The Sea Has Always Had a Name, and It Was Not Chinese
- museomaritimo
- Jul 4
- 11 min read
July 4, 2026 – Quezon City, NCR, Philippines
Article by Whesley Samar
International Law and Historiography | West Philippine Sea
China's multi-millennial claim to the West Philippine Sea sounds imposing, until you realize their official mapmakers were basically copying British homework in 1935. This four-part series kicks off by looking at what we call the shoal, and why Beijing's historical narrative completely shrinks when placed next to a Philippine paper trail.
When a top-down nature reserve collides with a coast of resistance
Joey Marabe has spent years on the waters off Masinloc, Zambales. He is the provincial coordinator of PAMALAKAYA-Zambales and vice president of the Masinloc-based Panatag Fisherfolk Association, and when China announced a "marine nature reserve" over Scarborough Shoal in late 2025, he did not see conservation. He saw the latest chapter of something older. "Sa napakatagal na pagtutol ng mga mamamalakayang Zambaleño sa usaping ng WPS, ngayon ang unang reaksyon namin ay: Ano ang karapatan nila na ideklara at gawing marine nature reserve ang Scarborough Shoal?" He told the Philippine Daily Inquirer (Baclig, 2025), after so many years of opposition by Zambaleño fisherfolk on the West Philippine Sea issue, his first reaction was to ask what right China has to declare and turn Scarborough Shoal into a marine reserve at all.
The fishermen of that coast have their own name for the shoal, separate from any of the names that show up in treaties or government statements. They call it Karburo (Avendaño, 2012). Manila's official documents call it Bajo de Masinloc, or Panatag Shoal. The rest of the world, going back to a British ship that ran aground there in 1748, knows it as Scarborough Shoal. China calls it Huangyan Dao, and in 2025 it attempted to overlay a nature reserve over it.
What China has never had, until well into the twentieth century, is an ancient name for that place. Not Karburo. Not anything close. That absence, set against more than two centuries of Philippine documentation, is where this series begins.
China's claim to the West Philippine Sea rests on four historical pillars: that it discovered these waters first, named them first, developed them first, and has administered them continuously since (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China [MFA], 2000). The 2016 Arbitral Award gutted the legal version of this claim, finding no basis under international law for China's nine-dash line (Permanent Court of Arbitration [PCA], 2016). However, China never stopped making the historical and civilizational case in classrooms, in state media, and in the language Beijing uses every time a Philippine vessel is blocked from its own waters. The Philippines, by contrast, has mostly fought this dispute in courtrooms and diplomatic notes. This series picks up the fight on the other front, the one where China has operated for decades with comparatively little resistance. We start with the question of what a place is called, and who had the right to call it that first.
How a twentieth-century committee sat in an office and copied British homework
It is worth stating China's position plainly, in its own words, before examining it. Beijing's foundational claim, laid out in its 2000 Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement and repeated in similar language since, holds that the Chinese people were the first to discover, name, and develop the islands of the South China Sea, and that the Chinese government was the first to continuously exercise sovereignty over them (MFA, 2000). In the days after the 2016 ruling, Chinese state media reaffirmed this directly, reporting that "the Chinese people were the first to name and develop the islands and it was the Chinese government that first asserted sovereignty over them" (Xinhua, 2016).
The specific naming evidence China cites relies on the Geng Lu Bu, a body of route notes compiled by fishermen from Hainan and passed down across generations, recording sailing directions and local names for features across the South China Sea (MFA, 2000). Chinese researchers have also pointed to a 1901 Chinese translation of the British Royal Navy's China Sea Directory, arguing that the concept of the South China Sea as Chinese maritime territory was already present in Chinese thinking by that point, even where individual features had not yet been formally labeled (Chen, as cited in Yuwei, 2025).
Where Scarborough Shoal specifically is concerned, Chinese state media have been surprisingly candid about the actual naming timeline. According to a 2025 Global Times investigation citing a researcher at the China Institute for Marine Affairs, a 1935 Republic of China (ROC) land and water map review committee, staffed by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Navy Ministry, and the Ministry of Education, formally assigned Chinese names to 132 South China Sea features for the first time (Yuwei, 2025). Modern state media often frames this 1935 batch as the moment Huangyan Dao was codified (Yuwei, 2025).
However, a deep dive into the actual 1935 ROC document; The Comparison Table of Chinese-English Names of the South China Sea Islands, reveals a much more telling historiographical reality. The committee did not record an ancient, indigenous name for the shoal; instead, they explicitly transliterated the British name "Scarborough" into "Sijiaboluo" (斯卡巴洛). It was not until the 1947 and 1948 Kuomintang revisions that the feature was scrubbed and renamed Minzhu Jiao (Democracy Reef), before eventually morphing into the modern PRC designation of Huangyan Dao (Yuwei, 2025).
