Sulu Series · Episode 1 — The Three Kings of Sulu: The Dezhou Tomb and the World Before the Sultanate

Sulu Series — Episode 1 of 5. You are at the start of the arc. Next → Episode 2: The Founding That Cannot Be Proven. Full arc: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5.

A Tomb in Shandong

In a quiet district of Dezhou, on the alluvial plain of the Yellow River in northern China, there is a tomb. It is enclosed by a wall, marked by a stele inscribed in Chinese, and tended by descendants who carry the surnames An and Wen. The man buried beneath it died in September of 1417. He was a Muslim. He was the king of a place the Ming dynasty bureaucracy called Su-lu.

His name, in the Chinese transcription, was Paduka Batara. The Yongle Emperor — the same emperor who dispatched Zheng He’s treasure fleets and built the Forbidden City — ordered him buried with the rites due to a foreign sovereign. He has lain there for six centuries.

Almost everything we can confidently say about pre-Sultanate Sulu, as a political entity rather than as a vague collection of islands, runs back to this tomb and to the Chinese state archives that produced it. The Spanish would not arrive for another 154 years. The Sultanate, by the conventional dating, would not be founded for another generation. The Tausug language has no written records from this period. The Sulu polity that sent Paduka Batara to China is documented almost entirely from outside.

This is the world before the Sultanate, seen from the only window we have.

A Note on the Confidence Framework

This five-part series uses an evolved confidence vocabulary, applied consistently across each story and made explicit here so the reader can audit the analysis. It builds directly on the Anchored / Plausible / Quarantined set used in earlier stories (notably The Luções Ascendancy, Women Who Held the Center, and The Stranger at the River Mouth), refining it into six tiers:

Anchored — direct external evidence; multiple independent corroborations; archaeologically or documentarily fixed.
Probable — fits well-attested regional patterns; converging weak signals; community tradition consistent with structural evidence. (This refines the older Plausible tier, which is preserved as a synonym where it appears.)
Contested — genuine scholarly dispute between defensible positions; the evidence does not adjudicate.
Speculative — proposed but unsupported; flagged for transparency rather than relied on.
Unknown — honest gap; nothing currently to say.
Quarantined — a claim a reader might import from popular accounts that we have explicitly excluded after adversarial review. The exclusion is kept visible at the end of each story so it can be checked.

The Quarantined tier is the methodologically central one. Most colonial-era distortions of Philippine history persist not because they are asserted in scholarly work but because they are assumed by readers and not visibly contested. Listing the quarantined claims at the end of each story is how this series makes its negative findings auditable.

The Chinese Window

The Chinese sources for Sulu form a clear three-step ladder, each step adding a different kind of evidence.

The first is Zhao Rugua’s Zhufan Zhi (諸蕃志, “Description of the Barbarous Peoples”), compiled around 1225 in Quanzhou — the great Song-dynasty port from which most South Seas trade was administered. Zhao Rugua was the Superintendent of Maritime Trade. He did not visit Sulu. He interviewed merchants who had. His entry on Su-lu records that the polity traded pearls, beeswax, and what later scholars have read as camphor with Chinese merchants, and that its people were considered reliable in their commercial dealings.

Pearls and beeswax may sound modest, but they situate Sulu precisely. Pearl-oyster beds of commercial scale are concentrated in the Tawi-Tawi and Sibutu passages — the southern fringes of the archipelago. Beeswax requires an organized apicultural-foraging tradition. The combination tells us that by the early 13th century there was, in the Sulu archipelago, a commercial system organized enough to aggregate these products in quantities a foreign merchant would cross an ocean to acquire.

The second source is Wang Dayuan’s Daoyi Zhilüe (島夷誌略, “Brief Records of the Island Barbarians”), compiled around 1349. Wang was a Chinese merchant who actually traveled. His Sulu entry is brief but it confirms that “Su-lu” by name was a recognized port-of-call in the Yuan-dynasty South Seas trade circuit, with a continued specialization in pearls.

The third source is the most important. The Ming Shilu (明實錄, “Veritable Records of the Ming”) is the day-by-day chronicle compiled at the imperial court. Its entries for the Yongle reign include, in sober administrative prose, an extraordinary event.

