A Rare Edition of Jose Rizal's El Filibusterismo Was Auctioned for P21 Million

The first-ever edition of Jose Rizal's El Filibusterismo was auctioned off for P21 million—"plus premium and VAT," according to historian Ambeth R. Ocampo—at the Asian Cultural Council Auction held on February 14 at Leon Gallery. It now holds the record of being the most expensive book sold in the country.

As evidenced by the name on the front cover, the book is from the collection of Don Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, a Filipino physician, historian and politician of Spanish and Portuguese descent. The title page, likewise, bears a stamp with the doctor's name. The next page also shows a handwritten dedication and signature from Rizal. Its initial price was P5 million.

In Noli Me Tángere, Crisóstomo Ibarra is a hopeful, European-educated idealist seeking reform through education. In El Filibusterismo, he has reemerged as Simoun, a wealthy, glittering jeweler whose outward charm masks a heart turned to designs of vengeance. Disillusioned by reform’s failure, he engineers a plot to ignite revolt—seeding dissent among students, officials, and the clergy and planning a catastrophic explosion at a social gathering to topple the colonial order.

If that sounded dark, that's because El Fili was written at a time when Rizal faced horrible tragedies. In 1890, Spanish authorities seized his family's land in Calamba and exiled his father and brother to Mindoro. That same year, his beloved Leonor Rivera was married off to an Englishman, Henry Charles Kipping. What Leonor did not know was that her mother had intercepted Rizal’s letters, leading her to believe she had been abandoned by the man she loved.

"Rizal would capture these dark events in El Filibusterismo. He tells the harrowing tale of Kabesang Tales, the farmer who loses his land to friars, and also narrates the death of Maria Clara, whose life ebbs away from a wasting disease in a convent," wrote Lisa Guerrero Nakpil, curator at Leon Gallery.

The manuscript was finally completed in April 1891, but the author's struggles did not end there. Based on letters to his close friend Jose Basa, a Filipino merchant and member of the La Liga Filipina, Rizal went to great lengths to have El Fili printed. After exhausting the first loan sent by Basa, he pawned jewelry his mother had given him and lived on tea and biscuits. It was Valentin Ventura, his fencing companion in Paris, who heard about the situation and sent the funds.

El Fili did not have as many copies as its prequel, but it was enough to "strike a stronger blow for the cause of revolution, a far more direct call to action and change than the reformist Rizal, who was better known in the Noli," wrote Nakpil.

The sequel included a message from Rizal’s confidante Ferdinand Blumentritt (translated from Spanish): "It can easily be supposed that a subversive (filibustero) has secretly bewitched the league of friar-lovers and reactionaries so that, unconsciously following his inspirations, they favor and foster that policy which ambitions only one end: to spread the ideas of subversion throughout the entire country and convince the last Filipino that no other salvation exists outside of separation from the Mother Country."

On top of that, the whole book is dedicated to the martyred Padres Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora. "Therefore, as long as your participation in the Cavite mutiny is not clearly proven, whether or not you were patriots, whether or not you harbored sentiments for justice and liberty, I have the right to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil which I undertake to combat," he wrote to the priests in an excerpt of the translated text.

This story originally appeared on Esquiremag.ph. Minor edits have been made by the Preview.ph editors.