Malacañang Museum Independence Day feature (1996)

by Lakambini Sitoy

Photos by Willie Avila

This feature appeared in the Independence Day edition of The Evening Paper (June 12, 1996). I have not been to the Malacañang Palace Museum since. Doubtless it is much changed.  


FOR SIX years after the Edsa Revolution of 1986 the public associated the words “Malacañang Palace Museum” with the personal effects of deposed president Ferdinand E. Marcos and his family. Visitors came to gawk at the array of Imelda R. Marcos's possessions and the opulence of her private quarters. They ventured up the Grand Staircase with its red carpet and  basketwork wood panelling, into rooms that had been off limits to most of the public for 20 years. They streamed into the palace out of curiosity, perhaps also in an attempt to demystify the administration that had changed the fortunes of an entire country. 

Fulfilling a campaign promise, President Corazon C. Aquino had decided not to live or hold office in the palace, opening the Marcos family quarters as a museum that would be a testament to how the former chief executive had lived and worked. When Fidel V. Ramos was elected to the presidency in 1992, his administration decided to retain the museum, but focused instead on the eleven presidents who had preceded him: Emilio F. Aguinaldo (1898-1901), Manuel L. Quezon (1934-1944), Sergio Osmeña Sr. (1944-1946), Jose P. Laurel Sr. (1943-1944), Manuel A. Roxas (1946-1948), Elpidio R. Quirino (1948-1953), Ramon F. Magsaysay (1953-1957), Carlos P. Garcia (1957-1961), Diosdado P. Macapagal (1961-1965), Marcos (1965-1986) and Aquino (1986-1992).

The change was motivated not so much by the desire to bury the spectre of the Marcos administration, but by the need to call forth other ghosts, those of the past presidents who had been consigned to dormant history and revived only in the few months every year that their names are repeated in grade school. In June 1992, President Ramos closed the Malacañang Palace Museum to viewers while it underwent major reformatting. The 11 presidents were assigned a room each, the order, determined by lot and not chronology. Portraits, furniture and memorabilia from different sources were installed. The museum reopened in February 1993.

A guided tour of the Museum takes one first to the Atrium on the ground floor, one of the rooms constructed during the 1978-1979 reconfiguration of Malacañang Palace, which the Marcoses ordered in time for their silver wedding anniversary. The vaulted glass roof allows natural light to fall on a fountain, on groupings of tropical plants and, in between the foliage, carved wooden statues. There is a carabao, the figure of a young woman, a fertility god. The hallway that encloses the Atrium on all sides is lined with carvings from Paete, Laguna, which are based on a mural by Carlos "Botong" Francisco. They depict scenes from Philippine history. From the edge of the atrium, one can see the 2nd floor exhibit gallery, which looks down on the sunlit room. Museum tour groups go up the red carpeted staircase, which used to be lined with portraits of European explorers done by unknown 19th century Spanish artists. These paintings have been in the Palace since the time of the Governors General. Like many of the other pieces of furniture and memorabilia, the exact date and manner of their acquisition are unknown, since records have been lost. Now, however, the paintings have been moved to one of the upstairs rooms excluded in the museum tour and only the staircase and its two sentries standing at attention, in dress uniforms patterned after those worn in the Philippine Revolution, greet the viewer.

The first president in the tour is Ramon Magsaysay. The Magsaysay room contains a portrait above a cabinet, a carved wooden bench of Philippine origin, and a round table. It is strangely bare. The row of five vintage photographs above the bench is uncaptioned. In an anteroom are more photographs and a stand, and a barong tagalog that belonged to the former president. Visitors learn from the guide that Magsaysay ordered the barong tagalog to be de rigeur at all official functions. Oddly, none of his photographs show Magsaysay in this garment.

A shoe mounted in a glass case in the same anteroom is quite disconcerting. It is a two-tone shoe with an upper of canvas and black leather at the heal and toe, a style that is back in fashion. The grommets which hold the laces are ripped. This was a shoe that Magsaysay was wearing when he died in a plane crash in 1957. It was the only item of his clothing recovered from the wreckage.

“People can relate most to the shoe,” says Mae Gaffud, manager of the Malacañang Heritage Foundation, which put together the current museum display. Things like his barong tagalog and that photograph astride his favorite horse Victory make him more of a real person to visitors.” The Foundation hopes to stock the museum with similarly personal items in the hope of reconstructing the former presidents as flesh and blood entities, not just dour personages in history text. At present it is arranging with the president's son, Senator Ramon Magsaysay Jr, to procure the president's riding boots and saddle. These will no doubt increase the interest value of a display that fascinates visitors as it is; Magsaysay, says Gaffud, is the most well-known of the presidents who preceded Marcos and Aquino.

