A receipt from a golden age
One of the odd things about retirement is finding myself busier than when I was in full-time employment. When the discipline of daily routine disappeared, and I found myself with a lot of “free time,” I accepted too many former “side hustles” and ended up “tired” rather than retired. I was mistaken to think retirement would give me the much-needed block of time to sit down and do some serious long-form writing. Encouraging younger authors meant writing blurbs and introductions to other people’s books rather than concentrating on my own. Then there are the commencement and keynote speeches to deliver—a clear sign that I have entered the stage of life best described in airport terms as the “pre-departure area.” My only consolation is that I have not yet reached the “Final Call for Boarding.”
Those who have seen me perform on a podium often remark on the seemingly effortless, seamless presentation that hides weeks of stress and preparation before D-Day. Thanks to Apple Keynote, my slide decks look sharp and professional. The problem with speaking from slides is that one does not write a full paper beforehand as we did in the last century, when all one had was a voice, eye contact, and a prepared text on a page. These days, artificial intelligence can transcribe and polish my oral presentations, so with a good amount of editing and proper citations, these can eventually be published as essays or journal articles.
What has kept me awake for weeks now is the two-day international gold conference, Ritual, Ornament, Currency: Gold in Early Asian Cultures, split between the Ayala Museum and the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), which between them hold the most important study collection of Philippine pre-Spanish gold dating from the 10th to the 16th centuries. The BSP collection has been inaccessible for some time. These pieces used to be handsomely displayed in the basement of the former Metropolitan Museum on Roxas Boulevard. I loved descending into that vault of black marble, steel, and glass to see both excavated gold and earthenware made long before Magellan was even conceived. I was fascinated by the elaborate security that required two people—one from the Met Museum and the other from the BSP—to punch in a code simultaneously to open the vault every morning.
Pending the building of a permanent BSP Museum, the gold collection—the Surigao Treasure, in particular—has been placed on loan to the Ayala Museum, bringing together gold pieces that originated from a chance find in Sitio Magroyong, Barangay San Miguel, Surigao del Sur in 1981. One would think that after a millennium there would be no more gold finds, but the Earth keeps giving (not to mention all the fakes currently on the market). I started collecting in the mid-1980s as a college student on an allowance, buying the best I could afford from Ermita antique shops.
Bits and pieces of excavated gold appeared, offered by runners who had sold the best pieces to moneyed collectors. After a flood in Mindanao or the Visayas, excavated gold would trickle down to Ermita. I bought a few beads here, an eye- or mouthpiece from a death mask there. Having developed suki relationships, I could buy on credit or in installments. Prices were not investment-grade as they are now; one just had to know what one was buying—or recognize the treasure from the trash. That’s when historical training came in handy.
In retrospect, pricing was crazy. Stray pieces were weighed by runners who valued them in grams, converted at the spot price of gold for the day. It did not matter that these were centuries old. There were not many buyers at the time, especially for the death masks, so many unsold pieces ended up first in pawnshops and eventually in the melting pots of Meycauayan to be transformed into bullion for modern jewelry. It is estimated that only about 20 to 30 percent of our precolonial goldwork survived melting and now rest in the Ayala and BSP Museums as well as in private collections.
There are so many references to gold in the primary sources from the Spanish period (1565–1898) that suggest two things: first, that there was a lot of gold in the Philippines; and second, that the Spanish were so interested in it that it entered their documents and our history. As a matter of fact, what is acknowledged as the oldest written document in the Philippines, the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, is a reference to gold.
I am disappointed that our first historical document—written in Old Javanese and hammered onto a sheet of copper—is not a piece of literature. It is not a poem, nor a fragment of a long-lost epic. It is a receipt! This at least shows how pragmatic precolonial Philippine society was: it records a debt pardon from the chief of Tondo in the year 900 AD. The debt of a certain Namwaran was erased to the tune of “one kati and eight suwarna of gold.” That equals 926.4 grams, which, at current spot prices for 22-karat gold, works out to over $110,000 or P7.1 million—tangible proof that, once upon a time, the Philippines literally had a golden age.
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