The 1417 Mission

In the 15th year of the Yongle reign — 1417 by the Western calendar — the Ming court received a tribute mission from Sulu unlike anything in the diplomatic record before or after. The mission was led not by one king but by three concurrent kings:

Paduka Batara, styled the Eastern King (東王)
Maharaja Kolamating, styled the Western King (西王)
Paduka Prabhu, styled the Peak King or King of the Cave (峒王)

All three traveled to the Ming capital. The Yongle Emperor received them, granted them imperial seals, and recognized them as kings of a tributary polity in the South Seas. They departed together. They reached Dezhou, in Shandong, on the return journey.

There the Eastern King fell ill and died.

The Yongle Emperor’s response is recorded in the Ming Shilu. The emperor ordered Paduka Batara buried at Dezhou with the full rites of a foreign sovereign, granted him the posthumous title Gongding (恭定, “Respectful and Steadfast”), and arranged for his widow, two sons, and a portion of his retinue to remain in Dezhou to tend the grave. The Western and Peak Kings were given safe escort home with continuing imperial favor.

The widow and sons did not return. Their descendants intermarried with local Hui (Chinese Muslim) families and adopted the surnames An (安) and Wen (溫) — surnames that the families of Dezhou still carry today. The Chinese government formally recognized them as descendants of the Sulu royal house in the 20th century. The tomb has been periodically restored, most significantly by the Qing court in the 18th century and by the People’s Republic in the 20th.

This is, to date, the only independently datable physical artifact corroborating any named Sulu political figure prior to the Spanish contact era. It is the single most important material anchor for the entire pre-Sultanate period of Sulu history.

What the Three Kings Mean

The 1417 mission has been a puzzle for historians since Saleeby first wrote about it in 1908. The puzzle is not whether it happened — the Ming Shilu entry, the tomb, the descendants, and the Qing-era Chinese stelae form an unusually robust evidentiary chain. The puzzle is what kind of polity sends three kings simultaneously to a foreign court.

Three readings have circulated.

The federation reading treats the three kings as the heads of three concurrent sub-polities of a loosely federated Sulu — perhaps territorial (east, west, mountain), perhaps clan-based — who traveled together to assert collective recognition. This is the reading most consistent with the later Tausug political tradition, which retained strong distributed-authority features even under the Sultanate.

The succession-dispute reading treats the three as rival claimants to a single throne, traveling to China to seek imperial endorsement of their respective claims. This is the reading favored by some Chinese scholars working from the Ming documentary tradition, which framed all foreign tribute through the lens of recognized sovereigns.

The diplomatic-convention reading is more cautious. It treats the “three kings” as a Chinese rendering of a non-Chinese political reality that did not map cleanly onto the Ming bureaucratic category of “king” (王). The Ming used 王 for any foreign sovereign of sufficient standing; the Sulu polity may have had datus, paramount datus, ritual leaders, and war leaders, with no single equivalent of “king” — and the Chinese chroniclers picked three figures to standardize.

None of these readings can be confirmed from the available evidence. What we can say with confidence is that Sulu in 1417 had plural authority — that whatever its political structure, sovereignty was not concentrated in a single individual. This matters because it complicates any later narrative that treats “the Sultan of Sulu” as the unbroken continuation of a single line of rule. The Sultanate that emerges in the next century imposes a unitary apex onto what had been a distributed system, and we do not know how, or with what resistance, that consolidation took place.

Source-criticism card: the Ming Shilu on Sulu

Custody chain: Compiled at the Ming court from contemporaneous official records. Surviving in multiple manuscript and printed editions. Translated and indexed in modern scholarship by Geoff Wade.

Tier: A — primary state-administrative record, contemporaneous with events.

Reliability: HIGH for events at the Ming court and its bureaucratic actions (recognition, burial orders, posthumous titles). MEDIUM for the political structure of the foreign polity — the Ming Shilu describes Sulu through Ming diplomatic categories, which may distort the indigenous structure.

Use guidance: Cite for the fact and form of the 1417 mission. Annotate for the limits of Chinese diplomatic vocabulary when describing Sulu political organization.

