in Kinabatangan, as stated in both Brunei and Sulu records. A younger sister of Ong Sum Ping (Huang Senping), the Governor of the Chinese settlement then married Sultan Ahmad of Brunei. Perhaps due to this relationship, a burial place with 2,000 wooden coffins, some estimated to be 1,000 years old, were discovered in Agop Batu Tulug Caves and around the Kinabatangan Valley area. It is believed that this type of funeral culture was brought by traders from Mainland China and Indochina to northern Borneo as similar wooden coffins were also discovered in these countries. In addition with the discovery of Chinese ceramics from a shipwreck in Tanjung Simpang Mengayau which estimated to be from 960 to 1127 AD of Song dynasty and Vietnamese Đông Sơn drum in Bukit Timbang Dayang on Banggi Island that had existed between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. During the reign of the fifth sultan of Bolkiah between 1485 and 1524, the Sultanate's thalassocracy extended over northern Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago, as far as Kota Seludong (present-day Manila) with its influence extending as far of Banjarmasin, taking advantage of maritime trade after the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese. Many Brunei Malays migrated to Sabah during this period, beginning after the Brunei conquest of the territory in the 15th century. But plagued by internal strife, civil war, piracy and the arrival of western powers, the Bruneian Empire began to shrink. The first Europeans to visit Brunei were the Portuguese, who described the capital of Brunei at the time as surrounded by a stone wall. The Spanish followed, arriving soon after Ferdinand Magellan's death in 1521, when the remaining members of his expedition sailed to the islands of Balambangan and Banggi in the northern tip Borneo; later, in the Castilian War of 1578, the Spanish who had sailed from New Spain (Centered in Mexico) and had taken Manila from Brunei, unsuccessfully declared war on Brunei by briefly occupying the capital before abandoning it. The Sulu region gained its own independence in 1578, forming their own sultanate known as the Sultanate of Sulu. When the civil war broke out in Brunei between Sultans Abdul Hakkul Mubin and Muhyiddin, the Sulu Sultan asserted their claim to Brunei's territories in northern Borneo. The Sulus claimed that Sultan Muhyiddin had promised to cede the northern and eastern portion of Borneo to them in compensation for their help in settling the