Part 4 (2/2)
The older history was considered vague and in its revision, called ”the new history,” fuller details appear, among them another name (Djava, Dj.a.pa or Dayapo (Dva-apo?)). The larger houses were covered with palm leaves and like the king's equipped with ivory couches. Bamboo mats are also mentioned and the exports are given as tortoise sh.e.l.l, gold and silver, rhinoceros-horns, and ivory. The ivory might have been white camagon, since it was used for furniture, and the rhinoceros horns could have been imported. The rapid intoxication from the native drink is emphasized and, contrary to the American traveller (Rev. Arthur J. Browne) who attributed the introduction of vice here to his soldier-countrymen, a virulent venereal disease is mentioned. The alternative name of the island turns out to belong to the place on it where the king resided and he is said to be a descendant of Ki-yen who had lived more to the east in the town of Pa-lu-ka-si. Of his thirty-two high ministers Datu Kan-liung was chief and twenty-eight small neighboring countries owed him allegiance, as the twenty-eight islands would to a powerful Sulu sultan. (As to number of islands, see Saleeby's History of Sulu, Manila, 1908, p. 15.)
A royal mountain resort overlooking the sea was Lang-pi-ya, a name for which, like the others, Groeneveldt finds it difficult to name a counterpart in Java, in this case noting ”we think it advisable not to insist upon the above identification.” The lat.i.tude would seem to have been in the Sulu neighborhood for at the summer solstice an 8-foot gnomon cast, on the south side, a 2.4-foot shadow.
Between 627 and 649 envoys to China accompanied the tribute bearers from Dva-ha-la and Dva-pa-tan (Dapitan?), receiving acknowledgments under the Chinese Emperor's great seal. Dva-ha-la also asked for good horses, and got them.
Then in 674 there was an ideal ruler, a woman named Sima, of whom a story is told similar to one remembered in Korea, and somewhat like the tales of China's Golden Age, that a foreign king (prince of Arabs) to test the reports he had heard sent a bag of gold to be left in the road. There it remained undisturbed till the heir apparent happened to step over it. The incensed queen was dissuaded by her ministers from killing him but, saying his fault lay in his feet, insisted on cutting these off, finally, however, compromising on amputating the toes. Not only was this an example to the whole nation but it so frightened the Arab king that he did not carry out his planned attack. This variation of the Queen of Sheba-Solomon anecdotes is common in Chinese history, and its extensive use was probably due to the same sort of local adaptation as later made an orientalized Dido story of land-measurement trickery spread so quickly after the coming of the Europeans. Groeneveldt suggests the Arab prince might have been one of the Arab chiefs in the Archipelago, which would by our identification nicely fit with Bornean conditions.
Between 766 and 779 three Ka-ling envoys visited China and in 813 four slaves (Groeneveldt thinks negroes), a.s.sorted colored parrots, ”pinka-birds”--whatever these may have been, and other gifts were presented to their powerful neighbor. A t.i.tle of ”Left Defender of the office of the Four Inner Gates” came to the amba.s.sador who, by cleverly seeking to relinquish this t.i.tle to his younger brother, secured imperial praise and the coveted honor for two members of his family instead of one.
In 827 and 835 were two emba.s.sies, and between 837 and 850 an envoy presented female musicians as the tribute gift. (Account summarized from Groeneveldt, pp. 12-15.)
”The great sea southwest of Hainan,” says he, ”* * * has in it Triple-joint currents (Shan-ho-lin). The waves break here violently, dividing into three currents: one flows south and is the sea which forms the highway to foreign lands; one flows north and is the sea of Canton (and Amoy) * * * one flows eastward and enters the boundless place, which is called the Great Eastern Ocean Sea.
”s.h.i.+ps in the southern trade, both going and coming, must run through the Triple-joint currents. If they have the wind, in a moment they are through it. But if on getting into the dangerous place there is no wind, the s.h.i.+p cannot get out and is wrecked in the three currents. *
* * It is said that, in the Great Eastern Ocean Sea there is a long bank of sand and rocks some myriads of li (705 yards or 2-5 mile) in length. It marks the gulf leading to Hades (Wei-lu). In olden times there was an ocean-going junk which was driven by a great westerly wind to within hearing distance of the roar of the waves falling into Wei-lu of the Great Eastern Ocean. No land was to be seen. Suddenly there arose a strong easterly wind and the junk escaped its doom. (Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-Kua, note 3, p. 185.)
