[INTRODUCTION]
Tome Pires [† ca 1540?] was a botanist by profession and set off for the Orient in 1511, with the task of choosing ingredients for medicine which were to be sent to Portugal. After some months living in Cannanore he was sent to Malacca [presently Melaka] in the middle of 1512 by Afonso de Albuquerque, the Governor, who assigned him to different functions related to his post in the years which followed. Pires returned to India at the beginning of 1515 with plans to return to Portugal for good. In the meantime, in the Hundustani ports, he finished writing the Suma Oriental [...] (The Suma Oriental [...] An Account of the East [...]), a extensive and well informed treatise on geography where he described the Asian coast in great, florid detail, from the shores of the Red Sea to the surroundings of the Mediterranean, to the farthest of Liuqiu· Archipelago and Japan. Blessed with unique powers of observation and an unquenchable curiosity evidently combined with an inquiring mind, in just a few years this Portuguese writer managed to compile a prodigious collection of information about many Oriental cultures and their people, information which had been quite unknown to Europeans up until then. His work of gathering together accounts was intimately linked to the Albuquerquian project of consolidating Portuguese presence in the Asiatic Seas, a plan which demanded haste in becoming acquainted with the area in geographical, economical, political and religious terms. The Suma Oriental [...] An Account of the East [...], included the first description of China taken down by a Portuguese observer. Tomé Pires revealed some surprises, which indicated the absolute newness of his information, in describing the fame enjoyed by the Middle Kingdom among the people of the Far East. Consequently he dedicated a few pages to a description of China, pointing out not only aspects of a commercial nature, but also information on the principle characteristics of Chinese civilisation.
The author of The Suma Oriental [...] An Account of the East [...], oddly enough, was to be the first Portuguese ambassador to be sent to Beijing•. As a result, when he prepared to return to Portugal in 1515, he was chosen by the Governor of Portuguese India, then Lopo Soares de Albergaria, to head a diplomatic mission to the Middle Kingdom. The ambassador disembarked in Guangzhou· in 1517 but after a quick visit to the Imperial capital at the beginning of 1521, all the members of the diplomatic mission ended up being detained by the authorities of Guangdong·. The situation reached such a degree of conflict that it was one of the first confrontations between the Portuguese and Guangdongnese. The ambassador, Tomé Pires, disappeared in circumstances which were never clear and one supposes that he died in a Chinese prison around 1527.
Folios 47 verso and 48 recto.
Suma Oriental [...].
TOMÉ PIRES.
Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (National Library of Lisbon) Collection, Lisbon.
In: GARCIA, José Manuel, ed., O Japão visto pelos Portugueses, Lisboa, Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1993, ill. 3.
* MS., Malacca/Cochin, ca. 1515.
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