José Rizal Trivia
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99 free José Rizal trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
José Rizal packed an astonishing amount into 35 years: an ophthalmologist who operated on his own mother, a novelist whose two books helped start a revolution, a sculptor, a Freemason, a polyglot said to handle twenty-two languages, and finally a prisoner who walked to Bagumbayan on December 30, 1896 with a poem hidden in an alcohol stove. These 99 questions run from the easy facts every Filipino student knows — Calamba, Laguna; June 19, 1861; Noli Me Tángere and El filibusterismo — through the details that make his life read like a novel: the pony named Alipato, the class 'emperor' at the Ateneo, the French ship Djemnah, Leonor Rivera's railway engineer, the school he ran in Dapitan, the trial at Fort Santiago, the grave marked 'RPJ' and the Swiss sculptor whose second-place design became the Rizal Monument. The hardest ask about Wenceslao Retana, the Indonesian soldiers who recited his poem, and how many of his 56 sculptures survive. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a one-line explanation. Whether you need 20 trivia about Jose Rizal for a classroom, a Rizal Day quiz or a Buwan ng Wika activity, play it here or print it.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Noli Me Tángere, which mother loses her mind searching for her two young sons?
Sisa
Sisa is driven mad when her boys, church sacristans accused of stealing, disappear; at the novel's end she dies in the arms of the elder, Basilio.
Q 02Which Filipino fable did Rizal draw as a picture story in a friend's album in Paris?
The Monkey and the Turtle
The Monkey and the Turtle filled an album owned by Juan Luna's bride-to-be, and Rizal later published the tale in a London journal, bringing it to European readers.
Q 03In Noli Me Tángere, what penalty falls on Ibarra after he attacks a friar who insulted his father?
Excommunication
Excommunication follows after Ibarra holds a knife to the friar at a town luncheon, letting him go only when María Clara pleads; the Captain-General later has the ban lifted.
Q 04Which woman became Rizal's common-law wife during his exile in Dapitan?
Josephine Bracken
Josephine Bracken could not marry him in church because he refused to return to the Catholic fold, so the two simply lived together as husband and wife.
Q 05For what crime was Rizal executed?
Rebellion
Rebellion was the verdict of a Spanish court-martial, even though Rizal had written a manifesto from his cell disowning the uprising.
Q 06In his essay The Philippines a Century Hence, which power did Rizal predict might one day covet the islands?
The United States
The United States, he wrote, had interests in the Pacific and might dream of foreign possession; less than a decade later it took the islands from Spain.
Q 07In Noli Me Tángere, which friar is revealed to be María Clara's real father?
Padre Dámaso
Padre Dámaso fathered her with the wife of her supposed father, and the friar who hounded Ibarra's own father then works to break the young couple's engagement.
Q 08What paid for the farmland Rizal bought during his exile in Dapitan?
A lottery prize
A lottery prize: he shared the winning ticket with the Spanish commandant who was guarding him, then spent much of his share on land by the sea.
Q 09Rizal's paternal line traced back to Lam-co, a merchant from which Chinese province?
Fujian
Fujian was the birthplace of Lam-co, who was baptised Domingo in Manila's Chinese quarter and later moved to Laguna to farm land leased from a friar estate.
Q 10On what charge was Rizal's mother jailed for more than two years when he was a boy?
Attempted poisoning
Attempted poisoning: accused of helping a relative try to poison his wife, she was forced to walk to the provincial jail and held until the high court cleared her.
Q 11Which historical figure did Rizal pose as for Juan Luna's painting The Blood Compact?
Sikatuna
Sikatuna, the Bohol chieftain who sealed a pact with the Spaniards in 1565, was modelled by Rizal, while his friend Trinidad Pardo de Tavera posed as Legazpi.
Q 12Whose fairy tales did Rizal translate into Tagalog for his nephews and nieces?
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen: while studying in Germany in 1886, Rizal put the Dane's tales into Tagalog and illustrated the little book himself for the children back home.
Q 13Which school gave the young Rizal the class title of 'emperor'?
Ateneo Municipal de Manila
Q 21Which brotherhood, condemned by the friars at home, did Rizal join as a student in Madrid?