The Earliest Muslim Among Them

There is a further detail in the 1417 records that deserves attention. The Eastern King’s full transcribed name in the Chinese sources is sometimes rendered with the additional element Muhammad Kamaluddin — an unmistakably Islamic personal name. If this reading is correct, then by 1417 the Sulu political elite was already Islamizing at the highest level, decades before the Tarsila tradition dates the founding of the Sultanate.

This is consistent with the broader pattern of Islamic diffusion through the Malay maritime world. By 1400, Brunei was Islamizing; by 1450, Malacca was a fully Islamic sultanate; the Bornean coast was already studded with small Muslim trading polities. Sulu sat squarely in this network. It would have been surprising if Islam had not reached the Sulu elite by the early 15th century.

What the 1417 evidence does, then, is shift the question. The conventional narrative — that Islam arrived in Sulu around 1380 with Makhdum Karim and that the Sultanate was founded around 1450 by Sharif Abu Bakr — places the religious transformation neatly before the political transformation, with both anchored in the indigenous Tarsila chronicle. The 1417 evidence does not contradict this, but it adds an external check: at least one member of the Sulu ruling elite was bearing an Islamic name by 1417, before the Sultanate proper. The Islamization was already underway when the Sultanate was being built. The two transformations overlapped; they were not sequential.

What the Chinese Sources Cannot Tell Us

The Chinese window is the best window we have, but it is a narrow one. The Zhufan Zhi, the Daoyi Zhilüe, and the Ming Shilu together can tell us:

That Sulu existed as a recognizable polity in external records from at least 1225
That its people produced, aggregated, and traded specific commodities (pearls, beeswax, possibly camphor)
That by 1417 it had plural political leadership and an Islamizing elite
That it was sufficiently organized to plan and execute a transoceanic diplomatic mission of considerable scale

What they cannot tell us is what Sulu looked like from the inside. We do not have the names of the three kings’ subordinates. We do not know the language of court communication. We do not know how decisions were made in the polity, what ritual cycles structured its political year, or how the three kings related to one another in everyday governance rather than in foreign diplomacy. We have no body of indigenous Sulu writing from this period. We have no archaeology of court sites. We have, in short, the external silhouette of a polity whose interior life is unrecoverable from the Chinese record alone.

This is a different kind of historical knowledge from what we have, for instance, of Butuan in the same period. The gold of the Surigao Treasure and the excavated balangay boats give us a material record of pre-colonial Butuan as a living thing, with techniques and tastes and a court life that we can partially reconstruct. For pre-Sultanate Sulu, we have no comparable material record. The archaeology has not been done. The unpublished Jawi-script manuscripts in private custody on Sulu and Tawi-Tawi have not been critically edited. The picture is constructed almost entirely from the outside looking in.

The Unobserved Century

Between Paduka Batara’s death in Dezhou in 1417 and the first European contact with the Sulu zone in the early 16th century, the polity disappears from external records almost entirely. There are scattered Chinese ceramic finds across the archipelago — Yuan and early Ming celadons that confirm the trade continued — but no further imperial missions, no Arab or Persian travel accounts that mention Sulu by name, and no European observations until the Portuguese began probing the South China Sea after 1511.

When the curtain rises again, in the mid-16th century, the polity has been transformed. The three kings are gone. In their place is a single Sultan, claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad through the Sumatran-Arab Sharif Abu Bakr, ruling under a hybrid system of Islamic sharia and indigenous adat law, presiding over a court that uses Jawi script for its administrative records and a redistributive feasting system (kanduli) to bind community to ruler. By the 1570s, this Sultanate is sending fleets to attack Spanish positions in the Visayas. By the 1630s, it is the target of major Spanish military expeditions. By the 1660s, it has outlasted its first attempted conquest.

How this transformation happened — how the distributed three-king polity of 1417 became the centralized Islamic Sultanate of 1578 — is the single largest evidentiary gap in Sulu history. We have a before and an after, separated by a century in which Sulu was, from the perspective of the surviving record, almost invisible.

