Ian C. Hannah states in his “Eastern Asia: A History” that outside the North of Toh Chow, in Shantung province, by a little mosque, is yet marked the burial place of a former sultan of Sulu who died on a visit to the Emperor Yung-lo in 1417.
In the same year, Sulu’s eastern, western and village rajahs with their wives, children and headmen all came to the Chinese court with tribute, and another tribute mission from Sulu arrived in 1420.
About the middle of the XV century, Doctors Hose and McDougall in their history of Borneo (Pagan Tribes of Borneo, London, 1912, chap. 1) assert, a Bisayan was king of Brunei. This Alakber Tala, later to be called Sultan Mohammed, introduced Arabic doctrines into his kingdom and the use of Arabic writing made his reign the beginning of Brunei’s local recorded history. His great grandnephew, Makoda Ragan, had Arab and Chinese as well as Bisayan blood, a fact remembered to this day by having representatives of these three races officiating at the king’s coronation, and the fourth official on these occasions is dressed in ancient Bisayan costume. Makoda Ragah, also called Sultan Bulkiah, is spoken of as the most heroic character in Bornean history and conquered the Sulu islands, and sent expeditions to Manila, the second time seizing the place. His wife, the first queen of the Philippines of whom we know, was a Javan princess. This great king was accidentally killed by his wife’s bodkin. It was this monarch or his son who died in 1575 that so impressed the chronicler of Magellan’s expedition.
Corroboration for this considerable historic association comes in the Chinese jars found in the oldest burial caves as well as prized among the more remote hill tribes as ancestral possessions, handed down from so remote an antiquity that their origin has long been forgotten and they are now venerated as objects that came from heaven (Fay Cole: Chinese Pottery in the Philippines). The four-toed dragon claw designs place them among the Chinese manufacture of not later than the last of the XIV century.
Legend is not lacking, either, for a tradition of Tapul (Saleeby: The Origin of the Malayan Filipinos, p. 1) relates that a Chinese rajah who anchored his boat at the south of their island had his daughter stolen in the night by the “dewas.” She was hidden in a bamboo stalk and there found by the solitary male who had hatched out of a roc’s egg. Their daughter, the earliest recorded Chinese mestiza, was, according to Doctor Saleeby again, the grandmother of the Chiefs of Sulu.
The very name Luzon is not the time-honored rice mortar, La-sung, but Luzong of which John Crawfurd (History of the Indian Archipelago, vol. 1, p. 324) says: “The term, I have no doubt, is Chinese, for the Chinese, who destroy the sound of all other native names of countries, or use barbarisms of their own, apply the word Lusong familiarly and correctly.” They even associate it with their famous dynasty of that name and have a joke of their own at the expense of the Spaniards (B. Laufer: The Chinese in the Philippines).
Naming in pairs is common enough by Chinese to make it seem more than a mere coincidence that these islands are called “Liu sung,” while their neighbors to the north were originally “Liu Kiu.”
(Translation, by Hon. W. W. Rockhill, of a Chinese book of 1349, by Wang Ta-yuan, Description of the Barbarians of the Isles (Tao-i-chih-lio).)