[INTRODUCTION]
Afonso Brás de Albuquerque [°1500-1-1580] was the son of the famous Governor of the [Portuguese] State of India and decided to prepare, from the correspondence he had in his possession, the Commentarios de Afonso de Albuquerque capitão geral & gouernador da India, [...] (The commentaries of the great A. Dalbuquerque, second Viceroy of India. [...]), as a way of doing justice to his father's achievements which had been insufficiently publicised by chroniclers on India. His voluminous work was first printed in Lisbon in 1557, and was quite successful from then on since a corrected and expanded edition was published in the kingdom's capital in 1576. Throughout his time living on Asian soil, Afonso de Albuquerque never travelled east of Malacca [presently, Melaka], the city he conquered for the Portuguese Crown in 1511. For this reason the Commentarios [...] (The commentaries [...]) should not have included any extensive description of the Middle Kingdom, so much the more that the year he died, 1515, there had still hardly begun the first Portuguese contacts with the Chinese. The books first edition actually gave little attention to China which was only referred to in passing without making a special point of it.
Curiously however, the same was not so in the second edition as it included a brief, previously unpublished account of a foray into Chinese soil under the pretext of the ambassadorial mission sent to Beijing• by the earlier sultan of Malacca. The justification was simple: at the time when Brás de Albuquerque was preparing a re-edition of the Albuquerquian biography, China had taken on an extraordinarily important role in the Portuguese vision of Asia, to such an extent that it would have been difficult to publish a work about Asian affairs without attributing some importance to that far off kingdom where the Portuguese had moreover established themselves quite firmly since 1557. This episode about the Malay diplomatic mission appeared later in the pages of Fernão Mendes Pinto's Peregrinaçam [...] (The Voyages and Adventures [...]) (See: Text 22 — Fernão Mendes Pinto), published only in 1614, reinforcing speculation on the relationship between the two works. It is not improbable that Brás de Albuquerque would have chosen an episode from the first draft of the romanticised memoirs of Mendes Pinto, as he did have access to them and the famous wanderer had returned to Portugal from the Orient in 1558, being understood that ten years later he would already have been well advanced in the writing of his work.
Afonso de Albuquerque.
ANONYOUS.
Mid sixteenth century. Oil on panel.
Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (National Museumn of Ancient Art). Lisbon.
In: GARCIA, José Manuel. Portugal e os Descobrimentos. Lisboa, Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1992. p.151.
* Second edition: Lisbon, 1576.
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