This bureaucratic paper trail does not show a multi-millennial state administrative history. It shows a twentieth-century committee sitting in an office, working off British Hydrographic Office charts, and phonetically mimicking Western nomenclature for a feature they had yet to systematically encounter.
Justice Antonio Carpio, in his public lectures, has cited an earlier date still, telling GMA News that China did not have a name at all for Scarborough Shoal until 1915, decades after China formally laid claim to other South China Sea islands in its subsequent 1947 nine-dash line map (as cited in Ombay, 2024). The exact year is contested even within Chinese and Philippine accounts of it. What is not contested, by either side's own sources, is that China's first documented name for this shoal falls somewhere in the early-to-mid twentieth century.
This is the claim. It is institutional, it is repeated consistently, and it carries the weight of a state that has invested in making the case for decades. It is also, on the specific matter of naming, built on a far shorter timeline than China's broader civilizational language suggests.
How a dangerous shoal acquired a name with a local Tagalog accent
To understand how modern bureaucratic naming stands up against ancestral reality, one must step back nearly two centuries before China's 1935 committee began its phonetic translations. In 1734, Spanish Jesuit priest Pedro Murillo Velarde, working with Filipino cartographic artists Francisco Suarez and Nicolas dela Cruz Bagay, produced the Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas, widely regarded as the first scientific map of the Philippine archipelago (Velarde, 2020). The map is detailed enough that individual towns can be made out under magnification (Velarde, 2020). Off the coast of Zambales, it marks three reefs: Galit (meaning anger), Lumbay (meaning gloom), and Panacot (meaning threat or danger).
These are Tagalog words, not Spanish administrative labels. They describe how these features were experienced by the people who actually sailed those waters. A shoal does not acquire a name like threat by accident. It acquires that name from people who nearly lost a boat there, or watched someone else lose one, and passed the warning down the coast. Murillo Velarde did not invent Panacot. He recorded a name that already existed among the communities living along that shore, which means the name itself likely predates 1734, possibly by a stretch the surviving paper record cannot fully capture.
Set that against China's own published timeline. By the account in China's own state media, formal Chinese naming of this shoal begins in 1935 with a phonetic copy of a British chart (Yuwei, 2025). By the account Justice Carpio has presented in public lectures, it begins in 1915 (as cited in Ombay, 2024). Either figure places the Tagalog name on a printed, archived, scientifically produced map at least 181 years ahead of China's earliest documented name for the same feature.
The Paper Trail
The 1734 map is not an isolated artifact. It opens a documented cartographic record that runs for nearly a century and a half. In April 1800, the Spanish frigate Santa Lucia sailed from Manila to survey the waters around Panacot, a state-organized hydrographic mission rather than a loose fishing expedition (Carpio, as cited in Rappler, 2026). The results were published in 1808, and the feature appeared on official charts under a new name, Bajo de Masinloc, tying it directly to the municipality of Masinloc, Zambales, the same coastal town whose fishermen still work those waters today (Rappler, 2026).
By 1875, a more complete Carta General del Archipiélago Filipino confirmed the same picture, showing Panatag and the full chain later known as the Spratlys as Philippine territory (Rappler, 2026). This map carried into the American colonial period and was reproduced in the 1939 Philippine Census atlas, published eight years before China issued its first nine-dash line map in 1947 (Velarde, 2020).
Three maps: 1734, 1808, 1875. One hundred and forty-one years of continuous, government-produced cartographic documentation, each building on the last, each naming the same feature in connection with the same stretch of the Philippine coast.
Why China’s own dynastic mapmakers always drew the imperial line at Hainan
China's naming claim runs into three distinct problems worth examining one at a time. The first concerns what the Geng Lu Bu actually is. It is not a government document. It is an oral fishing tradition written down by individual Hainan fishermen over generations, with no fixed date of original composition and no official state authorship (MFA, 2000). It records sailing routes and local names used by Hainan fishermen working those waters, which is real evidence of historic fishing activity. However, knowing how to sail somewhere and naming a hazard along the way is not the same as a sovereign, state act. Filipino, Vietnamese, and Malay sailors also worked these waters for centuries with their own working names for what they encountered. Route knowledge held by fishermen of several nations does not, by itself, settle a question of exclusive territorial title.
The second problem is the date itself. China's own state media places the first formal Chinese naming of Scarborough Shoal in 1935 (Yuwei, 2025). Carpio's noted figure of 1915 is slightly earlier, but still falls within living memory of people whose grandchildren fish those waters today (as cited in Lalu, 2024). Neither figure supports the picture of a continuous, multi-millennial naming tradition tied to this specific shoal.