Separated from the Magsaysay display by a stretch of corridor is a chamber dedicated to Carlos P. Garcia who succeeded Magsaysay, flying home from Australia to be sworn in shortly after his predecessor’s death. Garcia was a sportsman and so the foundation designed this Chamber as a game room. The first thing that greets the eye is the monumental billiard table, carved of narra and donated rather appropriately, by Vice-President Joseph Estrada. It looks antique, but isn't; it was donated in 1996. Almost all the pieces of furniture in the museum were fashioned by Filipino craftsmen and patterned after vintage pieces. The chess sets, about seven of them, actually belonged to the former president, who was an avid player. They never fail to catch people's attention, Gaffud says. In this era of video entertainment, chess is regarded as a rather stodgy business. The sets remind the younger set of what recreation was like in Garcia's time, the late 1950s.

In addition, the game room displays a set of golf clubs. There's also a board hewn out of stone for playing sungka, a traditional Filipino game. Visitors retrace their steps to the Magsaysay room and from there walk down a corridor whose walls contain colorized photographs and engravings of Malacañang Palace, spanning two centuries from the time it was a stone house in the country with a bathhouse for those who wanted a leisurely dip in the Pasig River, up to the present day. Nothing of the original structure remains. In fact, the wing of the Palace which houses the Museum is less than 20 years old. The 1978-1979 renovations actually resulted in entirely new structures, of which the wing is one.

This corridor leads to the Quezon room. Off it is another corridor leading to the study, which has been devoted to the memorabilia of Manuel A. Roxas, the last President of the Commonwealth Government and the 1st President of the Third Philippine Republic. The Roxas portrait that hangs on the wall was done by Fernando Amorsolo. Two flags flank the portrait. One is the Philippine standard, the other the flag of the Philippine Commonwealth. The Museum foundation is making arrangements to have both of them framed.

A glass-doored case houses old books, some of them dating back to the 16th century and bound in what looks like vellum. In front of the Roxas portrait is a bank of black and white photographs. A remarkable shot shows Roxas striding confidently toward the camera, Manuel L. Quezon to his left and Sergio Osmeña to his right. They are wearing lightweight summer suits (americanas these were called) and hats, and are apparently in good humor. The photograph has no date. None of the photographs have dates. Another photo is just a blurred black and white shot of a crowd massed around two flags. This is a memento of the transfer of sovereignty from the United States to the Philippines on July 4, 1946. The Philippine flag is going up, the American coming down. It takes a good eye to spot this photo though, and to pinpoint its historical significance.

The furniture in this room was procured only last year. Still, the long conference table and polished mahogany desk exude a quaint charm in the glow of the Viennese chandelier. The chairs are varnished in black with bronze trimmings. An atmosphere of wealth and quiet dignity pervades this room, as it does with most of the first half dozen rooms in the museum. The Malacañang Heritage Foundation is to be commended for achieving this look from scratch.

When the foundation took over the museum in 1992, they inherited the furniture put there by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Most of these were of foreign origin, and some were quite opulent, showy. Obviously, these ran counter to the Foundation's intentions: to assemble a look for each room that would reflect the furniture and decor that a particular president would have lived with. The Marcos furniture is now in storage along with Mrs. Marcos's personal positions, including her infamous collection of shoes. 

THE anteroom devoted to the memorabilia of Manuel L. Quezon was once the private sitting room of Imee and Irene Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos’s daughters. Quezon became the 1st President of the Commonwealth Government, holding office from 1935 to 1944, and holds the added distinction of being the first Filipino president to reside in Malacañang Palace. During World War Two, he moved the seat of government from Bataan to Corregidor to Australia and finally to Washington, DC. He died of tuberculosis while in exile in New York. The Quezon Room was funded by the San Miguel Corporation, which is co-owned by the Soriano family. Don Andres Soriano was the Secretary of Finance in the Quezon war cabinet; a photo of him hangs above a sculpture by Graciano Nepomuceno entitled Inang Bayan, which symbolizes the Philippines as ravaged by the Second World War. The sculpture depicts a dead woman with an infant trying to suckle at her breast.

Two items from this display actually date back to Quezon’s term and were used in the palace by the president himself. One is a console, the other a cabinet to the right of the Quezon portrait painted by Leon Burton. They are attributed to the inmates of the Iwahig Penal colony and are impressed with the seal of the Commonwealth government. The set of chairs in the center of the room, which are of wood and rattan, are old as well, but not as old as the first two pieces.

Unlike most of the other presidents’ memorabilia, the Garcia golf clubs, for instance, these pieces of furniture were not procured by the Malacañang Heritage Foundation, but were and still are part of the Palace collection. The official portraits of the different presidents have the same status. Visitors may wonder at this point why so little of the original palace furniture remains. No one can say exactly when the furniture, the official china and the silverware began to vanish, but sources say they were given away during the Marcos administration at about the time of the 1978 to 1979 renovations. They have reputedly been distributed among private individuals. This gradual erasure of so much of the palace legacy is responsible for the bareness of most of the rooms today, and the resemblance to empty stage sets. 

(The feature article continues in my next blog post)