The Boxer Codex is a late-16th-century Spanish manuscript produced in the Philippines. It contains 75 colored illustrations of the peoples of China, the Philippines, Japan, Java, the Moluccas, the Ladrones, and Siam. About 270 pages of Spanish text describe these places, their inhabitants and customs. An additional 88 smaller drawings show mythological deities and demons, and both real and mythological birds and animals copied from popular Chinese texts and books in circulation at the time.
The English historian Charles Ralph Boxer purchased the manuscript in 1947 from the collection of Lord Ilchester in London. Boxer recognized the importance of what he called the "Manila Manuscript" and published a paper in 1950 with a detailed description of the codex. He made the manuscript freely available to other researchers for study, and it became known as the Boxer Codex. Boxer eventually sold it to Indiana University, where it is held by the Lilly Library.
The manuscript was written around circa 1590 [1] in primarily Early Modern Spanish with some labels in Early Manila Hokkien written in Spanish orthography and Classical Chinese (Hokkien Chinese : 漢文 ; Pe̍h-ōe-jī :Hàn-bûn) and contains illustrations of ethnic groups in the Philippines, across Southeast Asia, and in East Asia and Micronesia at the time of early Spanish contact. It also contains Taoist mythological deities and demons, and both real and mythological birds and land animals copied from popular Chinese texts and books in circulation at the time. Aside from a description of and historical allusions to what are now the Philippines and various other Far Eastern countries, the codex also contains 97 hand-drawn color paintings and illustrations depicting peoples and animals of the Philippines, the Indonesian Archipelago, Japan, Taiwan, China, and Mainland Southeast Asia. The first illustration is an oblong fold-out, 74 are full-page colored illustrations, and the remaining are arranged four to a page on 22 pages (with some of the quarters remaining blank). Most of the drawings appear to have been copied or adapted from materials brought to the Philippines from China by Martín de Rada: the Shānhǎi Jīng (山海经, The Classic of Mountains and Seas ), and books from the shenmo (神魔) genre, which depict deities and demons. The remaining drawings represent individuals, often a male and female pair, as inhabitants from tributaries of China and Taiwan with their distinctive costume; some of these have been refashioned as warriors. The depictions of inhabitants from Chinese tributaries may have been copied from a pre-existing source, drawn from memory, or perhaps even drawn according to instruction given by Rada or one of the other Europeans who visited China. [2] At least 15 illustrations deal with the inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago. [3]
The Boxer Codex does not bear any direct statement of authorship or dates of production and there is no dedication that might indicate who was the patron of the work or for whom the work was intended. Its contents indicate that it was written in Manila in the early 1590s. The manuscript was likely compiled at the direction of Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, the Spanish Governor-General of the Philippines, or his son, Luis Pérez Dasmariñas. [4]
The Boxer Codex depicts the Tagalogs, Visayans, Zambals, Cagayanes or possibly Ibanags, and Negritos of the Philippines in vivid color. The paintings' technique and the use of Chinese paper, ink, and paints suggests that the artist may have been Chinese. [5] [2]
It is believed that the original owner of the manuscript was Luis Pérez Dasmariñas, son of Governor General Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, [6] the Spanish Governor-General of the Philippines. Luis succeeded his father in office as governor-general. Since Spanish colonial governors kept extensive written reports of the territories they governed, it is likely that the manuscript was written on the governor's orders. [5]
The manuscript's earliest known modern owner was Lord Ilchester. The codex was among what remained in his collection when his estate, Holland House in London, was bombed on September 27, 1940, during the Blitz. It was auctioned in 1947 and came into the possession of Charles Ralph Boxer, an authority on the Far East, and whom it is named. It is now owned by the Lilly Library at Indiana University. [3]
[2] (All Captions Below Based on Source)
[2] (All Captions Below Based on Source)
Visayans or Visayan people are a Philippine ethnolinguistic family group or metaethnicity native to the Visayas, the southernmost islands of Luzon and a significant portion of Mindanao. They are composed of numerous distinct ethnic groups, many unrelated to each other. When taken as a single group, they number around 33.5 million. The Visayans, like the Luzon Lowlanders were originally predominantly animist-polytheists and broadly share a maritime culture until the 16th century when the Spanish empire enforced Catholicism as the state religion. In more inland or otherwise secluded areas, ancient animistic-polytheistic beliefs and traditions either were reinterpreted within a Roman Catholic framework or syncretized with the new religion. Visayans are generally speakers of one or more of the distinct Bisayan languages, the most widely spoken being Cebuano, followed by Hiligaynon (Ilonggo) and Waray-Waray.
