Austronesians first to conduct trade with ancient China

I usually find Ambeth Ocampo’s columns illuminating. However, in his Oct. 28 column (“A receipt in copper,” Opinion), he implies that the Chinese were the originators of China’s trade with the Philippines. “Ancient Chinese seafarers were familiar with the trade winds… they sailed their junks from Guangdong and Fujian to the Philippines and Indonesia,” he wrote, and then quoted at length the second hand accounts of Chau Ju-kua, a 13th Chinese official based in Quanzhou, about the Philippines.

In fact, Chau’s account was the first on a Chinese ship visiting the Philippines while Austronesian (Philippine, Indonesian, Cham, etc.) navigators and traders had been going in the opposite direction for centuries.

As Chinese annals themselves mention, traders from Mo Yi (Mindoro) appeared in China in the 10th century, and tattooed Visayans were reported visiting China in the 12th century. The Chinese also recorded a mission from Butuan in 1004 and another in 1007, requesting the same status as Champa, the mercantile kingdom on the Vietnam coast.  Butuan was then a Hindu-ruled kingdom with a raja and its significant trading role is shown by finds of large ships, gold ornaments and early Indian and Persian artefacts.

Up to the Southern Song dynasty, almost all Chinese maritime trade with countries to the south and west was conducted by non-Chinese. The Chinese remained minority players in the seas of the archipelagos until European powers gradually snuffed out the indigenous mercantile enterprise of Java, Sumatra, Sulu and the ubiquitous Bugis.

To imply otherwise adds credence to China’s contrived “historic” claims to the so-called (a western invention) South China Sea.

PHILIP BOWRING, [email protected]