Tondo: Map & History

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" (a "city-state", "country" or "polity", lit. '"settlement"').

Early travellers from monarchical cultures who had contacts with Tondo (including the Chinese, Portuguese and the Spanish) often initially referred to it as the "Kingdom of Tondo".

Culture and society

Since at least the 3rd century, the Kapampangan and Tagalog people of Tondo had developed a culture which is predominantly Hindu and Buddhist society. They are ruled by a lakan, which belongs to a caste of Maharlika, were the feudal warrior class in ancient Tagalog society in Luzon, translated in Spanish as hidalgos, and meaning freeman, libres or freedman. They belonged to the lower nobility class similar to the timawa of the Visayans. In modern Filipino, however, the term itself has erroneously come to mean "royal nobility", which was actually restricted to the hereditary maginoo class.

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.

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 (parang) and eventually wild vegetation (sukal).