Sangley and Mestizo de Sangley are archaic terms used in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era to describe respectively a person of pure overseas Chinese ancestry and a person of mixed Chinese and native Filipino ancestry. The Sangley Chinese were ancestors to both modern Chinese Filipinos and modern Filipino mestizo descendants of the Mestizos de Sangley, also known as Chinese mestizos, which are mixed descendants of Sangley Chinese and native Filipinos. Chinese mestizos were mestizos in the Spanish Empire, classified together with other Filipino mestizos.
The Philippines is inhabited by more than 182 ethnolinguistic groups, many of which are classified as "Indigenous Peoples" under the country's Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act of 1997. Traditionally-Muslim peoples from the southernmost island group of Mindanao are usually categorized together as Moro peoples, whether they are classified as Indigenous peoples or not. About 142 are classified as non-Muslim Indigenous people groups, and about 19 ethnolinguistic groups are classified as neither Indigenous nor Moro. Various migrant groups have also had a significant presence throughout the country's history.
Philippine Hokkien is a dialect of the Hokkien language of the Southern Min branch of Min Chinese descended directly from Old Chinese of the Sinitic family, primarily spoken vernacularly by Chinese Filipinos in the Philippines, where it serves as the local Chinese lingua franca within the overseas Chinese community in the Philippines and acts as the heritage language of a majority of Chinese Filipinos. Despite currently acting mostly as an oral language, Hokkien as spoken in the Philippines did indeed historically have a written language and is actually one of the earliest sources for written Hokkien using both Chinese characters as early as around 1587 or 1593 through the Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china and using the Latin script as early as the 1590s in the Boxer Codex and was actually the earliest to systematically romanize the Hokkien language throughout the 1600s in the Hokkien-Spanish works of the Spanish friars especially by the Dominican Order, such as in the Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum (1626-1642) and the Arte de la Lengua Chiõ Chiu (1620) among others. The use of Hokkien in the Philippines was historically influenced by Philippine Spanish, Filipino (Tagalog) and Philippine English. As a lingua franca of the overseas Chinese community in the Philippines, the minority of Chinese Filipinos of Cantonese and Taishanese descent also uses Philippine Hokkien for business purposes due to its status as "the Chinoy business language" [sic]. It is also used as a liturgical language as one of the languages that Protestant Chinese Filipino churches typically minister in with their church service, which they sometimes also minister to students in Chinese Filipino schools that they also usually operate. It is also a liturgical language primarily used by Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, and Matsu veneration temples in the Philippines, especially in their sutra chanting services and temple sermons by monastics.
The Sambal people are a Filipino ethnolinguistic group living primarily in the province of Zambales and the Pangasinense municipalities of Bolinao, Anda, and Infanta. The term may also refer to the general inhabitants of Zambales. They were also referred to as the Zambales during the Spanish colonial era.
The alipin refers to the lowest social class among the various cultures of the Philippines before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the Visayan languages, the equivalent social classes were known as the oripun, uripon, or ulipon.
The timawa were the feudal warrior class of the ancient Visayan societies of the Philippines. They were regarded as higher than the uripon but below the tumao in the Visayan social hierarchy. They were roughly similar to the Tagalog maharlika caste.
Bahag is a loincloth that was commonly used by men throughout the pre-colonial Philippines. It is worn shirtless with no other extra garments. They were either made from barkcloth or from hand-woven textiles. Before the colonial period, bahag were a common garment for commoners and the serf class. Bahag survives in some indigenous tribes of the Philippines today - most notably the Cordillerans in Northern Luzon.
In early Philippine history, the Tagalog and Kapampangan settlement at Tondo, sometimes referred to as the Kingdom of Tondo, was a major trade hub located on the northern part of the Pasig River delta on Luzon island. Together with Maynila, the polity (bayan) that was also situated on the southern part of the Pasig River delta, Tondo had established a shared monopoly on the trade of Chinese goods throughout the rest of the Philippine archipelago, making it an established force in trade throughout Southeast Asia and East Asia.
The Sangley Rebellion was a series of armed confrontations between overseas Chinese, known as the Sangley, and the Spanish and their allied forces in Manila under the Captaincy General of the Philippines, in October 1603. The local ethnic Chinese residents dominated trade and outnumbered Spanish residents in Manila by a five-to-one ratio, although both were minorities to the indigenous Tagalog population. The ruling Spaniards feared and resented the rival Chinese minority. Policies of persecution were enacted against the local Chinese residents and they were expelled from the city to an undesirable swamp area in 1586, which the local Chinese turned into a thriving town. The local Chinese planned a strike due to worsening relations, but it resulted in the execution of their mayor, and became a rebellion. It ended in the massacre of more than 20,000 ethnic Chinese in Manila at the hands of the Spaniards, local Japanese, and indigenous Tagalog forces.