Such superst.i.tion, like that of the Pillars of Hercules, in the Strait of Gibraltar, naturally restrained explorations so that the first voyages across the China sea came from Manila.
The earliest account of Filipino traders comes through a brief mention in a French ethnologist's notes on foreigners in China (Henry St. Denis, Ethnographie, II, 502, according to Rockhill) that in 982 merchants from Manila visited Canton for trade. They probably were not pioneers as it is related that they came with valuable merchandise. This was about the time (between 976 and 983) when the Canton trade was declared a state monopoly. Over two centuries a maritime customs service had existed in that port, reorganized in 971 because of the greatly increased foreign trade.
From 1174 to 1190 (Chau Ju-Kua's account, Hirth and Rockhill, p. 165) the Formosan Bisayan chiefs were in the habit of a.s.sembling parties of several hundreds to make sudden raids on villages of the neighboring Chinese coast. There murders innumerable and even cannibalism were charged against them, though perhaps there should be some discount upon these unfavorable statements as even today enemies are not always reliable authorities upon their adversaries.
They placed great value upon iron, even to the extent of attaching ropes, of over a hundred feet in length, to their spears so that these might be recovered after each throw.
Such was their fondness for all forms of iron that those surprised by them would throw away spoons or chopsticks of that metal so while the pursuers were stopping to pick these up they could gain a start. Once in the house the door had only to be closed and they would be distracted from the attack by sight of an iron knocker which they would wrench off and then immediately depart with it.
The soldiers decoyed them with mail-covered hors.e.m.e.n and in their mad struggle to strip off the armor they would meet their death without being sensible of their danger. Bamboo lashed into rafts conveyed them over the waters and when hard pressed facilitated their escape for these, folded up like screens, were easy to lift and swim off with.
A collector of customs (the Chau Ju-Kua before quoted) of Chinchew, the port in the Amoy district later made famous by Marco Polo, from personal investigation obtained data as to the Philippines which he published in a geography written between 1209 and 1214 (B. Laufer, Relations of Chinese to the Philippines, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1907, p. 24).
Under ”Mai,” an island north of Borneo, he is supposed to include Western Luzon, and the Island of Mindoro, which Blumentritt thinks (Versuch einer Ethnographie der Philippinen, 65) had the name ”Mait,” or black, from the former negrito population. The opening description, now held to be of Manila, tells of about a thousand families who occupied both banks of a water-course. Some people wore only waist-cloths while others draped themselves in a sort of cotton sheet, getting presumably much the same effect as may be seen among the feminine bathers on the Tondo beach any Sunday morning.
Little bronze idols of unknown origin were to be found in the gra.s.sy region outside the village, for Mr. Rockhill is careful to translate ”idols” instead of ”Buddhas,” holding that the word has the more general meaning often. Yet because the later idols of the country were of wood and clay one wonders where bronze idols would be made at that time if not in a Buddhist land. Manila was a peaceable community then, and peaceful too, for the fierce pirates of the south had not yet gotten into the habit of coming there, still less had settled, as they were to do two centuries later.
The traders' s.h.i.+ps anch.o.r.ed in front of the quarters of the chiefs, to whom they presented the white silk parasols which these dignitaries were accustomed to use. There the market was held, and the sh.o.r.e people at once went on board, mixing in friendly fas.h.i.+on with the newcomers. Nor was there fear of loss, for such then was the Manilans'
honesty that even when some one helped himself and took away goods without being seen he could be relied on in due season to faithfully account for them. The period was usually eight or nine months so that, though not travelling the greatest distance, those trading to Manila were among the latest in getting back to China.
The trade was without money, a barter of the country's yellow wax (a medium grade), cotton, pearls, tortoise sh.e.l.l, medicinal betel nuts, and native cloth, for imported porcelain, trade gold, iron censers, leads, colored gla.s.sbeads and iron needles. Names of other settlements in this region may be what we now call the Babuyanes islands, Polillo island, off the East coast, Lingayen in Pangasinan, Luzon perhaps used of East Luzon and (according to Luther M. Parker, a graduate student in the University of the Philippines, 1913-14) Lian in Batangas.
For the group called ”the three islands,” Calamianes, Palawan and Busuanga are the closest resemblances to the curious names of the Chinese narrative, though B. Laufer in his notes to Fay Cole's Chinese pottery in the Philippines (Field Museum Bulletin) suggests another for Calamianes.
Local customs were said not to differ particularly from the ways of Mai. The country, grand in its scenery, had many ridges and ranges of cliffs rose from the sh.o.r.e, steep as the walls of a house.
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