Thirteen years after the events of the first book, Ibarra, the young reformer of the first book, returns to Manila disguised as Simoun, a rich jeweller, and feeds the colony's corruption to push it toward a rising. José Rizal wrote it in Ghent in 1891, paying the printer in instalments as the money came; five years later the Spanish authorities shot him. The Philippines read it as the sequel that stopped pretending reform was possible. A hundred plates of painting, from Juan Luna to Joaquín Sorolla, trace the corruption and grandeur of the age Rizal wrote against.