In Philippine history, the Tagalog bayan of Maynila was one of the most cosmopolitan of the early historic settlements on the Philippine archipelago. Fortified with a wooden palisade which was appropriate for the predominant battle tactics of its time, it lay on the southern part of the Pasig River delta, where the district of Intramuros in Manila currently stands, and across the river from the separately-led Tondo polity.
In early Philippine history, barangay is the term historically used by scholars to describe the complex sociopolitical units that were the dominant organizational pattern among the various peoples of the Philippine archipelago in the period immediately before the arrival of European colonizers. Academics refer to these settlements using the technical term "polity", but they are usually simply called "barangays".
The Rajahnate of Cebu or Cebu also called as Sugbu, was an Indianized Raja monarchy Mandala (polity) on the island of Cebu in the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. It is known in ancient Chinese records as the nation of Sokbu (束務) (Hokkien) or Suwu (Mandarin). According to Visayan oral legend, it was founded by Sri Lumay or Rajamuda Lumaya, a minor prince of the Tamil Chola dynasty. He was sent by the Chola emperor from southern India to establish a base for expeditionary forces, but he rebelled and established his own independent polity. The capital of the nation was Singhapala which is Tamil-Sanskrit for "Lion City", the same root words with the modern city-state of Singapore.
The maharlika were the feudal warrior class in ancient Tagalog society in Luzon, the Philippines. They belonged to the lower nobility class similar to the timawa of the Visayan people. In modern Filipino, however, the word has come to refer to aristocrats or to royal nobility, which was actually restricted to the hereditary maginoo class.
The history of Luzon covers events that happened in the largest island of the Philippine Archipelago, Luzon. Luzon wrested the record of having the oldest man ever discovered in the Philippines with discovery of the Callao Man in 2007, which predated the Tabon Man by around 20,000 years. The written history of Luzon began in around 900 CE with the discovery of the Laguna Copperplate Inscription in 1989. After that, Luzon began to appear in the annals of the Japanese. One example would be the, wherein Luzon appeared in 22 records. Luzon was split among Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, Muslim principalities, and ethnoreligious tribes, who had trading connections with Borneo, Malaya, Java, Indochina, India, Okinawa, Japan before the Spanish established their rule. As a result of the Spanish–American War, Luzon became American territory. In the Second World War, Luzon saw one of the fiercest battles during the Japanese occupation. Luzon, apart from being the largest island, had been the economic and political center of the Philippines ever since the country entered the Western Calendar, being home to the country's capital city, Manila, and the country's largest metropolis, Metro Manila.
Madja-as was a legendary precolonial confederacy on the island of Panay in the Philippines. It was mentioned in Pedro Monteclaro's book titled Maragtas. It was supposedly created by Datu Sumakwel to exercise his authority over all the other datus of Panay. Like the Maragtas and the Code of Kalantiaw, the historical authenticity of the confederation is disputed.
The clothing style and fashion sense of the Philippines in the modern-day era have been influenced by the indigenous peoples, Chinese waves of immigration, the Spaniards, and the Americans, as evidenced by the chronology of events that occurred in Philippine history. At present, Filipinos conform their way of dressing based on classic fashion or prevailing fashion trends.
The pañuelo or alampay is a Filipino lace-like embroidered neck scarf or shawl worn around the shoulders over the camisa (blouse). They were square-shaped and were folded in half into a triangle when worn. Pañuelos are the direct predecessors of the Manila shawl. The Spanish word pañuelo means kerchief, scarf, and handkerchief.
El Piñal was a port in the Pearl River Delta area that was temporarily granted to the Spanish from 1598 to 1600 by Cantonese officials of the Ming dynasty. Seen as a threat to the Portuguese monopoly on the 16th century China trade, the Spanish presence in El Piñal provoked a violent reaction from Portuguese Macau nearby. El Piñal was soon abandoned, and its exact location remains a matter of scholarly debate.
Balarao, also known as "winged dagger", is a Filipino dagger used throughout the pre-colonial Philippines. It is unusually shaped, with a double-edged leaf-like blade and a finger-fitting grip consisting of two horn-like projections at the pommel and no guards. The tang also protrudes at the back. The dagger is a status symbol among nobility and warriors and is usually finely-worked with precious metals, ivory, and horn.