Tagalog Culture ID

The Tagalog culture developed around the bays and rivers of central Luzon in the Philippines, including the great harbour that would become Manila. Austronesian and maritime, it grew prosperous on trade.

Tagalog society was organised into communities known as barangays, led by chiefs, and engaged actively in commerce with China and the wider region, exchanging local goods for foreign wares.

The Tagalog possessed their own writing, and their religious life centred on a pantheon of deities and nature spirits and the veneration of ancestors, served by ritual specialists.

Mercantile and maritime, settled around one of the region's great harbours, the Tagalog formed a leading culture of the pre-colonial Philippines.