Ma i

Possible sites

For many years, scholars believed that Ma-i was likely to have been on the island of Mindoro. But recent scholarship casts doubt on this theory, arguing that historical descriptions better match Bay, Laguna (whose name is pronounced Ba-i), which once occupied a large territory on the eastern coasts of Laguna de Bay.

Both sites have names which sound similar to Ma-i. The pre-colonial name of Mindoro was "Ma-it", whereas historical variants of the name of Bay, Laguna include "Bae", "Bai", and "Vahi".

An earlier theory, put forward in 1914 by Craig 1914 and asserted by local historians, also suggested Malolos, Bulacan as a potential site of Ma-i.

Physical Description

In 1225, the Zhu Fan Zhi noted that "the country of Ma-i is to the north of Borneo" and added that few pirates reach these shores. It also noted that "the people of Ma-i live in large villages (literally "settlements of more than a thousand households") on the opposite banks of a stream."

The 1349 document Daoyi Zhilüe also noted that the settlement of Ma-i consisted of houses arranged on the two banks of a stream. It also noted that "its mountain range is flat and broad", "the fields are fertile," and "the climate is rather hot."

Economic activities and trade practices

Because all the documents describing Ma-I were primarily concerned with trade, this is the most documented aspect of Ma-I culture.

Exported products

Both the Song Dynasty records (specifically the Zhu Fan Zhi), and Yuan Dynasty records (specifically the Daoyi Zhilüe ) describe the local products as "kapok cotton, yellow bees-wax, tortoise shell, medicinal betel nuts and cloth of various patterns." (The 1225 Zhu Fan Zhi lists "yuta cloth" while the 1349 Daoyi Zhilüe lists "cloth of various patterns.")

Barter items accepted as exchange

The Zhu Fan Zhi notes that in exchange, the locals accepted products such as "porcelain, trade gold, iron pots, lead, colored glass beads, and iron needles." The Daoyi Zhilüe later lists "caldrons, pieces of iron, red cloth or taffetas of various color stripes, ivory, and "tint or the like"" as accepted items of exchange.

Administration of trade

The Zhu Fan Zhi notes that Ma-I's official plaza is its official venue for barter and trade, and note that officials have to be presented with white parasols as gifts:

"When trading ships enter the harbor, they stop in front of the official plaza, for the official plaza is that country's place for barter and trade and once the ship is registered, they mix freely. Since the local officials make a habit of using white umbrellas, the merchants must present them as gifts."

The Zhu Fan Zhi further describes the process of transaction as follows:

The method of transacting business is for the savage traders to come all in a crowd and immediately transfer the merchandise into baskets and go off with it. If at first they can't tell who they are, gradually they come to know those who remove the goods so in the end nothing is actually lost. The savage traders then take the goods around to the other islands for barter and generally don't start coming back until September or October to repay the ship's merchants with what they have got. Indeed, there are some who don't come back even then, so ships trading with Mai are the last to reach home.

The Daoyi Zhilüe similarly describes it:

"After agreeing on prices, the barbarian traders carry off the goods for bartering the native products and bring these products back to the Chinese in the amount agreed on. The Chinese vessels' traders (Filipinos) are trustworthy. They never fail to keep the agreement of their bargains."

Religion

While documents did not definitively describe the religious beliefs of the people of Ma-i, the Zhu Fan Zhi did note the presence of unspecified religious artifacts in Mayi, supposedly as of 1225 AD:

"There are metal images of unknown origin scattered about in the tangled wilds."

Contemporary historiographers do not draw conclusions about the religion of Ma-i's residents based on this text. In his book "Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History", W.H. Scott notes that a literal translation of the Zhu Fan Zhi text describes "metal buddhas." However, he and Chinese Scholar I-hsiung Ju translate this in 1968 as "metal images" to correct for the linguistic bias of the text.

In his seminal 1984 book "Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History", Scott particularly questioned whether the presence of these images reflect actual beliefs by the people of Ma-i:

"The people in Ma-I sound like newcomers [to this port] since they don't know where those metal statues in the jungle come from."

Earlier writers, including Jose Rizal and Ferdinand Blumentritt, accepted the "buddhist connection" more readily. For example, in supporting Blumentritt's proposition that Ma-i was somewhere on Luzon Island, Rizal cites the Zhu Fan Zhi's use of the word "Buddhas" as evidence:

"The gentleness of Tagalog customs that the first Spaniards found, very lfferent from those of other provinces of the same race and in Luzon itself, can very well be the effect of Buddhism "(There are copper Buddha's images)."

Food

The Chinese records made no specific note of the solid food the people of Ma-i ate, but the Daoyi Zhilüe did describe their process for making alcoholic beverages:

"The people boil seawater to make salt and ferment treacle (molasses) to make liquor."

Clothing

The Zhu Fan Zhi describes the people of Ma-i as covering themselves "with a cloth like a sheet or hide their bodies with a loin cloth." And the Daoyi Zhilüe, written a century later, describes the clothing and coiffure of the people of Ma-i, saying "In their customs they esteem the quality of chastity and uprightness. Both men and women do up their hair in a mallet-like tress. They wear a blue cotton shirt."

Funerary practices

In 1349, the Daoyi Zhilüe also made observations of funerary practices, describing them thus:

When any woman is burying her husband, she shaves her hair and fasts for seven days, lying beside her dead husband. Most of them nearly die. If after seven days they are not dead, their relatives urge them to eat. Should they get quite well they cherish their chastity by not marrylng again during their whole lives. There are some even, who, when the body of their dead husband is burning, get into the funeral pyre and die.

