Foreign News: The Land & the People

The Philippines are a chain of 7,100 islands in the Southwestern Pacific, most of them less than a square mile in size, running roughly north and south. They cover 115,600 square miles, about the area of Italy. The principal islands: Luzon (40,420 square miles) and Mindanao (36,537 square miles). Biggest city: Manila (pop. 1,024,557).

People: The first settlers, who, some theorize, may have come by land bridges from the Asiatic mainland, were aboriginal Negrito pygmies. Then, 6,000 years ago, came Indonesians in boats, to push the Negritos into the interior; the Indonesians in turn were pushed back by a wave of Malays. When Ferdinand Magellan landed in 15 21 he found a people with its own written language, government by tribal law, a strict moral code, a thriving commerce. Magellan, before he was killed by tribesmen, named the place San Lazaro, but later Spain changed it to Philipinas, in honor of Prince Philip, who became Philip II.

Except for the Negritos, the Filipinos are basically Malayan stock with a mixture of Caucasian and Mongolian. The U.S. Supreme Court once ruled that they are not Caucasians; the state of California has ruled that they are not Mongolians. The Filipinos’ own smiling explanation: a god and goddess once inhabited the earth, got lonely and decided to create man. They fashioned a man out of clay and baked it in an oven, but it was overcooked and came out black. They tried another but it was undercooked and came out white. The third was cooked to a just-right brown. That was the Filipino.

Religion: With the Spaniards came Catholic priests, and today the Philippines are 80% Catholic. But there are some 700,000 Moslems (the proud, independent tribesmen on Mindanao and Sulu whom the Spaniards named Moros after their own Moors), pagans (some 625,000), Buddhists (about 47,000), Shintoists (13,000), Protestants (600,000) and more than 2,000,000 members of the Filipino Independent, or Aglipayan, Church, an offshoot of Catholicism.

Resources: A lush northerly tropic with fertile plains, great rivers, high, tree-covered mountains and volcanoes, the Philippines are an agricultural hothouse and a treasure chest of only partially exploited minerals (copper, gold, chromite, manganese, iron, some coal). Properly developed, they could support perhaps 100 million people.

Principal crops: rice (more of which has to be imported to eke out the local supply), abaca (the famous Manila hemp), copra, sugar, corn, tobacco. The seasons: hot (March through June), rainy (July through October), cool (November through February). In the hot season, the government itself picks up & leaves Manila, settles down in the mountain city of Baguio (pop. 29,262), which is the official summer capital.