Philippine progress prior to 1898 : $b a source book of Philippine history to supply a fairer view of Filipino participation and supplement the defective Spanish accounts — John Shaqi
Philippine progress prior to 1898 : $b a source book of Philippine history to supply a fairer view of Filipino participation and supplement the defective Spanish accountsCraig, Austin
History
Philippine progress prior to 1898 : $b a source book of Philippine history to supply a fairer view of Filipino participation and supplement the defective Spanish accounts
Craig, Austin
Philippines
About the middle of the XV century, Doctors Hose and McDougall
in their history of Borneo (Pagan Tribes of Borneo, London, 1912,
chap. 1) assert, a Bisayan was king of Brunei. This Alakber Tala,
later to be called Sultan Mohammed, introduced Arabic doctrines
into his kingdom and the use of Arabic writing made his reign the
beginning of Brunei's local recorded history. His great grandnephew,
Makoda Ragan, had Arab and Chinese as well as Bisayan blood, a fact
remembered to this day by having representatives of these three races
officiating at the king's coronation, and the fourth official on these
occasions is dressed in ancient Bisayan costume. Makoda Ragah, also
called Sultan Bulkiah, is spoken of as the most heroic character in
Bornean history and conquered the Sulu islands, and sent expeditions
to Manila, the second time seizing the place. His wife, the first
queen of the Philippines of whom we know, was a Javan princess. This
great king was accidentally killed by his wife's bodkin. It was this
monarch or his son who died in 1575 that so impressed the chronicler
of Magellan's expedition.
Corroboration for this considerable historic association comes in
the Chinese jars found in the oldest burial caves as well as prized
among the more remote hill tribes as ancestral possessions, handed
down from so remote an antiquity that their origin has long been
forgotten and they are now venerated as objects that came from heaven
(Fay Cole: Chinese Pottery in the Philippines). The four-toed dragon
claw designs place them among the Chinese manufacture of not later
than the last of the XIV century.
Legend is not lacking, either, for a tradition of Tapul (Saleeby: The
Origin of the Malayan Filipinos, p. 1) relates that a Chinese rajah who
anchored his boat at the south of their island had his daughter stolen
in the night by the "dewas." She was hidden in a bamboo stalk and there
found by the solitary male who had hatched out of a roc's egg. Their
daughter, the earliest recorded Chinese mestiza, was, according to
Doctor Saleeby again, the grandmother of the Chiefs of Sulu.
The very name Luzon is not the time-honored rice mortar, La-sung,
but Luzong of which John Crawfurd (History of the Indian Archipelago,
vol. 1, p. 324) says: "The term, I have no doubt, is Chinese, for the
Chinese, who destroy the sound of all other native names of countries,
or use barbarisms of their own, apply the word Lusong familiarly and
correctly." They even associate it with their famous dynasty of that
name and have a joke of their own at the expense of the Spaniards
(B. Laufer: The Chinese in the Philippines).
Naming in pairs is common enough by Chinese to make it seem more
than a mere coincidence that these islands are called "Liu sung,"
while their neighbors to the north were originally "Liu Kiu."
(Translation, by Hon. W. W. Rockhill, of a Chinese book of 1349,
by Wang Ta-yuan, Description of the Barbarians of the Isles
(Tao-i-chih-lio).)
San-tao.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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