At the burial of a great chief, two or three thousand (sic. could be twenty or thlrty) male or female slaves are put to death for burying with him.

Relationship with China and Brunei

Scott 1989 notes that Ma-i's relationship with Song and Yuan Dynasty was defined by trade, not by diplomacy:

Ma-i never sent a tribute mission to China and probably never needed to: it flourished during the Sung Dynasty when the imperial government was encouraging Chinese merchants to carry their goods abroad in their own ships."

The nature of Ma-i's relationship with Brunei is less clear because of scant documentation, but there is no indication of any relationship other than possible trade.

Relationship with nearby territories

The Zhu Fan Zhi mentions a number of territories in its account of Ma-i, saying:

"San-hsu, Pai-p'u-yen, P'u-li-lu, Li-yin-tung, Liu-hsin, Li-han, etc., are all the same sort of place as Ma-i"

Contemporary scholars believe that these are the Baipuyan (Babuyan Islands), Bajinong (Busuanga), Liyin (Lingayen) and Lihan (present day Malolos City). Malolos is a coastal town and one of the ancient settlement around Manila Bay near Tondo.

While the phrase "subordinates" has sometimes been interpreted to mean that these places are territories of Ma-I, Scott clarifies that:

"The text says, not that these places belong to Ma-i, but they are of Ma-i's 'shu', a word that means type or class as a noun, and subordinate (e.g. shu kuo, tributary state"), as an adjective, being used elsewhere in the Chu Fan Chih in these two senses"

Ma-i after the Yuan Dynasty records

No mentions of the country of Ma-i have been found after 1349 (or 1339 depending on the source). However, historians generally believe that Ma-i continued to exist under a different name. Early theories for the location of Ma-i include locations in Central Luzon, or the Southern Tagalog area. Many 20th Century Scholars came to accept the idea that Ma-i was located on the island of Mindoro, based on the name of Mait, a place on the island. However, this has been questioned on the basis of physical evidence and an analysis of Chinese orthography, and Bay (pronounced "Ba-i" or "Ba-e" by locals) has once again been suggested as a likely location of Ma-i.

Bay, Laguna as Ma-i

The idea that Ma-i was located somewhere in the Tagalog region was proposed early on by scholars such as Blumentritt and Rizal, before it became popular during the middle and late 20th century to believe that it had become "Mait", a place now located in Mindoro.

In 2004, Chinese Filipino scholar Bon Juan Go questioned this common belief, citing the lack of physical evidence for a large, prosperous settlement on the island of Mindoro. He suggested that Chinese orthogoraphy equally allows for the possibility that Ma-i became Bay, Laguna, whose name is pronounced "Ba-eh" by locals. He notes that Bay is also a match for the physical characteristics of Ma-i, and that numerous artifacts found in the area (including the nearby towns of Victoria Pila and Lumban, Laguna) suggest the presence of a prosperous pre-colonial settlement. Grace P. Odal-Devora notes that this region was the place of the taga-ilaya, whereas the taga-laud who settled downstream on the banks of the Pasig River.

Go suggests that Ma-i, as Ba-e, became less important as the riverine settlements of Namayan, Tondo, and Maynila rose to power, but also noted that Ba-i still nonetheless served as the capital for the province of Laguna de Bay, which would later be split into the provinces of Laguna and Morong (modern day Rizal Province, including coastal towns now administered by the National Capital Region).

Mindoro as Ma-i

Philippine historians of the middle and late 20th century widely believed Ma-i could be equated with "Mait", a place now located in Mindoro. Writing in 1984, Scott says "there is no reason to doubt that Mai- or "Ma-yit"- is Mindoro, for Mait was the old name of the island when the Spaniards arrived, and that name is still known to its hill tribes and Fishermen."

This has been contested in contemporary scholarship, but textbooks containing this assumption are still widely in use.

Mindoro and the Bruneian Empire and decline

In the year 1498-99, the Bruneian Empire conducted a series of raids against the natives of the Kingdom of Taytay in Palawan and the island of Mindoro which had been subjugated to the Islamic Bruniean Empire under Sultan Bolkiah. The Muslim conquest reached as far as the Kingdom of Tondo which was supplanted by Brunei's vassal-state the Kingdom of Maynila.

Before they reached the shores of Luzon, they subjugated the Buddhist Huangdom of Mai and that lead to its decline.The Buddhist culture of Mindoro gradually disappeared after Bolkiah forced the citizens of Mai to converted their faith to Islam. They forcibly converted and conquered people up to the fall of the Kingdom of Tondo.

Mindoro under Spanish rule

As described in an anonymous account translated in Blair and Robertson's The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, Miguel López de Legazpi sent Captain Martin de Goiti and Juan de Salcedo on an expedition to Mindoro in May 1570, to counteract Muslim pirates based on the island who were attacking their new headquarters on nearby Panay Island. Legazpi himself would arrive on Mindoro the next year, 1571. The Spanish conquered and burned two square forts on Lubang Island, each with earthen embankments 2 meters high and a surrounding moat two and a half fathoms wide. Each fort, moreover, had 10 to 12 lantakas, not counting several smaller guns. After destroying these Muslim forts, they despoiled the town of Mamburao while they were at Mindoro.

The Spanish Advent

Whatever happened to Ma-i between the end of the Tang Dynasty in the 1300s and the beginning of Philippines Spanish in the 1570s, both Mindoro and Bay eventually became part of the Philippine Islands under the dominion of Spain.

Associated Filipino Family Names