The Freemasons
The Freemasons of Madrid spoke against the friars in a way no one could in Manila, which is what drew Rizal to join one of their lodges in 1883.
Q 22Who was the 14-year-old Batangueña Rizal later called his first love?
Segunda Katigbak
Segunda Katigbak, a schoolmate's sister, sat for a portrait sketch by the shy student, but she was already engaged and went home to marry another man.
Q 23At the end of Noli Me Tángere, what does María Clara choose over marrying Linares?
Entering a convent
Ateneo Municipal de Manila split each class into rival Roman and Carthaginian 'empires' that battled over recitations, and the best boy in each ruled as its emperor.
Q 14Which prize-winning Juan Luna painting did Rizal celebrate in a famous 1884 toast in Madrid?
Spoliarium
Spoliarium, a huge canvas of dead gladiators being stripped beneath a Roman arena, had just won gold, and Rizal's toast declared that genius belongs to no single race or country.
Q 15What prize did Rizal's 1879 poem to the Filipino youth win?
A silver pen
A silver pen shaped like a feather was the prize for A la juventud filipina, the poem in which he called the Philippines, rather than Spain, 'my fatherland'.
Q 16Rizal's 1880 prize play El Consejo de los Dioses is set where?
Mount Olympus
Mount Olympus is where the gods weigh Homer and Virgil against Cervantes, because the play was written for a Manila contest held in the Spanish novelist's honour.
Q 17In the bedtime fable that most impressed Rizal as a boy, which creature ignores a parent's warning and dies?
A young moth
A young moth burns in the flame it was warned against; real ones were circling the family's coconut-oil lamp as his mother read it, and the scene stayed with him for life.
Q 18At which French port did Rizal land in 1882 on his way to Spain?
Marseille
Marseille ended a voyage begun in secret: his passport was in the name José Mercado, and his parents had not been told he was going abroad.
Q 19Which play by the German poet Schiller did Rizal translate into Tagalog in 1886?
William Tell
William Tell, the drama of an archer who defies a foreign governor, appealed to Rizal as the story of a people winning its freedom, and he finished the Tagalog version while in Germany.
Q 20Which Noli Me Tángere character powders her face, poses as a Spaniard and marries a lame quack doctor?
Doña Victorina
Doña Victorina weds the Spaniard Tiburcio de Espadaña, passes him off as a physician, and doubles the 'de' in her new surname to sound grander.
Entering a convent is the only way out she will accept: believing Ibarra dead, she tells her godfather it must be 'the nunnery or the tomb', and he gives in.
Q 24Henry Kipping, the Englishman who married Rizal's long-time sweetheart, had what job?
Railway engineer
Railway engineer Kipping had come to build the new line to Dagupan, where her family lived; her mother favoured him, and for a year Rizal's letters went unanswered.
Q 25Which statuette did the schoolboy Rizal carve with a pocket knife at one of his teachers' request?
The Sacred Heart of Jesus
The Sacred Heart of Jesus was meant to travel to Spain with the priest who asked for it, but it was left behind and hung on the boarders' dormitory door for some twenty years.
Q 26Why did the American George Taufer bring his adopted daughter to Dapitan in 1895?
To have his eyes examined
To have his eyes examined: other doctors had failed to restore his sight, and he went home uncured, but his adopted daughter and the exiled doctor had fallen in love.
Q 27Rizal's only child, a son who lived a few hours, was named after whom?
His father Francisco
His father Francisco gave his name to the boy, born early after a prank of Rizal's startled the mother; he lived only a few hours.
Q 28Rizal annotated a 1609 history of the Philippines by which Spanish author?
Antonio de Morga
Antonio de Morga's book gave Rizal, working at the British Museum, the evidence he wanted that Filipinos had a civilisation of their own before the Spaniards came.
Q 29German police who questioned Rizal suspected him of spying for which country?
France
France and Germany were bitter rivals after their war of 1870, and Rizal had come to Germany from Paris.
Q 30To whom did Rizal dedicate his second novel, El filibusterismo?
Three executed priests
Three executed priests, garrotted in 1872 after the Cavite mutiny, are named in the dedication as victims of the very evil the novel sets out to fight.