Philippines

The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean consisting of about 7,641 islands grouped into Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, with a population of over 114 million. Negritos, the archipelago's earliest inhabitants, were followed by waves of Austronesian peoples, and the adoption of animism, Hinduism with Buddhist influence and Islam established island kingdoms, before the arrival of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan marked the beginning of Spanish colonization. Spain ceded the territory to the United States after the Philippine Revolution and the 1898 Spanish-American War, and following the Philippine-American War and the Japanese invasion during World War II, the Philippines became independent in 1946. The country experienced martial law from 1972 to 1981 under Ferdinand Marcos before his overthrow in the 1986 People Power Revolution. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/