What We Can State With Confidence

The 1417 evidence permits us to fix a small number of claims with unusually high confidence for a pre-colonial Philippine polity:

Sulu existed as a named, externally-recognized polity by 1225. Anchored by Zhao Rugua.
By 1417, Sulu’s ruling stratum included Islamized members. Anchored by the Ming Shilu transcription of the Eastern King’s name.
By 1417, Sulu sovereignty was distributed across at least three concurrent rulers. Anchored by the Ming Shilu and confirmed by the parallel imperial recognitions.
The 1417 tribute mission left a continuous descendant community in Dezhou, China. Anchored by the surviving tomb, the Qing-era stelae, the An and Wen family lineages, and the modern Chinese state’s recognition.

Each of these claims rests on evidence that is, by the standards of pre-colonial Southeast Asian historiography, exceptionally solid. None of them rests on the Tarsila — the indigenous chronicle whose evidentiary status is the subject of the next story in this series. They are the bedrock on which any further reconstruction must build.

A Tomb, a Word, a Sovereignty

The tomb at Dezhou is not just an artifact. It is a small reminder that sovereignty in the medieval South Seas was a distributed, plural, and often non-Western thing. The Yongle Emperor recognized three kings of one Sulu without confusion or qualification, because the Ming court had a wide diplomatic vocabulary that could accommodate plural sovereigns. The Tausug-speaking world out of which those three kings emerged had its own vocabulary for distributed authority — datu, panglima, ritual leader, kin-group head — that did not map onto a single throne.

When the Sultanate eventually concentrated authority into a single apex, it did so within an existing political culture that had long operated on plural foundations. That culture did not vanish. Beneath every later “Sultan of Sulu” there continued to operate a network of datus, kin groups, and local authorities whose consent was the actual fabric of governance. This is the angle that the colonial sources — Spanish, then American — will systematically miss. They will look for the sovereign and find a man with a title, while the real sovereignty continues to live in the distributed community below.

The Eastern King died in Dezhou. The polity he came from did not. It re-emerges, transformed, in the Sultanate. But the older grain of distributed authority — the grain that produced three kings traveling together to a foreign court — runs through everything that follows. To understand Sulu, one has to begin with this: it was never, even at the height of the Sultanate, a place where sovereignty sat in a single seat.

Quarantined Claims

Claims a reader might import from popular accounts that this story explicitly excludes:

QUARANTINED: That Sulu before 1450 was a “pre-state” or “pre-political” society awaiting the arrival of the Sultanate to give it form. The 1417 evidence shows three concurrent kings receiving Ming imperial recognition — this is a structured, treaty-capable polity.
QUARANTINED: That Islam arrived in Sulu only with Sharif Abu Bakr c. 1450. The Eastern King’s name in the Ming Shilu (1417) shows Islamization of the ruling stratum at least a generation before any Sultanate founding date.
QUARANTINED: That Paduka Batara was “the Sultan of Sulu.” He was one of three concurrent kings of a pre-Sultanate Sulu — the projection of later Sultanate categories onto 1417 obscures what the source actually records.
QUARANTINED: That “the An and Wen families of Dezhou” are folkloric or symbolic. They are documented Chinese citizens with continuous lineage records and PRC state recognition; the descent is administratively real, not legendary.

Primary sources: Zhao Rugua, Zhufan Zhi (c. 1225), trans. Friedrich Hirth & W.W. Rockhill (1911); Wang Dayuan, Daoyi Zhilüe (c. 1349); Ming Shilu (Veritable Records of the Ming), Yongle reign entries for the 15th year (1417), translated and indexed by Geoff Wade, “Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: An Open Access Resource” (Asia Research Institute, NUS); contemporary Qing-era stelae at the Dezhou tomb complex. Secondary: Najeeb M. Saleeby, The History of Sulu (1908); Cesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (1973); Roderich Ptak, “From Quanzhou to the Sulu Zone and Beyond: Questions Related to the Early Fourteenth Century,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29.2 (1998); William Henry Scott, Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History (1984); Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 1 (1988); Geoff Wade, “The Ming Shi-lu as a Source for Southeast Asian History,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 78.1 (2005). Internal cross-reference: see “The Gold Kingdoms of Butuan” for a parallel pre-colonial Mindanao polity documented through Chinese sources, and “Ma-i and the China Trade” for the broader Song-Yuan trade system in which Sulu was embedded.