LAUFER] RELATIONS OF CHINESE TO THE PHILIPPINES 25 1 



Matteo Ricci, who presented to the Emperor a map of the world 

 on which he stated that "there are in the world five parts of the globe. 

 The fourth of these was America." 1 



It is at a comparatively late date that Chinese history makes men- 

 don of the Philippine Islands ; and this fact is the more striking, 

 since some of the adjacent isles to the south are touched upon much 

 earlier. The Moluccas, for example, are first mentioned, under the 

 name Mi-li-kil, in the Annals of the T'ang dynasty (618-906), in de- 

 termining the site of the island of Bali, although no special descrip- 

 tion of them is given earlier than the sixteenth century. 2 Puni — 

 that is, Brunei, or the northwest coast of Borneo — appears in the 

 history of the Sung dynasty (960-1279), 3 and we cannot but think 

 that navigators sailing there must have passed the great island of 

 Palawan or some isles of the Sulu Archipelago. However this may 

 be, the Philippines are not actually mentioned by name in literature 

 earlier than the time of the Ming dynasty {Ming shih, chap. 323, 

 p. 11 a). In the fifth year of the period Hung-wu (1372) the first 

 embassy from the Philippines arrived in China with tribute. The 

 site of Luzon is stated on this occasion to be in the South Sea very 

 close to Chang-chou in Fuhkien. The Emperor reciprocated the 

 gifts of this embassy by despatching an official with presents of silk 

 gauze woven of gold and colored threads to the king of the country. 

 From this first mention of the Philippines in Chinese history we 

 should not be so narrow-minded as to infer that Chinese intercourse 

 with the Philippines dates from just the year 1372; on the contrary, 

 the fact that there was a Philippine embassy in that year points to a 

 long commercial intercourse between the two peoples, which had 

 escaped the knowledge of the court historiographers at Peking. 

 Although the imperial geography of the Ming, the "Ta Ming i t'ung 

 chi," states expressly that no investigation of Luzon had been made 

 by earlier generations, this is refuted by the fact that we meet with 

 an account of the Philippine tribes in the before-mentioned "Chu 

 fan chi" of Chao Ju-kua in the thirteenth century. 4 Chao Ju-kua 

 describes a country in the north of Borneo which he calls Ma-yi(t), 

 which name Professor Blumentritt thinks is identical with Bay, the 



1 E. Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, vol. 

 11 (London, 1888), p. 324. 



2 Groeneveldt, loc. cit., p. 117. 



3 Ibid., pp. 106, 108. 



4 The passage in question has been translated by Professor Hirth in his 

 book "Chinesische Studien," p. 40. 



