Conclusions

The presence of Filipinos in China between 982 and 1427 is suggestive for the pre-colonial history of those peoples archaeologist Wilhelm Solheim has called Nusantao-“southem island people.”

None of these contacts were made on pioneering voyages of discovery, across sea routes already known in pursuit of commerce already profitable. Butuan in the eleventh century and Sulu in the 15th were dealing in non-Philippine products; spices, aromatics, silks, and porcelain.

Merchants from Ma-i appeared in China only ten years after the establishment of an office of maritime trade in Kwangchow (Can- ton), a port with no seafaring tradition of its own. And 350 years later, Filipino merchants like Arabs in Malaysia, were traveling to Ch’tian-chou farther north in Fukienese vessels. By the late Sung, Ma-i was itself the central port for the exchange of local goods on a Borneo-Fukien route, and may well have been a Brunei outpost.

Chinese accounts call it a “country” with officials imposing harbor regulations but mention no king, and it never sent a tribute mission of its own. The tribute missions themselves are even more suggestive, for they are limited to two very brief periods, the opening years of the Sung and Ming Dynasties when energetic new emperors were tightening up trading restrictions.

The Butuan missions are patent attempts to bypass Champa middlemen and were probably not repeated because they were suc- cessful, just as the Champa-Butuan trade itself was probably success- ful in bypassing Srivijaya controls south of Borneo. Luzon’s prompt response to the first Ming emperor’s closing of Chinese ports to foreign trade was probably an attempt also successful, to transfer Ma-i’s emporium to Manila Bay. The early 15th century Muslim envoy from Mao-li-wu may have been a step in the process, and the Pangasinan mission’s less successful attempts to participate directly in the Borneo-Mindoro-Luzon-Fukien trade. The first Sulu mission with its anomalous three “kings” and the recognition of one as su- perior to the others, may have been intended to consolidate its posi- tion on the new Malacca trade route by the formal alignment of political ties at home. It also seems to have attracted enough Chinese attention to its lucrative trade for the court to send an emissary to woo a Mindanao competitor in Kumalalang. It is noteworthy that there is no Arab shipping or trade route in the story. The late H. Otley Beyer theorized such a route passing up the coasts of Borneo and the Philippines to Korea via Japan, and concluded that the Ma-i merchants who reached Canton in 982 must have got there on Arab vessels.34 He pointed to an uprising in Can- ton in 758 and a massacre in 878 as motivation for a new Arab route, and the presence of Arabs in Korea in 846 as evidence of its existence. 35 Whatever the merits of its reasoning, however, ther

s no need for any theory in the first place: the facts are readily avail- able in the Braddell, Hourani, and Tibbetts studies of medieval Arab maritime commerce.36 Arab sailing directions during the Tang Dy- nasty describe a course from the Strait of Malacca northeast to Champa, where it divides either to follow the coast around to China or to head directly across the open sea to Canton, with a feeder line collecting spices and aromatics in Sumatran and Javanese entrepots where they presumably had been delivered in Nusanto bottoms. Fol- lowing the Canton disturbances, they simply withdrew to Tongkong (northern Vietnam) or Kalab on the Malay Peninsula, transshipping to local Chinese vessels there. During the Sung, they returned not to Canton but to Ch’lian-chou, where they played such a dominant role they were sometimes appointed to Chinese office, but by the end of the dynasty they found it more profitable to board the huge junks of China’s new merchant marine in Malaysian ports. Not until then do Arab sources refer to islands on the east side of the South China Sea.

Beyer’s willingness to construct a theory on such slender evid- ence appears to be based on the assumption that commerce in the South China Sea had to be carried either in Arab shipping or Chinese: he evidently did not consider the possibUity of Filipinos conducting the trade themselves. Since his day, however, historians and archaeolo- gists alike have rediscovered the maritime capacity of the Malaya- Polynesian peoples, and the farflung extent of their trading ventures. In the first century, they were supplying European markets with cin- namon by delivering it to the African coast in outrigger canoes which Pliny, like Chao Ju-kua after him, thought were “rafts”-and in the 13th were delivering Sung porcelains to islands still unknown to the Chinese like Sulawesi. 37 And when the Portuguese reached Malacca

in the 16th, they were surprised to find native merchantmen of greater tonnage than their own naos.3s Magellan died in Mactan in 1521 just a century after Paduka Suli presented the seven-ounce pearl to the Emperor. At that time, Luzon ships were plying the waters between Manila, Timor, and Ma- lacca, three points which describe a triangle that includes all of in- sular Southeast Asia. If one wishes to speculate about the advent of Tang porcelains or Arabic Korans in the prehispanic Philippines, there- fore, a ready explanation is available namely, that they came in ves- sels built, owned, and m:::nned by islanders born within that triangle.