#mai-i

We like to think of the Philippines as some sort of thriving pre-Hispanic entrepot. These glorious Islands rich with resources and good, intelligent and shrewd merchants who treated with the great empires of East Asia.

Nice to believe, noh?

There were trade and diplomatic relations on-going; isolated though it may have been to certain areas of the archipelago, and certain tribes. We were on the fringe, just barely touching the main of regional trade.

The Philippines does show up in Chinese trade documents. Mindoro was known as Mai-i, among others. 982 saw the first of the Mai-i traders to visit Canton; bearing gifts for the Emperor. Those tribes became vassals and a kind of a tributory state to the Chinese empire. And that was just the beginning, far from the end, of our growing connections to East Asia.

We do like to imagine the pre-Hispanic Filipinos as well-traveled, well-connected and experienced traders. Then on the other hand, our histories assume that they were idyllic Garden of Eden dwellers, noble and pure, who were tricked and debased by the wily white man.