THE RELATIONS OF THE CHINESE TO THE PHILIP- 

 PINE ISLANDS 



By BERTHOLD LAUFER 



The history of the Spaniards on the Philippines is an endless 

 chain of frictions and struggles with the Chinese immigrants and 

 settlers, so that the history of the Philippines during the last three 

 centuries is very closely interwoven with an account of the relations 

 between these two peoples. The trade with China was by far the 

 most important business of the Spanish colony — and with it the for- 

 tunes of the colony rose and fell. An abundant mass of material 

 has been stored up by Spanish writers since this early contact with 

 the East, from which the political and commercial history of Chinese 

 intercourse might well be compiled ; but no attempt has heretofore 

 been made to call to witness coeval Chinese sources, and to compare 

 Spanish accounts with Chinese testimony on the same subject. To 

 advance a step in this direction and do justice to the audiatur et 

 altera pars is the prime object of the present paper. 



The Chinese have been acute observers of foreign nations and 

 countries, and in their astoundingly vast amount of literature we 

 find many valuable reports on the geography, history, and ethnology 

 of the neighboring peoples. The history of the Malayan Archipel- 

 ago (particularly, for example, Java and Sumatra) during the pre- 

 colonial age would be almost shrouded in mystery but for the ma- 

 terial regarding these islands hoarded up by the Chinese. 1 The 

 principal Chinese sources of which I have made use are the Annals 

 of the Ming dynasty, or the "Ming shih," which, in chapter 323, 

 furnishes an account of all islands in the eastern Pacific known to 

 the Chinese at that time, and also of the Portuguese, Spanish, and 

 Dutch, who then made their first appearance in the Far East. 

 Furthermore, the annals of the provinces of Kuang-tung and Fuh- 

 kien frequently speak of the Philippines, and describe historical and 

 other incidents relating to them, for the natural reason that the 

 traders and seafaring people of those parts of China were most 



'The principal papers on this subject are: L. de Rosny, Les peuples orien- 

 taux connus des anciens Chinois (Paris, 1881) ; W. T. Groeneveldt, Notes on 

 the Malay Archipelago and Malacca, compiled from Chinese sources (Batavia, 

 1876), and Supplementary Jottings to this paper in T'oung Pao (1896), vol. vn, 

 pp. 1 13-134. Groeneveldt has not dealt with the Philippines. 

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