The third problem is the one Justice Carpio has pressed hardest before international audiences, and it uses China's own historical record against itself. Presenting evidence before the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Philippine legal team showed ancient Chinese maps spanning the Song dynasty through the Qing dynasty, nearly a thousand years of Chinese cartography. Every one of them showed the exact same southernmost point of Chinese territory: Hainan Island, not the Spratlys, and certainly not Scarborough Shoal (Carpio, as cited in Velarde, 2020). "China in its earliest dynasty, from the Song and fast forward to their last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, and all their maps uniformly show that their southernmost territory is Hainan," Carpio notes. "If you superimpose all the maps from the Song to the Qing dynasty, over almost a thousand years, the southernmost territory of China was Hainan" (as cited in Velarde, 2020). If China's own dynastic maps stop at Hainan, the modern claim that ancient China considered these waters its sovereign territory does not square with the documentary record China itself produced.
A fourth point is worth a brief mention, since it shows how recent the entire framework actually is. The nine-dash line anchoring Beijing’s modern claim traces back to a 1947 Republic of China map built on highly flawed, error-ridden sketches from the previous decade. This early cartography was so uneven that the 1935 land and water review committee originally left Scarborough Shoal entirely outside their territorial line, registering the feature merely as Sijiaboluo—a clunky phonetic imitation of its British name (Yuwei, 2025; Velarde, 2020). The institutional claim Beijing presents today as ancient and continuous was still being drawn and redrawn well within the twentieth century, by China's own documentary account.
Defending the generational memories that a state nomenclature tries to erase
A name is not simply a label. It is evidence of a relationship. When the fishermen of the Zambales coast called a shoal Panacot, they were not filing a legal claim. They were encoding something learned the hard way and passed from one generation of sailors to the next, about a place they returned to again and again because their lives depended on knowing it well. That kind of knowledge is not issued by a centralized committee. It accumulates over years, among people who were actually there.
China's strongest naming evidence, even taken at face value, describes a similar process: fishermen learning a place through repeated contact and passing that knowledge down. The issue for Beijing is not that this kind of evidence is illegitimate in principle. It is that the Philippine version of it is older, better documented across an unbroken chain of state-produced maps, and tied directly to a community that is still there.
Joey Marabe is not asserting a claim to water he has never seen. He represents the fishermen of a coast that has named, feared, and depended on that shoal for longer than anyone in Beijing had a word for it. When Leonardo Cuaresma, president of the New Masinloc Fishermen's Association, describes families retreating from Panatag because of harassment and dredging near the shoal (as cited in Baclig, 2025), he is describing the systematic unraveling of exactly the kind of generational, place-bound knowledge that gave the shoal its name in the first place.
What comes next?
Naming is the most intimate of China's four pillars, and it is also the one that collapses fastest once both timelines are placed side by side. However, naming is only the opening argument. China's next claim is bigger: that Chinese fishermen were the first to actually live on and use these waters, not just sail past them. The Philippine answer to that claim does not begin with a map. It begins with a boat, a vessel pulled out of the ground in Butuan and carbon-dated to the seventh century, among the oldest watercraft ever excavated in Southeast Asia, built by people trading across this sea long before anyone had written the word Huangyan.
References
Avendaño, C. O. (2012, April 29). What's in a name? Scarborough, Panatag or Bajo de Masinloc? Philippine Daily Inquirer. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/184321/whats-in-a-name-scarborough-panatag-or-bajo-de-masinloc
Baclig, C. E. (2025, November 5). PH fishers resist China "nature reserve" in Scarborough Shoal. Philippine Daily Inquirer. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2134459/ph-fishers-resist-china-nature-reserve-in-scarborough-shoal
Ombay, G. (2024, June 16). EXPLAINER: What is Scarborough Shoal and why is it important? GMA News Online. https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/nation/910257/explainer-what-is-the-scarborough-shoal-and-why-is-it-important/story/
Yuwei H. (2025, October 8). GT investigates: Uncovering why Huangyan Dao belongs to China through global cartographic records and China's surveying, mapping, and naming of island. Global Times. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202510/1345156.shtml
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China. (2000). Historical evidence to support China's sovereignty over Nansha Islands. https://ph.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zt/nhwt/200404/t20040408_1334577.htm
Permanent Court of Arbitration. (2016). The South China Sea arbitration (The Republic of the Philippines v. The People's Republic of China), PCA Case No. 2013-19. https://pca-cpa.org/en/cases/7/
Rappler. (2026, June 28). Scarborough Shoal, 4 forgotten maps and Antonio Carpio. https://www.rappler.com/plus-membership-program/exclusive-content/scarborough-shoal-forgotten-maps-antonio-carpio/
Velarde, M. V. (2020, November 13). Map rights wrongs: The 1734 Murillo Velarde map. https://upd.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/UPDate-Vol1-2-No1.pdf
Xinhua. (2016, July 12). China refuses South China Sea arbitration award.
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