Early Filipinos

Early Filipinos were not in their feastings to eat and drink to excess, although they certainly drank a great deal more than they ate. On such occasions their doors were open to all who wished to come and drink with them. No matter how drunk he departs from a feast or how late at night, ever failed to find his own house. If there is need of weighing the price in silver or gold, he does it with such steadiness that his hand never trembles nor misses the exact point of balance.
The costume and dress of inhabitants of Luzon before the Spaniards enter the country. They dressed well. Their taste ran to bright blues and reds, gold chains round the neck and burnished bangles on wrist and ankle. This suggests that among early Filipinos the arts of weaving and dyeing were fairly well developed, while craftsmanship in the precious metals had reached a surprisingly high level of virtuosity. Industry, however, was chiefly of the household type, with each village and clan community producing most of what it needed. And yet, we cannot altogether rule out the existence of production for the market.
While we are still pretty much in the dark with regard to the purely domestic trade of the early Filipinos, we are somewhat better informed as to their foreign trade. Certainly, the Chinese carried on trade with the islands from a very early period. The pottery being unearthed by archaeologists in Southern Luzon, Mindoro, Palawan and elsewhere provides striking confirmation of the evidence from Chinese historical sources. These suggests that by the thirteenth century Chinese merchant ships were calling regularly at Palawan and the Calamaines group, and that fair trading practices had been established by common consent. The trade in the north of the archipelago seems to have been most active and extensive at Ma-i, which is commonly identified as the island of Mindoro. At Sulu; the Chinese traders also found it both safe and profitable to put out their goods to native traders on consignment.

By the early 15th Century, the trade between Sulu and China was sufficient importance to justify a tribute mission to Peking. It was one of the more solemn fictions of Chinese diplomacy that foreigners could have only one object in coming to China: to swear fealty to the emperor and pay the tribute of vassalage. It was, however, generally recognized on both sides that such “tribute” missions were really trade mission, and while the emperor and the foreign envoys exchanged gifts, their respective followers engaged in rather more mercantile transactions. It is the tradition among the people of Magindanao that the religion of Islam was brought to them by a nobleman of Johore named Kabungsuwan, toward the end of the 15th century.
The Magindanao records make mention of a mysterious power which Kabungsuwan and his men possessed of killing someone from a distance by “beckoning” to him. It is quite possible that the strangers brought with them not only a new religion but a new weapon: the gun. The migrants from the Malay Peninsula do not seem to have come in any large numbers; but by virtue of superior weapons and organization they were able to impose on the indigenous population both their religion and their rule. This process, which must have taken several generations to complete, is what telescoped in story from the traditions of the Magindanao. While Magindanao and Sulu were developing into sultanates under the sway of Muslim princes from Malaysia, the profits of Chinese trade were slowly bringing forth in the northern islands more sophisticated forms of political and social organizations. In 1544, an aged inhabitant of Abuyog in Leyte told one of Villalobos officers where these trading towns were to be found.
By the second half of the sixteenth century Butuan in Northern Mindanao was a port of call not only for Chinese but for Muslim Malay merchants. It had also advanced sufficiently beyond the clan organization of the barangay to be ruled by what to a Westerner was recognizably a “king”. But by this time the Filipinos were no longer content to wait for trading vessels to visit them. They were striking out on their town. The first years of the sixteenth century saw merchant seamen from Luzon sailing their junks into Malacca Roads and establishing a settlement north of Selangor. Just before the arrival of the Spanish, the rulers of Manila had accepted the faith of Islam. They had also evolved a feudal kingship not far removed from that early medieval Europe.