Half of the Philippines lives on one rice-mortar-named island
Luzon is the Philippines’ largest and most populous island, home to Manila, Quezon City, and about 64.3 million people as of 2024—more than half the national total. The name likely comes from lusong, a Tagalog wooden mortar for pounding rice.
As an island group, “Luzon” can also sweep in Batanes, Babuyan, Polillo, Catanduanes, Marinduque, Mindoro, and sometimes Masbate, Palawan, and Romblon. Portuguese maps wrote Luçonia; early-1500s sailors in Malaysia called Manila Bay peoples Luções after Lusong/Lusung. In the 1900s villagers still pounded unhusked rice in a stone or wooden lusong, the first blows loosening the hull and later ones the bran, before winnowing on a bamboo tray. Callao Cave yielded Homo luzonensis fossils dated to at least 50,000–67,000 years, adding an archaic human species to the island’s deep past.
By 1000 CE Tagalog, Kapampangan and Pangasinan peoples had built trading kingdoms on the coasts, among them Maynila, Tondo and Namayan, ruled through ties between local datu and paramount lakan or rajahs. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription of 900, the oldest known Philippine document, names places around Manila Bay and even Medan in Indonesia. Chinese and Bruneian writers of the tenth century also describe a Buddhist polity called Ma-i, whose location scholars still dispute.
In the twelfth century Japan prized Luzon-made storage jars for tea and rice wine, each stamped by its potters with Baybayin letters naming the kiln; the Burnay jars of Ilocos are the lone survivors of that craft. In 1405 the Yongle Emperor named Ko Ch’a-lao governor of Luzon during Zheng He’s voyages, and later a Brunei sultanate founded by Sharif Ali set up Maynila as a client state, although Pangasinan resisted Islam.
Portuguese sailors met Luções serving as soldiers and sailors as far off as the Malabar Coast of India, and in Malacca the Luzon-born merchant Regimo de Raja rose to become Temenggong, overseer of maritime trade.
Source: Luzon
