A Citizen of the World

The Travels

Ten years abroad in three continents. He went out a provincial student and came back the most dangerous man in the colony.

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Rizal on a Madrid street in the 1880s, with horse carriages and colonial architecture

The Itinerary

1882 · Singapore, Ceylon, Suez, Naples
His first voyage out. He kept a diary of every port, noting harbours, peoples, and prices with the eye of a student.
1882–1885 · Barcelona & Madrid
Medicine and philosophy at the Universidad Central. Here the Filipino students in Spain began to organise, and here the Propaganda Movement found its voice.
1885–1886 · Paris
Six months in the clinic of Dr. Louis de Wecker, the foremost eye surgeon of the day.
1886 · Heidelberg & Wilhelmsfeld
Further ophthalmic study under Otto Becker, and the poem written to the flowers of the Neckar valley.
1886–1887 · Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin
He learned German thoroughly, translated Schiller, and in Berlin — cold, hungry, and nearly penniless — saw Noli Me Tángere through the press in 1887.
1887 · Vienna, Prague, Rome & the return home
A grand circuit of central Europe, then Marseilles and the passage back to Calamba after five years away.
1888 · Hong Kong, Japan & America
Six weeks in Japan; then across the Pacific and by rail across the United States, a country he admired for its liberty and faulted for its treatment of the coloured races.
1888–1889 · London
In the reading room of the British Museum he copied out and annotated Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas.
1889–1891 · Paris, Brussels & Ghent
Kislap-Kalayaan and the essays of maturity; El Filibusterismo printed at Ghent in 1891 on money he could barely raise.
1891–1892 · Hong Kong
A practice in ophthalmology, his family gathered around him, and the plan for a Filipino colony in North Borneo.

What the Voyages Taught Him

Travel was Rizal's second education. In Spain he learned that the abuses of the colony were not the policy of a nation but the work of an entrenched order; in Germany he learned the discipline of scholarship; in Britain he learned to answer the historians of empire in their own archives. By the time he sailed home in 1892 he had a programme — reform, education, and the dignity of a people — and no illusion about what it would cost him.