Tondo (historical polity)


Tondo, also popularly known referred to as the Kingdom of Tondo, was a Tagalog and Kapampangan settlement which served as a major trade hub located on the northern part of the Pasig River delta on Luzon Island. Together with Maynila, the polity which was also situated on the southern part of the Pasig River delta, Tondo 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.
Tondo is one of the oldest historically documented settlements in the Philippines. It was mentioned in the Lord Namvaran's acquittance in 900 AD, also called the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, the oldest extant written document in the Philippines.
Manila, Tondo, and other Luzonian towns around Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay saw an influx of travelling Spanish warriors under Spanish royal command starting from 1570.
The Spaniards conspired to conquer the towns of Luzon for the Spanish king starting from the Manila Bay area. The Luzonian towns by the Manila Bay only started to capitulate to Spanish rule in 1571, including the traditional city of Manila, which was the capital of Luzon, and the town of Tondo. Tondo was afterwards ruled by the Spaniards from Manila.
Tondo's absorption into the Kingdom of the Spains and the Indies effectively ended its status as an independent political entity. It only regained sovereignty in the Philippine revolution, and then succumbed again to foreign rule after the American invasion, and has always remained a separate town until 1911 when Tondo was designated as a district of the modern City of Manila.

History

Geographically, the settlement was completely surrounded by bodies of water: mainly the Pasig River to the south and the shore of Manila Bay to the west, but also by several of the delta's rivulets: the Canal de la Reina to the southeast, the Estero de Sunog Apog to the northeast, and the Estero de Vitas on its eastern and northernmost boundaries.
It is referred to in academic circles as the "Tondo polity" or "Tondo settlement", and the earliest Tagalog dictionaries categorized it as a "bayan and Balayan in Kapampangan".
Early travellers from monarchical cultures who had contacts with Tondo often initially referred to it as the "Kingdom of Tondo". Early Augustinian chronicler Pedro de San Buenaventura explained this to be an error as early as 1613 in his Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, but historian Vicente L. Rafael notes that the label was nevertheless later adapted by the popular literature of the Spanish colonial era because Spanish language writers of the time did not have the appropriate words for describing the complex power relations on which Maritime Southeast Asian leadership structures were built. The earliest Spanish accounts referred to Tondo as a smaller settlement compared to the fortified polity of Maynila, a characterization that reflects Spanish perceptions rather than the settlement's actual complexity.
Politically, Tondo was made up of several social groupings, traditionally referred to by historians as barangays, which were led by datus. These datus in turn recognised the leadership of the most senior among them as a sort of "paramount datu" called a lakan over the bayan. In the middle to late 16th century, its lakan was held in high regard within the alliance group which was formed by the various Manila Bay area polities, which included Tondo, Maynila, and various polities in Bulacan and Pampanga. Extrapolating from available data, the demographer-historian Linda A. Newson has estimated that Tondo may have had a population of roughly 43,000 when the Spanish first arrived in 1570.
Culturally, the Kapampangan and Tagalog people of Tondo had a rich Austronesian culture, with its own expressions of language and writing, religion, art, and music dating back to the earliest peoples of the archipelago. This culture was later influenced by its trading relations with the rest of Maritime Southeast Asia. Particularly significant were its relations with Ming dynasty, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Majapahit empire, which served as the main conduit for significant Indian cultural influence, despite the Philippine archipelago's geographical location outside the Indian cultural zone.

Critical historiography

Junker notes that most of the primary written sources for early Philippine history have inherent biases, which creates a need to counter-check their narratives with one another, and with empirical archaeological evidence. She cites the works of F. Landa Jocano, Felix M. Keesing, and William Henry Scott as notable exceptions.
F. Landa Jocano warns that in the case of early Philippine history, it's essential that "even archaeological findings" be carefully interpreted by experts, because these can be misinterpreted if not analyzed in proper context.

