Balayan attest to the fact of their presence in the said site at least in the latter part of the 12th century down to the coming of Goiti and Legaspi in Batangas in 1570. The flourishing trade relations between these early Batangueños with a number of Chinese merchants prior to the Spanish conquest explained the presence of hundreds of Chinese wares from potteries to stonewares and vases of Song dynasty period to the latter part of the 16th century, in the burial grounds at Calatagan sites of Pulung Bakaw, Kay Tomas, Pinagpatayan I and II at Butong, Taal Batangas. By origin the early Lipeños were Buddhist in religion and Indian in civilization. With its not infrequent contact with the Chinese traders, the Batangueños have absorbed and been influenced too by China. With the Spanish colonization of the Philippines and the Salcedo conquest of Batangas in 1572, the Lipeños were forced to embrace Western Civilization. Spanish Rule At the coming of the Spaniards to Batangas in 1570, the Malay settlements along the southern shores of Taal Lake at Tagbakin was inhabited by the warlike descendants of the two datus called the Tagalogs. In 1605, after Marshall Gabriel de Rivera received the encomienda of Bombon, the Augustinian Fathers made Tagbakin the first settlement of the Lipeños and a mission center with the name of San Sebastian, perhaps after the installed Patron Saint, which continued to the present. The settlement was made a regular municipality in 1702 and a regular parish in 1716 with Fray Diego de Alday as the first curate. With the eruption of Taal Volcano in 1724, the people moved to what is now "Lumang Lipa" and, again, in 1754, they moved to Balete where they settled for two years until 1756 when they moved inland to the present site obviously for more security from volcanic eruptions. When Don Galo de los Reyes was the governadorcillo of Lipa, he introduced the cultivation of coffee. The seeds of the Arabica species were said to be of two chupas brought in from Mexico by an Augustinian missionary. The coffee industry so flourished and made Lipa the richest municipality in the country with an annual income of P4,000,000.00 that on October 21, 1887, the Queen regent Maria Christina, acting for the young King Alfonso XIII, signed a decree elevating Lipa to a city known as "Villa de Lipa", and later authorized to use