It is not infrequent for some Filipino historians to write that the Filipino people have inherited a, great deal from both Oriental and Occidental cultures without losing their racial identity, and that before the coming of Spain and Christianity to the Philippines during the sixteenth century, the ancestors of the present-day Filipinos had commercial, political, and cultural relations with India, China, Japan, and the rest of Malaysia. This view, however, requires certain clarifications and qualifications. The term “Filipino” now-a-days is mainly a political one and generally denotes the native inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago who are subject to a definite and internationally recognized central government. Seventy years or more ago, the native inhabitants of the Philippines were called “indios” and not “Filipinos”, as this latter term was reserved for Spaniards who were born in the Philippines, to distinguish them from those Spaniards who were born in Spain. Historically speaking, in spite of the fact that the present-day Filipinos and their ancestors belong to a wider race, they did not constitute a “people” in any political sense. This is not to deny that their ancestors shared in a common cultural matrix. But if they were a “people” in this sense, then they, with the present-day Indonesians and other Malays, belong to one people. As pointed earlier, the concept of a Filipino people belonging to one national community is a recent one, and the process of integrating them more and more into a national community is still going on. It might be meaningful to maintain that the different Malay peoples at present are segmented or divided into different political entities.