business as a contractor shall be valid for one (1) year from the date of issuance. Previously, the validity of the license was for the remainder of the fiscal year.

Under the original law, the penalty imposed was a fine of not less than Five Hundred Pesos (P500.00) but not more than Five Thousand Pesos (P5,000.00). These amounts were obviously significant in 1965, when the original law was enacted. Moreover, the original law enumerated the acts which subjected the malefactors to the original fine. These acts are stated as “[a]ny contractor who, for a price, commission, fee or wage, submits or attempts to submit a bid to construct, or contracts to or undertakes to construct, or assumes charge in a supervisory capacity of a construction work within the purview of this Act, without first securing a license to engage in the business of contracting in this country; or who shall present or file the license certificate of another, give false evidence of any kind to the Board, or any member thereof in obtaining a certificate or license, impersonate another, or use an expired or revoked certificate, or license…”.

Under Republic Act No. 11711, the amendatory law, new prohibited acts were introduced, as follows:

“Section 35. Prohibited Acts. The following are prohibited under this Act:

“(a) Any contractor who, for a price, commission, fee or wage, submits or attempts to submit a bid to construct, or contracts to or undertakes to constructs, or assumes charge in a supervisory capacity of a construction work within the purview of this Act, without first securing a license to engage in the business of contracting in the Philippines shall be penalized with a fine of not less than One hundred thousand pesos (P100,000.00) but not more than Five hundred thousand pesos (P500,000.00) plus the equivalent of one-tenth of one percent (1%) of the project cost. Furthermore, the offending party shall be prohibited from obtaining a contractor’s license for a period of one (1) year from the time that party is found guilty under this provision.

“(b) The same fine under the preceding subsection shall be imposed upon two (2) or more licensees, each of whom has been issued a license to engage separately in the capacity of a contractor but shall jointly submit a bid or otherwise act in the capacity of a contractor without securing an additional license for acting in the capacity of such a joint venture or combination in accordance with the provisions of this Act. The licenses of the offending parties shall be automatically revoked and they shall be prohibited from obtaining a contractor’s license for a period of one (1) year from the time the licensees are found guilty under this provision.

“(c) It shall be unlawful for any person who is a managing partner, officer, or employee of a licensed partnership, corporation, firm, association or other organization to individually engage in the contracting business or individually act in the capacity of a contractor within this jurisdiction without having a license in good standing to so engage or act. Anyone found to be in violation of this provision shall be penalized with a fine of not less than One hundred thousand pesos (P100,000.00) but not more than Five hundred thousand pesos (P500,000.00) plus the equivalent of one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of the project cost. Furthermore, the offending party shall be prohibited from obtaining a contractor’s license for a period of one (1) year from the time that party is found guilty under this provision.

“(d) Any person who shall present or file the license certificate of another, give false evidence of any kind to the Board, or to any member thereof, in obtaining a certificate or license, impersonate another, or use an expired or revoked certificate or license shall be penalized with a fine of not less than Five hundred thousand pesos (P500,000.00) but not more than One million pesos (P1,000,000.00) and the penalty of imprisonment of not less than one (1) year but not more than six (6) years. The penalties provided in this section are without prejudice to any liability for the violation of any of the provisions of The Revised Penal Code, as amended, or other special laws.”

The new law also increased the fees to be collected for securing the Contractor’s License, with authority to increase the rates every three (3) years, subject to a ceiling of fifteen percent (15%) per increase.

Longer renewal periods were also installed under the new law, now allowing contractors who have been operating in good standing for twenty-five (25) years or more to renew its license every three (3) years instead of the customary annual license renewal required.

Source: NDVLaw