REMEMBERING JACK BRAGA

The death of José Maria Braga last May was an opportunity for his reputation to be restored from the depths of obscurity to which he had been condemned in Macau many years previously. He was an avid researcher, a prolific author, considered by Father Manuel Teixeira (and likewise Charles Boxer) to be one of Macau's greatest historians. Jack Braga was destined to suffer obscurity in seclusion in a distant land. A lamentable awareness of this shameful omission is evident in the comments proffered by Father Teixeira and Patrício Guterres which were published in the Gazeta Macaense. RC hopes that publishing these obituaries along with a list of his most important works (recorded in Luís Gonzaga Gomes' Bibliografia Macaense) will serve as a modest "in memorium" of Jack Braga. We are delighted that last year, on Portugal Day, José Maria Braga was decorated with the Order of Prince Henry, an honour which is awarded to those who have made the greatest contribution to the dissemination of Portuguese culture throughout the world. The honour was bestowed at the request of the Board of Directors of the Cultural Institute of Macau. More important, however, is the value of his works, a literary proliferation which surpasses the deeds of common man and which, as the result of well-deserved and long-overdue new editions, shall continue to serve the historical City of the Name of God.

The Death of the Historian José Maria Braga

An old friend has died in the city of San Francisco at the age of ninety. I say "old friend" for, over the course of sixty four years, there was never a cloud over our friendship.

When I arrived in Macau in 1924, Jack Braga was a young teacher (twenty eight years old) in St. Joseph's Seminary where he taught English Language and Literature.

At that time, the only historian at work in Macau was Father Régis Gervaix, the French teacher at the same educational establishment as Braga. However, the Chinese Government invited Gervaix to teach French Literature in Beijing University and in 1925 he left Macau to take up the appointment.

Jack Braga had been interested in the history of Macau since 1920 and on Gervaix's departure, he took on the task himself and excelled himself at the job. For ten years he was the great historian of this land just as Father Gervais had been from 1916.

His works were published in English and brought Macau to the attention of the outside world.

There had been another important historian: Montalto de Jesus. By 1902, he had already published his master work Historic Macao which was soon sold out. It was Jack Braga who took responsibility for reprinting it but with the arrival of the Second Republic in 1926 the book was burned beside the "Tanque do Mainato" and its author condemned by the Tribunal. Montalto de Jesus was to die penniless and forgotten and a revival of his works has yet to come. Jack Braga was the only one to keep his head above water.

Jack Braga and Charles Boxer complemented each other, They were both prolific writers. Braga truly deserved to be decorated and I myself requested the government to do so but to no avail.

To this day, Macau has a debt to pay to Montalto and Braga, two great historians and two sons of the city.

The Burning of the Books

Montalto de Jesus' book, Historic Macao, was not the only one to be burned. A book by Jack Braga, Os Jesuítas na Ásia (The Jesuits in Asia), also followed the same path. There is now only one copy of this book in the whole world and it is held in St. Joseph's Seminary.

For many years, Jack Braga published his work every month in the Boletim Eclesiástico da Diocese de Macau (The Ecclesiastical Bulletin of the Diocese of Macau) while five hundred off-prints were made. These were stored in the Mission Building where they were stacked up to the ceiling of one of the rooms.

When the Mission Building was demolished to make room for the present building, I requested the church authorities to take care of the off-prints. Nothing was done. Well aware of how valuable those off-prints were, I made a collection of the five hundred articles and bound them into a fat volume which I still have to this day and protect with religious zeal. The other copies were burned and lost to the world!

What did this work encompass? Part of the wealth of documents prepared by Brother João Álvares in 1742 with comprehensive foot-notes made by Jack Braga. He never managed to finish the job of editing all the documentation and in fact completed only half of it.

I frequently encouraged him to complete this valuable work but he never did and now all that remains of it is the copy in the Seminary.

I believe it would be an excellent move if the Cultural Institute of Macau were to publish a facsimile edition of his work in order to save it.

