When I was in school I heard about Chau Ju-kua (1170-1228) and read the portions of his two-volume work, “Chu-fan chi” (Description of Barbarous Peoples), which referred to pre-Spanish Philippines. Searching for him on the Internet recently made me see the many changes in contemporary Chinese orthography. For example: the Chinese capital Peking has become Beijing; the founding father of China, Mao tse-tung, has become Mao Zedong; Chau Ju-kua has become Zhao Rugua and his book “Chu-fan-chi” has become “Zhufan zhi.” These cause some confusion in bibliographic and Internet searches. Nevertheless, Zhao Rugua’s description of the islands that were yet to become the Philippines and of the islanders who were yet to become indios and later Filipinos is one way to see what we were like long before Magellan was born.
The reference to Visayan pirates raiding 12th-century China comes from two contemporary sources: the “Sung shi” and “Zhufan zhi.” These accounts are almost exactly the same, and Chen Ching-ho in “The Chinese Community in the Philippines” (Tokyo, 1968) says the Sung shi copied from the Chu fan-chi (“Zhufan zhi”). Some readers directed me to a website where my last column on Pirates from the Visayas was posted with a comment saying that P’i-she-yeh was misidentified by Chen Ching-ho as the Visayas; it is actually part of Formosa or modern Taiwan. I reread the source for the column that states authoritatively: “[T]here is no doubt as to the identity of the P’i-she-yeh of the twelfth century with the Visayas.” Chen Ching-ho based this conclusion on a contemporary Chinese account that described the faces of the raiders from P’i-she-yeh as tattooed black. He also cited the “Sucesos de las islas Filipinas” (1609) by Antonio de Morga who described the Visayans as “a race of skillful navigators who were eager for pillaging raids.”
Aside from the two 12th-century accounts of the Visayan raids on southern China, there is another from the 14th-century travel account of Wang Ta-yuan who wrote of the Visayas and the Visayans as follows:
“The Visayas live in a remote land in the eastern sea, where the hills are flat and deserted and the fields are little tilled. There is not much planting. The climate is scorching hot. The natives are fond of pillaging. The males and the females both tie their hair in a topknot, tattoo their bodies here and there with ink, and wrap their heads with a piece of red silk to which a piece of yellow cloth is tied to make a tail. Their country has no chief, and the land produces nothing. At times they prepare dry provisions, row in a small boat, go to other barbarians, lie in ambush in wild mountains and remote valleys where no man lives, capture fish-catchers and fuel-collectors whom they happen to meet, and bring home and sell the prisoners to other countries, in which transactions they get two ounces of gold apiece. Men of that country make their living by this custom from generation to generation, for which reason the people of the eastern sea, upon hearing the name of Visaya, are all terrified and flee.” (Underscoring mine).
French Sinologist Terrien de Lacouperie, in his eight-volume work “The Languages of China before the Chinese” (1887), was the first to identify the P’i-she-yeh with the Visaya or Bisaya of the Philippines. Furthermore, an explanatory footnote by Friedrich Hirth and William Rockhill to their translation of the “Chu fan-chi” in 1911 reads:
“During the period A.D. 1174-1190 these raids on the Fukien coast were of frequent occurrence. The P’i-she-yeh were consequently established along the southwestern coast of Formosa at that time, but it seems probable that they were of Philippine origin. This belief is further strengthened by the statement of [Zhao Rugua] in the preceding chapter that the people of Liu-k’iu, the Formosans immediately to the north of the P’i-she-yeh, had regular trade relations with the Philippines (San-sii). It must be noted that the raiders came to China on rafts, not in boats as they would have done had they come directly from the Philippines.” (Underscoring mine).
More research is needed to ascertain the identity of these 12th-century Visayan pirates as well as the tradition of slave-raiding that goes even further back in time. Come to think of it, what is described as “slave raiding” in historical and archeological texts on pre-Spanish Philippines still exists today under another name—kidnapping. While most people think history is a useless academic subject and argue for its removal from present school curricula, it is history that helps us find context. When we go through our history and see beyond the memorized names, dates and places, we see how the past remains current and relevant in our times. The references to the 12th-century Visayan pirates do seem irrelevant except that in our present row with China over some islands and maritime territories, we are rediscovering the long historic links between our two countries. If I had another life I would probably study Chinese if only to see what references to the Philippines lie in ancient Chinese historical sources. Since I don’t have another life, I can only wish young Filipino historians will do this long overdue task.
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