FIRST-TIME visitors to the 'carat strip' of Manila's Chinatown are likely to do a double take at the Florentina Yu jewellers in Ongpin Street.

Here, shoppers peering into a fluorescent-lit glass vitrine displaying trays of gold jewellery rub shoulders with locals buying pan de sal rolls and fluffy ensaimada cakes.

As a fusion concept, a jewellery store and a bakery sharing the same floor space is never going to be the next bookstore-cum-cafe.

But such are the charms of Binondo, Manila's atmospheric Chinese quarter that lies across the murky Pasig River from the old Spanish walled city of Intramuros.

You won't find many map-in-hand tourists exploring Binondo; it's not that kind of Chinatown. But a couple of hours spent exploring the shops on its busy main thoroughfare Ongpin Street, and getting lost in its side streets, is a must-do in Manila.

Singaporeans with long memories who know Binondo say its scattering of pre-war buildings and fly-blown facades remind them of Chinatown back home in the 1960s, before it became a conservation area of temples and converted shophouses.

It is not unusual to see red lanterns in front of the Binondo Church, the main landmark of Binondo.

'Parts of Smith and Temple streets used to look a bit like Binondo,' remembers Mr Patrick Lim, 61, who runs a building-supply business here.

Ethnic Chinese in the Philippines comprise less than 2 per cent of the population of 89 million. From that minority, a predominantly Hokkien-speaking community continues to live in Binondo.

Centuries before the explorer Ferdinand Magellan waded ashore on these islands in 1521 and named them for King Philip of Spain, merchant ships from China were trading with native settlements along Manila Bay and the Pasig River.

It wasn't until the galleon trade linked the Philippines with Mexico that the Chinese came in large numbers, mostly traders and artisans from Fujian province.

Alarmed at the influx, the Spanish created the enclave of Binondo in 1594 and made sure it was well within the firing range of the cannons of Intramuros.

'They arrived young and penniless, they died old and moneyed,' wrote the Philippine novelist Nick Joaquin of these early migrants in a book on Manila.

Religion and inter-marriage brought the local Chinese and the Filipinos closer together. To the Philippines' credit, its minority Chinese population, at least in modern times, has not had to endure the sort of trials faced by other communities elsewhere in South-east Asia.

Over 80 per cent of Filipino-Chinese are thought to be Christian, though Chinese customs and rituals are still observed.

These come together at the Santo Cristo de Longos pavement shrine on the corner of Ongpin and Tomas Pinpin streets, where passers-by stop to worship before a crucifix of red roses and light incense sticks.

A good place to start a Binondo walk is the Filipino-Chinese Friendship Arch at the bottom of Jones Bridge in Quintin Paredes Street. If you get there between breakfast and lunch, pop into the New Po-Heng Lumpia House at No.531. This is a pleasant spot for a snack. The restaurant has an airy covered courtyard full of potted palms.

Lumpia is a Filipino version of an uncooked spring roll, albeit one with Hokkien roots. The lumpia here mixes dried seaweed and chopped vermicelli with vegetable and meat filling. Filipinos love a touch of the sweet with their savouries, so don't be surprised to find brown sugar in your lumpia.

CAKES AND GEMS: At the jewellery shop-cum-bakery like Florentina Yu in Ongpin Street, you can shop and eat at the same time.

For a snack on the hoof, there are bakeries galore, many of them specialising in hopia, a Chinese-inspired pastry. A popular hopia filling is made from a purple yam called ube, used widely in Filipino desserts.

The New La Simpatica Commercial in Ongpin Street sells delicately beaded slippers, one of several old trades still surviving in this district.

At La Resureccion Fabrica de Chocolate a few doors away at No.618, four generations of the To family have been making tablea in their tiny shop.

The hard round tablets of cocoa are dissolved in hot milk or water. Hot chocolate was introduced here by the Spanish in the mid-17th century, and is enjoying a revival due to the health benefits being claimed for cocoa.

The Spanish, meanwhile, took to hototay, a light soup of green vegetables, shrimp, pork and beaten egg, served in the noodle eateries, or panciterias, which were run by the Chinese. It is on the menu at the Lai Lai Palace at 839 Ongpin Street.

With at least a dozen banks in Quintin Paredes Street alone, Binondo is probably the most 'banked' district in the Philippines - an apt reflection of how the ethnic Chinese community has prospered over the generations.

Big business in the Philippines is now largely controlled by the old Hispanic elite and a much newer crop of self-made local taipans. Politically, the ethnic Chinese are less well-placed, however.

And success has brought its perils. The Chinese-Filipino community has long been bedevilled by kidnap-for-ransom syndicates. The 1990s are remembered as a particularly dire period in Binondo, but the situation seems to have improved in recent years.

Even so, many kidnappings are thought to go unreported, with ransoms bargained down and quietly paid. It's a subject most Binondo folk are reluctant to talk about.

'But it's not true that we are all rich,' says 60-year-old Medy Ong, who recently returned to live in Binondo, where she was born, after a career as a nurse in Canada.

'Many younger families seem to be moving out, the people remaining are not the wealthy ones.'

This article was first published in Life!, The Straits Times on May 13, 2008.