Father Manuel Teixeira

(Gazeta Macaense)

Editorial

The historian Jack Braga has died. His death marks the passing of one of the greatest and most renowned historians of the Portuguese in the Orient. Macau is indebted to him.

He was a member of one of the most illustrious and prominent Portuguese families who established themselves in Hongkong and founded a partriotic Portuguese community in the British Colony.

In his work as a teacher in the former St. Joseph's Seminary, he prepared generations of Macau's youth with a grounding in English, English Literature and business knowledge.

Many of his students later shone in the most varied professions in Hongkong, Shanghai and other cosmoplitan cities in the Far East. Others emigrated to Australia, Brasil, Canada and the United States.

He himself emigrated, first to Australia and then to the United States where he was to live until the end of his life leaving an unblemished reputation and a wealth of historical works which shall guarantee him immortality.

Macau has still not shown this son the gratitude which he so richly deserves by honouring him with a posthumous medal and bringing his name into the public sphere. By honouring Macau, Jack Braga honoured Portugal. Jack Braga was a true Portuguese who always repected the scattered motherland to which he belonged and it is for this reason that he deserves national recognition.

Patrício Guterres

(Gazeta Macaense)

J. M. Braga, historian and scholar, dies

Scholar and historian J. M. (Jack) Braga, a member of one of Hongkong's oldest families has died in San Francisco after a long illness. He was ninety.

Almost immediately after the British occupied Hongkong, his great grandfather moved here from Macau and started the flourishing business of Noronha and Co., which flourished for more than a century until it was bought by the Hongkong Government some years ago.

His father, Mr J. P. Braga, was also a printer and publisher and later a director of several local companies and an active member of the Sanitary Board (now called the Urban Council) and the Legislative Council.

His mother, Olive Pollard, who came to Hongkong from Australia in the 1890's, was by profession a violinist.

Mr Jack Braga was born in Hongkong in 1897 and educated at St. Joseph's College. For many years he taught English and literature at St. Joseph's Seminary in Macau.

In Macau during the early 1920's Mr Braga became fascinated by the historical voyages of the Portuguese pioneers who were the first to sail beyond the Cape of Good Hope to reach India, China and other eastern lands. He engaged in study and research, and he began to write a series of books on early relations between China and the West which established his reputation as one of the foremost historians of this period.

To further his knowledge of his chosen subject, Mr Braga travelled to Japan, England, Italy and Portugal, where he delved into archives in religious seminaries and other institutions for original documents, many of which he brought to light and referred to in his books.

His books and voluminous notes are now housed in a wing of the National Library of Australia in Canberra, where he was engaged to continue his research and correspondence with historians and students from all over the world for several years until his retirement at the age of seventy five.

He then moved with his wife to San Francisco, where they lived with their eldest daughter.

While in Macau Mr Braga acted as an unofficial counsellor to a succession of governors of the Portuguese enclave, especially in connection with relations between the governments of Macau and Hongkong. He was correspondent in Macau for Reuters news agency and the South China Morning Post.

Known to but a few trusted individuals was Mr Braga's work for the Allied cause during the Pacific War. In Macau he was the liaison officer between several secret-service groups including the Chinese Government service and the British Army Aid Group. He organised the clandestine courier system which carried vital messages between Hongkong, Macau, Chungkung and Allied radio stations behind the Japanese lines in China.

Mr Braga is survived by his wife Augusta and their seven children.

Tony Braga

(South China Morning Post)

Death of Historian J, M, (Jack) Braga

A Personal Memory by Geoffrey Bonsall

Mr J.M. Braga, a long time resident of Macau and Hongkong, died, aged ninety, in San Francisco on April 27, 1988.

An informative obituary, excellently written by his somewhat younger brother Tony (A. T.) Braga, himself a distinguished member of the Braga family, was published in the South China Morning Post on May 1, 1988.

I first met Mr Braga about 1956 when he was running a little business, which his friends jokingly called his hobby, while his books and research were his life.

