Portuguese presence in Asia

Background

Asia has always exerted a fascination on the Portuguese. Then came the much valued spices, luxury products like ivory, precious stones and dyestuffs used in the dye industry. The inaccuracy of geographical knowledge before the Discoveries made people to believe that Asia lay at the beginning of the Nile River and not in the Red Sea, allowing the inclusion of Ethiopia in Asia and the extension of the word India, to incorporate these and other parts of Eastern Africa in it. Here, according to an old legend, would live a Christian emperor, wealthy and powerful, known as Prester John.

The designation of Prester John seems to derive from zan hoy (my master), an Ethiopian term for how the population designated its king. In the fifteenth century, Prester John was identified with the king of Ethiopia; after a few contacts between the two parties, the Portuguese needed to know how to get to Ethiopia, although little information about that empire. This knowledge was transmitted by travelers, geographers, pilgrims, merchants and politicians returning home after long trips.

India and Ceylon

Middle East

Southeast Asia

China and Japan

The Legacy

Literature

The "Suma Oriental", the first European description of Malaysia, is the oldest and most extensive description of the Portuguese East. Tomé Pires was a prominent Portuguese apothecary who lived in the East in the sixteenth century and was the first Portuguese ambassador sent to China. The Suma Oriental describes the plants, medicinal drugs of East and beyond medical aspects also describes thoroughly all trading ports, of potential interest to Portuguese newcomers in the Indian Ocean, electing as its main objective the commercial nature of information, including all traded products in each kingdom and each port, as well as their origins and the merchants that undertook the traffic. This is a study that precedes Garcia da Orta, and it is a work that was discovered in the 1940s, by the historian Armando Cortesão.

Duarte Barbosa was an official of Portuguese India between 1500 and 1516-17 holding the post of scrivener in Kannur and at times local language interpreter (for Malayalam). His "Book of Duarte Barbosa" describing the places we visited is one of the oldest examples of Portuguese travel literature soon after their arrival in the Indian Ocean. In 1519 Duarte Barbosa went on the first trip of circumnavigation with Magellan, of whose brother-in-law he was, dying in May 1521 in the banquet trap of King Humabon in the island of Cebu in the Philippines.

Domingos Pais and Fernão Nunes made important reports of the Vijayanagara Empire, or "Reino de Bisnaga" (as it was referred to by the Portuguese) located at the Deccan in southern India during the reign of Bukka Raya II and Deva Raya I. Its description of Hampi, the Hindu imperial capital, is the most detailed of all historical narratives on this ancient city.

It was Coimbra that printed eight of the ten books that Fernão Lopes de Castanheda had scheduled about the history of the discovery and conquest of India by the Portuguese. He wished his work to be the first to celebrate historiographically the Portuguese effort. The first volume came out in 1551. Volumes II and III appeared in 1552, the fourth and fifth in 1553, the sixth in 1554 and the eighth in 1561. The seventh was published without place or date. After the publication of the eighth volume, Queen Catherine, yielding to pressure from some nobles who did not like the objectivity of Castanheda, banned the printing of the remaining volumes, IX and X. His work, still valid for its vast geographic and ethnographic information, was widely translated and read in the Europe of the time.

Written by João de Barros (following a proposal of Dom Manuel I) from a story narrating the achievements of the Portuguese in India and thus titled because, like the work of the Roman historian Titus Livius Patavinus, grouping the events per book here too is done in periods of ten years. The first decade came out in 1552, the second in 1553 and third was printed in 1563. The fourth decade, unfinished, was completed by engineer, mathmetician and Portuguese cosmographer João Baptista Lavanha (Lisbon, c 1550 -. Madrid, March 31, 1624) and published in Madrid in 1615, long after his death. The "Decades" met little interest in their author's lifetime. It is known only an Italian translation came out in Venice in 1563. John III (Dom João III), enthusiastic about its contents, asked the author to draw up a chronicle on the reign of Dom Manuel events - what Barros can not do, and chronic in question was drafted by Damião de Gois. As a historian and linguist, its "Decades" are a precious source of information about the history of the Portuguese in Asia and the beginnings of modern historiography in Portugal and worldwide.

Written in Portuguese in the form of a dialogue between Garcia da Orta and Ruano, a newcomer colleague in Goa looking forward to encounter the materia medica of India. A literal translation of its title would be "Colloquium of simple drugs and medicinal things in India". The Colloquium include 57 chapters where you study an approximately equal number of oriental drugs such as aloe, benzoin, camphor, the canafístula, opium, rhubarb, tamarinds and many others. It presents the first rigorous description by a European of botanical characteristics, origin and therapeutic properties of many medicinal plants, though previously known in Europe, were wrongly or very incomplete described and only in the form of the drug, i.e. the part of the plant collected and dried.

The "Treaty of things from China," published in 1569 by Friar Gaspar da Cruz was the first complete work on China and the Ming Dynasty in the West since Marco Polo published in Europe. It includes information about the geography, provinces, royalty, employees, bureaucracy, transport, architecture, agriculture, handicrafts, trade matters, clothing, religious and social customs, music and instruments, writing, education and justice, thus containing a text which had a role in influencing the image Europeans had of China.

The Lusíadas of Luís Vaz de Camões (c 1524-1580) is considered the Portuguese epic par excellence. Probably completed in 1556, it was first published in 1572, three years after the return of the author of the East. En route from Goa to Portugal, Camões in 1568 made a stopover on the island of Mozambique, where Diogo do Couto found, as was related in his work, "so poor living friends" (Decade 8th Asia). Diogo do Couto paid for the rest of his trip to Lisbon, where Camões arrived in 1570.

Nippo Jisho, or Vocabvlário of Lingoa of IAPAM was the first Japanese-Portuguese dictionary created and the first to translate the Japanese into any Western language. It was published in Nagasaki (Japan) in 1603. It explains 32,000 words in Japanese translated into Portuguese. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), with the collaboration of Japanese, compiled this dictionary over several years. This was meant to be of help to the missionaries to study the language. It is thought that the Portuguese priest João Rodrigues was the main organizer of the project.

The "Pilgrimage" of Fernando Mendes Pinto is perhaps the most translated book of travel literature. It was published in 1614, thirty years after the author's death. What is striking is its exotic content. The author is an expert in describing the geography of India, China and Japan, laws, customs, morals, festivals, trade, justice, war, funerals, etc. Noteworthy is also the forecast of the collapse of the Portuguese Empire.

Manuel Dias (Yang Ma-On) (1574-1659) was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary undertook some notable activities in China, particularly in astronomy. This work presents the most advanced European astronomical knowledge of the time in the form of questions and answers to questions posed by the Chinese.