Boxer Codex

The English historian Charles Ralph Boxer purchased the manuscript in 1947 from the collection of Lord Ilchester in London. Boxer recognized the importance of what he called the "Manila Manuscript" and published a paper in 1950 with a detailed description of the codex. He made the manuscript freely available to other researchers for study, and it became known as the Boxer Codex. Boxer eventually sold it to Indiana University, where it is held by the Lilly Library.

Description and contents

The manuscript was written around circa 1590 in primarily Early Modern Spanish with some labels in Early Manila Hokkien written in Spanish orthography and Classical Chinese and contains illustrations of ethnic groups in the Philippines, across Southeast Asia, and in East Asia and Micronesia at the time of early Spanish contact. It also contains Taoist mythological deities and demons, and both real and mythological birds and land animals copied from popular Chinese texts and books in circulation at the time. Aside from a description of and historical allusions to what are now the Philippines and various other Far Eastern countries, the codex also contains 97 hand-drawn color paintings and illustrations depicting peoples and animals of the Philippines, the Indonesian Archipelago, Japan, Taiwan, China, and Mainland Southeast Asia. The first illustration is an oblong fold-out, 74 are full-page colored illustrations, and the remaining are arranged four to a page on 22 pages (with some of the quarters remaining blank). Most of the drawings appear to have been copied or adapted from materials brought to the Philippines from China by Martín de Rada: the Classic of Mountains and Seas and books from the shenmo genre, which depict deities and demons. The remaining drawings represent individuals, often a male and female pair, as inhabitants from tributaries of China and Taiwan with their distinctive costume; some of these have been refashioned as warriors. The depictions of inhabitants from Chinese tributaries may have been copied from a pre-existing source, drawn from memory, or perhaps even drawn according to instruction given by Rada or one of the other Europeans who visited China. At least 15 illustrations deal with the inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago.