[12][13][note 1][14] Lam-co traveled to Manila from Xiamen, China, possibly to avoid the famine or plague in his home district, and more probably to escape the Manchu invasion during the transition from Ming to Qing.

"[20] This was to enable him to travel freely and disassociate him from his brother, who had gained notoriety with earlier links to Filipino priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora (popularly known as Gomburza), who had been accused and executed for treason.

He continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila to obtain a land surveyor and assessor's degree and simultaneously at the University of Santo Tomas, where he studied a preparatory course in law and finished with a mark of excelente, or excellent.

He wrote a poem to the city, "A las flores del Heidelberg", which was both an evocation and a prayer for the welfare of his native land and the unification of common values between East and West.

Besides poetry and creative writing, he dabbled, with varying degrees of expertise, in architecture, cartography, economics, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, dramatics, martial arts, fencing and pistol shooting.

In this period of his life, he wrote about nine women who have been identified: Gertrude Beckett of Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill, Camden, London; wealthy and high-minded Nelly Boustead of an English-Iberian merchant family; Seiko Usui (affectionately called O-Sei-san), last descendant of a noble Japanese family; his earlier friendship with Segunda Katigbak; Leonor Valenzuela, and an eight-year romantic relationship with Leonor Rivera, a distant cousin (she is thought to have inspired his character of María Clara in Noli Me Tángere).

Viola, a friend of Rizal's and an early financier of Noli Me Tángere, was alluding to Dumas's 1848 novel, La dame aux camelias, about a man who fell in love with a courtesan.

His mother suggested a civil marriage, which she believed to be a lesser sacrament but less sinful to Rizal's conscience than making any sort of political retraction in order to gain permission from the Bishop.

He discussed the significance of Palm Sunday in socio-political terms: "This entry [of Jesus into Jerusalem] decided the fate of the jealous priests, the Pharisees, of all those who believed themselves the only ones who had the right to speak in the name of God, of those who would not admit the truths said by others because they have not been said by them.

Rizal's friend Ferdinand Blumentritt, a professor and historian born in Austria-Hungary, wrote that the novel's characters were drawn from life and that every episode could be repeated on any day in the Philippines.

[47] The boys' school, which taught in Spanish, and included English as a foreign language (considered a prescient if unusual option then) was conceived by Rizal and antedated Gordonstoun with its aims of inculcating resourcefulness and self-sufficiency in young men.

[52][53] In Dapitan, the Jesuits mounted a great effort to secure his return to the fold led by Fray Francisco de Paula Sánchez, his former professor, who failed in his mission.

Examining them impartially, comparing them and scrutinizing them, one cannot avoid discerning the human 'fingernail' and the stamp of the time in which they were written... No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space.

While imprisoned in Fort Santiago, he issued a manifesto disavowing the current revolution in its present state and declaring that the education of Filipinos and their achievement of a national identity were prerequisites to freedom.

The friars, led by then-Archbishop of Manila Bernardino Nozaleda had 'intercalated' Camilo de Polavieja in his stead as the new Spanish Governor-General of the Philippines after pressuring Queen-Regent Maria Cristina of Spain, thus sealing Rizal's fate.

Aware of this, the sergeant commanding the backup force hushed his men to silence when they began raising "vivas" with the highly partisan crowd of Peninsular and Mestizo Spaniards.

Immediately following the execution, Rizal was secretly buried in Pacò Cemetery (now Paco Park) in Manila with no identification on his grave, intentionally mismarked to mislead and discourage martyrdom.

His undated poem Mi último adiós, believed to have been written a few days before his execution, was hidden in an alcohol stove, which was later handed to his family with his few remaining possessions, including the final letters and his last bequests.

[63]: 91  During their visit, Rizal reminded his sisters in English, "There is something inside it", referring to the alcohol stove given by the Pardo de Taveras which was to be returned after his execution, thereby emphasizing the importance of the poem.

On one day, she visited Paco Cemetery and discovered guards posted at its gate, later finding Luengo, accompanied by two army officers, standing around a freshly-dug grave covered with earth, which she assumed to be that of her brother's, on the reason that there had never been any ground burials at the site.

Marciano Guzman, cites that Rizal's 4 confessions were certified by 5 eyewitnesses, 10 qualified witnesses, 7 newspapers, and 12 historians and writers including Aglipayan bishops, Masons and anti-clericals.

Six years after his death, when the Philippine Organic Act of 1902 was being debated in the United States Congress, Representative Henry Cooper of Wisconsin rendered an English translation of Rizal's valedictory poem capped by the peroration, "Under what clime or what skies has tyranny claimed a nobler victim?

[98] The United States passed the Jones Law that made the legislature fully autonomous until 1916 but did not recognize Philippine independence until the Treaty of Manila in 1946—fifty years after Rizal's death.

While visiting Girona, in Catalonia, circulars were distributed among the crowd bearing Rizal's last verses, his portrait, and the charge that Polavieja was responsible for the loss of the Philippines to Spain.

The United States promoted Rizal, who represented peaceful political advocacy (in fact, repudiation of violent means in general) instead of more radical figures whose ideas could inspire resistance against American rule.

"[110] On the other hand, numerous sources[111] quote that it was General Emilio Aguinaldo, and not the second Philippine Commission, who first recognized December 30 as "national day of mourning" in memory of Rizal and other victims of Spanish tyranny.

"[118] His critics assert this character flaw is translated into his two novels where he opposes violence in Noli Me Tángere and appears to advocate it in Fili, contrasting Ibarra's idealism to Simoun's cynicism.

His defenders insist this ambivalence is trounced when Simoun is struck down in the sequel's final chapters, reaffirming the author's resolute stance, Pure and spotless must the victim be if the sacrifice is to be acceptable.

In the 10th Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences Awards ceremony, Rizal was honored in the Best Story category for Gerardo de León's adaptation of his book Noli Me Tángere.

[177] Both novels were translated into opera by the composer-librettist Felipe Padilla de León: Noli Me Tángere in 1957 and El filibusterismo in 1970; and his 1939 overture, Mariang Makiling, was inspired by Rizal's tale of the same name.