Abstract: Current literature on Butuan’s ancient history situate the place either within a larger overarching theme or are focused only on particular details. These studies fall short of satisfactorily situating Butuan in a wider pre-colonial systemic context. From an International Relations (IR) standpoint, certain questions arise: How did Butuan relate with contemporaneous polities in an international system? How did events in neighboring polities explain Butuan’s political-economic rise and decline? To avoid the entrenched Eurocentrism of mainstream IR theories and to emphasize the region’s unique cultural characteristics and agency, this study—following Alan Chong’s suggestion—utilized O.W. Wolters’s articulation of the mandala polity. This was the lens used to reconstruct Butuan’s position vis-à-vis other polities in the international system of the tenth to eleventh centuries. Through utilizing both primary and secondary documentary sources, this study found out that the eleventh-century Butuan tribute missions to China were not manifestations of political-economic ascendancy but rather a function of competition among polities for regional dominance. Despite the silence of historical sources after 1011 CE, the abundant archaeological data attest to Butuan’s successful establishment of direct trading relations with China, maintained by both largesse and raiding.