Ma-i and the China Trade: The Philippines in the Song Dynasty Records

The Trade That Predates the Colony

The standard narrative of Philippine history begins in 1521, with Magellan’s arrival at Homonhon. But five centuries before that European landfall, Chinese merchants were already sailing regularly to Philippine ports, trading iron, porcelain, and silk for beeswax, cotton, tortoiseshell, and pearls. They left behind not just trade goods — recovered by the thousands from archaeological sites across the archipelago — but written records that describe, in remarkable detail, the people and polities they found.

These records demolish the colonial myth of an isolated, primitive Philippines. They describe instead a commercial civilization — sophisticated, organized, and very much part of the Asian world.

Zhao Rugua and the Zhufan Zhi

The most important of these sources is the Zhufan Zhi (諸蕃志, “Description of the Barbarous Peoples”), compiled around 1225 by Zhao Rugua, the Superintendent of Maritime Trade at Quanzhou during the Southern Song dynasty. Zhao Rugua did not visit the Philippines himself; he compiled his account from interviews with traders who had.

His entry on Ma-i (麻逸) — generally identified by scholars as Mindoro, though William Henry Scott argued it may refer more broadly to the Manila Bay trading zone — describes a trading system of surprising formality:

“The traders arrive and anchor offshore. They beat drums to announce their presence. The local people come out in small boats with cotton, beeswax, tortoiseshell, and betel nut to trade. They are honest in their dealings.”

The Zhufan Zhi describes the process of barter at anchor: Chinese merchants would display their goods — iron pots, lead net-sinkers, colored glass beads, iron needles, and tin — and the Ma-i traders would make offers. The system was orderly and governed by established custom. Zhao Rugua specifically notes that the people of Ma-i were reliable trading partners who honored their agreements.

This was not casual barter. It was a regularized commercial system operating across hundreds of nautical miles of open ocean.

The Song Shi and the Butuan Missions

The Song Shi (宋史, “History of the Song”), the official dynastic history compiled in 1345, records something even more striking: formal diplomatic missions from the Philippines to the Chinese court.

In 1001 CE, a mission from P’u-tuan (蒲端, identified as Butuan in northeast Mindanao) arrived at the Song court bearing tribute. The Song Shi records:

“In the first year of the Jingde reign [1001 CE], the ruler of P’u-tuan, named Kiling, sent an envoy, Liyihan, to offer tribute of a memorial and local products.”

A second mission followed in 1003 CE, and a third in 1011 CE. These were not casual visits but formal tributary trade missions — the mechanism by which Southeast Asian polities gained access to Chinese markets and received recognition of their sovereignty. Butuan was operating within the Chinese tributary system at the same level as the Champa kingdom, the Javanese polities, and Srivijaya.

The name “Kiling” has been analyzed by scholars including Scott and Fay Cooper Cole as possibly deriving from an Austronesian title. The envoy’s name, “Liyihan,” may transcribe a local term for emissary. What matters is the implication: Butuan had a political structure capable of organizing a transoceanic diplomatic mission — ships, crew, cargo, translators, and diplomatic protocol.

The Goods

Chinese trade ceramics are the most abundant archaeological evidence of this commerce. Tens of thousands of Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasty ceramics have been recovered from Philippine sites — from the Butuan archaeological complex to the Santa Ana site in Manila, from burial caves in Palawan to the seabed around the Calamian Islands.

These are not trinkets. The recovered goods include:

Longquan celadon — high-quality Song dynasty greenware, the most prestigious ceramic of its era
Dehua white porcelain — fine whiteware from Fujian province
Brown-glazed Guangdong stoneware — utilitarian storage jars
Blue-and-white porcelain — Yuan and Ming dynasty pieces that would have been luxury items

The presence of high-quality celadon in Philippine burial sites suggests these goods were not merely consumed but given social significance — incorporated into local systems of wealth, prestige, and mortuary practice.

In exchange, Philippine communities supplied goods that Chinese merchants prized:

Beeswax — essential for Chinese metalworking and court ritual
Cotton — Philippine cotton was valued in Chinese textile production
Tortoiseshell — luxury material for decorative arts
Pearls — from the Sulu Sea, among the finest in Asia
Abaca fiber — for rope and textile
Civet musk and aromatic resins — from the forests of Mindanao and Palawan

The Trading Ports

Scott, in Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History (1984), identified multiple Philippine trading settlements mentioned in Chinese records:

Ma-i (麻逸) — Mindoro or the broader Manila Bay area
P’u-tuan (蒲端) — Butuan
Su-lu (蘇祿) — Sulu
Ma-li-lu (麻里嚕) — possibly Manila
San-su (三嶼) — the “Three Islands,” possibly the Calamian group

Each of these represent not isolated villages but organized polities with the infrastructure to host foreign merchants, regulate trade, and project authority over surrounding waters.

What the Records Tell Us

The Chinese records reveal a Philippines that was:

Commercially integrated — part of the maritime Silk Road that connected Song China to India, Arabia, and East Africa
Diplomatically active — capable of sending and receiving formal missions across open ocean
Politically organized — with rulers who could control trade, command fleets, and project authority
Materially wealthy — producing commodities that the most powerful economy in the medieval world wanted to buy
Culturally distinctive — the Chinese records consistently note that the people of Ma-i had their own customs, dress, and systems of governance

The trade did not make the Philippines Chinese. It made the Philippines international. These islands were a node in a network that spanned the breadth of Asia, connected by the same monsoon winds that would later carry the galleons.

A Commerce Erased

When the Spanish arrived, they found the remnants of this trade still active. The Sangley (Chinese merchant) communities of Manila existed because the commercial networks of the Song dynasty had never fully disappeared. But the colonial regime redirected Philippine commerce toward the Pacific — toward Acapulco and Spain — severing the centuries-old connections to the Asian mainland.

The Chinese records survive as evidence of what was lost: not merely trade goods, but a Philippines that looked west and south, toward the world it had always been part of.

Primary sources: Zhao Rugua, Zhufan Zhi (c. 1225), trans. F. Hirth and W.W. Rockhill (1911); Song Shi, juan 489. Secondary: William Henry Scott, Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History (1984); Laura Lee Junker, Raiding, Trading, and Feasting (1999); Robert Fox, “The Archaeological Record of Chinese Influences in the Philippines,” Philippine Studies 15:1 (1967).