In Hongkong he was known to us as Jack Braga, but José Maria Braga was originally much more concerned with Macau - where he lived and worked, mainly as a teacher for much of his life - and only later with Hongkong.

It was perhaps from his distinguished father Mr José Pedro Braga that he inherited a love of books, writing and historical research.

His father was for some years editor of the Hongkong Telegraph and was also, in Noronha and Co., printer for the Hongkong Government, able to gather a large, and maybe complete, collection of Hongkong Government publications.

Jack said that all these, and his father's other books, were lost in the Pacific War. This impelled him to start again and build up a new library of his own which would match his growing interest in the Portuguese voyages and discoveries reaching round The Cape and finally to his own Macau.

And it was in his later years, after the war, that Jack himself moved to Hongkong and built up his library.

But Jack's interests widened to include Hongkong, George Chinnery, business affairs, and of course his ever-growing library about the Portuguese in the East. He travelled and researched valuable resources in Évora, Lisbon, London and elsewhere.

Jack was a man of impressive physical stature, twinkling bright eyes, a keen but patient manner, with an awesome knowledge of Portuguese history in the Far East as well as a sharp interest in current Hongkong affairs.

He showed me, for instance, his ideas for a commercial and historical publication, published in 1957 as the Hongkong Business Symposium.

Other more eminent scholars had already realised that in these isolated outposts there was a talent, not university trained, but naturally skilled.

In 1942, Jack saw through the press, in wartime turmoil, Charles Boxer's still greatly prized Macau Three Hundred Years Ago, later revised in 1984 as Seventeenth Century Macau.

A full bibliography of Jack's writings awaits our attention but, to mention only a few there are Picturesque Macau, 1926; Tomb-Stones in the English Cemeteries at Macau, 1940; The Western Pioneers and Their Discovery of Macau, 1955; On the Beginnings of Printing at Macau, 1955; China Landfall, 1513. Jorge Álvares' Voyage to China, 1965; Macau, a Short Handbook, 1963.

Nevertheless, in spite of these achievements, Jack remained extremely modest. He would send me a manuscript full of unusual and wellresearched material.

"But Jack", I would say, "how do you know all these marvellous things, where do you find them?" "Oh, but it's mentioned in such and such, by so and so" he would reply. "But tell us, Jack, and then we do not need to go back and check," "Ah yes, of course, I will do that, thank you, that is easy" this modest man of culture and letters would say. And an enlightening footnote would appear.

During the Pacific War both Jack and Sir Robert Ho Tung were in Macau. Jack told me that when he returned to Hongkong at the end of the conflict, it was he who persuaded Sir Robert to leave the house where he had lived in Macau, as the Sir Robert Ho Tung Library.

Much later it was Jack who introduced me to a Portuguese lady in Hongkong who had the most complete set of the Hongkong News, an English-language newspaper published by the Japanese in Hongkong during the occupation. This we acquired for the Hongkong University Library and it has been preserved and made available internationally on microfilm.

Thus, in these and so many other ways, Jack Braga contributed to both Macau and Hongkong. Scholars like the learned and versatile Austin Coates, used his books and his knowledge, and many would tread the path to his library, in later years crowded into a modest flat in Bonham Road where his gentle, quiet wife Augusta would also make you welcome.

It was this very valuable library, originally offered through me to the University of Hongkong that is, however, now in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Jack had prepared his own annotated catalogue of it and this is still a hunting ground for interested scholars.

For many of his later years Jack's help and wisdom were denied to us because of his long struggle with Parkinson's Disease.

Jack Braga, a son and senior citizen of both Hongkong and Macau, would like to be remembered, I think, not so much by what he himself achieved - and that was much against unusual odds - but that he inspired others, particularly in Macau, to continue his work.

The Macau Government's efforts and expense on libraries, the Archives of Macau, and the various and expanding museums would have delighted him and brought to his face that gentle smile of achievement and satisfaction that we remember so well.

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José Maria Braga and Charles Boxer

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Illustration by Carlos Marreiros © copyright 1988.