The Chinese also have arrived in California via the Philippines. The Philippines lay between Nueva Espana and China. Chinese had settled in the archipelago even before Miguel Lopez de Legazpi conquered the Philippines for Spain in 1565 (thanks to Andres de Urdaneta's discovery of the eastern way to Asia) and founded Manila in 1571. After the Spanish conquest, the so-called "Manila galleons" started traveling between Acapulco in Nueva Espana and Manila in the Philippines one or two times per year, and were known as "Naos de China" because they came with silver and with American vegetables (corn, potato, tomato, tobacco, cocoa, etc) and sometimes imported European objects and returned home with Chinese luxury goods such as spices, porcelain, silk, lacquerware and jade as well as slaves.

Most of the Chinese merchants and sailors who settled in the Philippines came from the province of Fujian and spoke Hokkien. The Chinese in the Philippines were almost all men and most of them married local women. The second-generation "Chinese" in the Philippines were therefore mostly mixed-race. The Spaniards called them "Sangleyes".

Trouble started soon, when the Chinese pirate Lim Hong (Limahong for the Spaniards) attacked the newly established capital of Manila in 1574. He was not working for the Chinese government (which in fact wanted him dead or alive) but the Spanish rulers remained suspicions about the Chinese population's loyalty after Limahong was defeated and fled. In 1581 the Spanish authorities opened a market calle Parian that became a sort of ghetto for the Sangleyes who didn't convert to Catholicism: it was located outside the walled city of Intramuros, where the Spanish colonizers lived and worked. In 1594 the authorities also created Binondo for the Chinese who converted to Catholicism (it is Chinatown in today's Manila, the oldest Chinatown in the world). The Sangleyes vastly outnumbered the Spaniards (thousands to a few dozens). The Sangleyes revolted in 1603 and the Spaniards killed thousands and burned down the Parian. From generation to generation the Parian kept moving.

Despite the distrust, the Chinese colony in the Philippines grew rapidly, as trade with China was lucrative and the only other option was to sail west across the Atlantic Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope (in violation of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1493) using Dutch and Portuguese ports in the Indian Ocean: clearly not an ideal route.

Spanish priest Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga, who wrote "Historia de las Islas Filipinas" (1803), counted tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese in the Philippines. It became possible for the Chinese to emigrate to North America because both the Philippines and Mexico were part of Nueva Espana. Trade run by Manila's Sangleyes indirectly connected Canton with Sevilla, often bypassing state control (both Qing and Spanish), thereby creating a globalized economy in which American silver was exchanged for Asian goods, or Asian goods fashionable in Europe for European luxury goods that became fashionable among China's elite (like clocks and mirrors). This globalized economy effectively extended to the whole globe because the western Mediterranean was connected with the Middle East via ports like Marseille and Canton was connected with India via British routes and nearby Macao via Portuguese routes. And Manila became a cosmopolitan city, as documented by Spanish missionary and cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde, author of the first detailed map of the Philippines in 1734 (the "Carta hydrographica y chorographica de las Yslas Filipinas").

In about 1763 Filipino immigrants somehow traveled as far as the swamps of Louisiana and founded the fishing village of Saint Malo, possibly the first Asian settlement in North America, a "floating" village of raised stilt homes that was first described in 1883 by writer Lafcadio Hearn. Both Chinese sailors and Chinese merchants travelled on the Spanish galleons bound for Acapulco. These galleons always stopped in Monterrey, sometimes for several weeks. Chinese fishermen settled around Monterrey even before Portola and Junipero Serra built the first Spanish settlements of Alta California in 1769. After Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, the route from the Philippines to America declined for a while because Spain moved control of the Philippines to Madrid. The next wave of Chinese emigration to the American continent came after Britain emancipated the African slaves of its Caribbean colonies. Both Britain and the Netherlands looked at China for indentured servants and workers (cheap labor). The decline of the transatlantic slave trade created an opportunity for those Chinese who wanted to emigrate to America: Chinese contract laborers found work as far as Argentina and in the sugar plantations of Cuba (the first recorded arrival in Cuba dates from 1847 when 206 arrived from Guangdong province) and later worked on the Panama Canal in 1903–14. Cuba had the largest Chinatown in Latin America (today there are virtually no Chinese left in Havana's Chinatown because the Chinese, having become rich capitalists, left after communist dictator Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and nationalized all private businesses). Today, one of the smallest Chinese communities of Latin America is in Mexico, despite the fact that many arrived in Acapulco: clearly many Chinese left Mexico and the simplest explanation is that they moved to California.