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The National Museum of the Philippines. The National Museum of the Philippines is the official repository established in 1901 as a natural history and ethnography museum of the Philippines. It is located next to Rizal Park and near Intramuros in Manila. Its main building was designed in 1918 by an American architect Daniel Burnham. Today, that building, the former home of the Congress of the Philippines, holds the National Art Gallery, natural sciences and other support divisions.The adjacent building in the Agrifina Circle of Rizal Park, formerly housing the Department of Finance, houses the Anthropology and Archaeology Divisions and is known as the Museum of the Filipino People. For all the fractious politics and rowdy elections that make the Philippines such a seemingly turbulent outpost of Western-style democracy, there is something ennobling about a nation that styles itself the land of heroes. All throughout the Spanish, American and Japanese occupations, many individuals sacrificed their lives in the name of freedom. The countrys history is written in blood. Resentment at injustice and oppression flared up time and again in violent insurrection against great odds. Today, little remains of that legacy beyond pictures of heroes in public schools and in peso bills. Still, there is National Museum of the Philippines, in what used to be the government center in Manila, repository of a brave peoples natural history and ethnographic heritage. Museums are not very big in the country. They are greatly outnumbered by art galleries. In fact too many Filipinos are preoccupied with todays fads and tomorrows emigration to foreign shores. For the culturati, therefore, finding a suitable home for the National Museum of the Philippines has been a bit of a struggle. Always, the Museum was relegated to poor-relation status, taking over a building when a government agency vacated it for better quarters elsewhere. Early in the 20th century, fortunately, the American architect Daniel Burnham (of Washington D.C. Union Station and Chicago city planning fame) was commissioned to lay out a suitable capital city outside the cramped confines of Intramuros. One result of his efforts was a horseshoe of government buildings around the periphery of Luneta Park: the Executive, Legislature, Finance and Agriculture buildings. In the aftermath of destruction caused by the Liberation of Manila and during Martial Law, a great expansion in the numbers of congressional districts engineered by President Marcos, Congress and the Executive departments transferred to the open vistas of a new government center in Quezon City. Then the National Museum of the Philippines moved into the old Congress building. Having too many artifacts and archives, however, the Anthropology and Archaeology Division needed a building all to itself. Thus it was that the nearby building vacated by the Department of Finance became the National Museum of the Filipino People. The latter is
arguably the more frequented since it houses Juan Lunas Spoliarum, the grandest and most famous painting by a Filipino ever.