Names and etymology

Alternative names and orthographies

As a result of Tondo's history as a center of commerce, it has been referred to by many names by in various texts and languages. It is variously also referred to as Tundo, Tundun, Tundok, Tung-lio, Tundaan, Tunduh, Tunda, or Tong-Lao.

Origins of the name "Tondo"

Numerous theories on the origin of the name "Tondo" have been put forward. Filipino National Artist Nick Joaquin suggested that it might be a reference to high ground. The French linguist Jean-Paul Potet, however, has suggested that the river mangrove, Aegiceras corniculatum, which at the time was called "tundok", is the most likely origin of the name. Kapampangan studies professor Robby Tantingco suggested that the name was derived from tundun, Kapampangan term of "nape."

Tondo as a "Bayan"

According to the earliest Tagalog dictionaries, large coastal settlements like Tondo and Maynila, which a lakan or rajah ultimately led, were called "bayan" in the Tagalog language. This term is a Tagalog term that eventually came to refer to the entire Philippines in modern times, alongside the word bansa.
However, the precolonial settlement of Tondo has also been described using several descriptors.
The earliest firsthand Spanish accounts described it as a smaller "village", in comparison to the fortified polity of Maynila. However, this term is no longer used in academic circles because it reflects the strong hispanocentric bias of the Spanish colonizers.
Travellers from monarchical cultures who had contacts with Tondo also often initially mislabelled it as the "Kingdom of Tondo". Early Augustinian chronicler Pedro de San Buenaventura explained this to be an error as early as 1613 in his Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. Historian Vicente L. Rafael notes, however, that the label was later adapted by the popular literature of the Spanish colonial era anyway because Spanish-language writers of the time did not have the appropriate words for describing the complex power relations on which Maritime Southeast-Asian leadership structures were built.
Historian F. Landa Jocano has described Tondo using the term "large barangay", making Tondo out to be a larger version of what Filipino historians have traditionally considered the "basic political structure" of pre-colonial societies. However, the use of the term "barangay" for such purposes has recently been brought to question by historian Damon Woods, who believes that the use of this term was the result of a 20th-century American mistranslation of the writings of Juan de Plasencia.
To avoid cross-cultural inaccuracies regarding the political structure of Tondo, it is usually described in academic texts using generic umbrella terms, where it is described as the "Tondo polity" or "Tondo settlement".

Geographical location and political influence

Scholars generally agree that Tondo was located north of the Pasig river, on the northern part of Lusong or Lusung, which is an Old Tagalog name for the Pasig river delta. This name is thought to have been derived from the Tagalog word for a large wooden mortar used in dehusking rice. This name eventually came to be used as the name for the entire island of modern Luzon.

Territorial boundaries

Except in the case of fortified polities such as Maynila and Cainta, the first-hand descriptions of territorial boundaries of Tagalog polities tend to discourage scholars from providing exact delineations, because the descriptions depict the boundaries of even compact polities like Tondo as slowly diminishing concentrations of households, dissipating into agricultural land and eventually wild vegetation.
However, Tondo's territorial boundaries are generally accepted as defined by several bodies of water which gave Tondo an island shape:
  • the Pasig River to the South;
  • the Canal de la Reina, forming the Isla de Binondo between itself and Estero de Binondo to the southeast,
  • an eastern stretch of the Estero de Vitas to the east,
  • the Estero de Sunog Apog to the northeast forming the Isla de Balut between itself and the Estero de Vitas,
  • a northern stretch of the Estero de Vitas merging from the mouth of the Navotas River to the north, and
  • the original shoreline of Manila Bay to the west.
Notably, the area of modern Tondo now known as "Gagalangin" is not believed to have been part of Tondo's original "territory", since it was a place grown wild with plants in olden days.
The shoreline of the modern district of Tondo has been significantly altered by reclamation activities. Pre-reclamation maps of Tondo show a relatively straight shoreline from the beachfront of Intramuros to the mouth of the Estero de Vitas.
Tondo's territorial boundaries also excluded territory occupied by Maynila Namayan, Tambobong, Butas, Pandacan, and Pasay – all of which had their own respective leaders.