Latest / The History of Portugal: The Small Nation That Built a Global Empire — Fexingo History / Portugal's First Embassy to China: The Tomé Pires Disaster
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Estado da Índia — Goa, Malacca, the spice routes. But there's a story we haven't touched yet, and it's one of the most dramatic diplomatic disasters in early Portuguese expansion. Luna: I'm guessing it involves China? Lucas: Exactly. By 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque had taken Malacca, which put the Portuguese right at the doorstep of the Ming Empire. And they knew that trade with China was the real prize. So in 1517, they sent an official embassy to the Ming court — the first European diplomatic mission to China since Marco Polo. Lucas: The man they chose to lead it was a pharmacist turned diplomat named Tomé Pires. He'd spent years in India as the factor of drugs in Cochin, and he wrote an incredibly detailed account of Asian trade called the Suma Oriental. But he had zero diplomatic experience. Luna: A pharmacist as ambassador — that's a bold choice. Lucas: It gets bolder. Pires sailed from Goa with a fleet commanded by Fernão Peres de Andrade, who was a competent and diplomatic captain. They reached the Pearl River estuary in August 1517, and after some negotiation with local officials, they were allowed to sail up to Canton — modern Guangzhou. Lucas: Now, the Ming had strict rules about foreign embassies. You had to present credentials, follow protocol, and wait for permission to go to Beijing. Peres de Andrade handled that well. But then he left, and his brother Simão de Andrade took over the fleet in 1519. Lucas: And Simão was a disaster. He built a fortified outpost on an island called Tamão — probably near the Pearl River Delta — and started acting like he owned the place. He seized ships, enslaved locals, and even executed a Portuguese sailor who tried to desert. Word of his brutality reached the Ming court. Luna: So one bad commander ruined the entire mission. Lucas: Worse than ruined. Tomé Pires had finally made it to Beijing in 1520, and he was actually received by the Zhengde Emperor in 1521. But then Zhengde died suddenly in April 1521, and the court faction that supported foreign trade lost power. The new Jiajing Emperor was a rigid Confucian conservative, and he ordered Pires expelled. Lucas: On the way back to Canton, Pires and his entire embassy were arrested. The Ming blamed Portugal for Simão's crimes, and they demanded that the Portuguese withdraw from Tamão and return all seized goods. When that didn't happen — because the Portuguese in Malacca had no real control over rogue captains — the Ming executed Pires and his men in 1524. Luna: They killed the ambassador? That's extraordinary. Lucas: It was. Diplomatic immunity wasn't a thing in Ming China the way we think of it. The embassy was seen as a vassal mission, and when the vassal misbehaved, the emperor could punish them. Pires became a scapegoat. Some accounts say he and his men were beheaded, others say they died in prison. Either way, the mission was a complete failure. Lucas: But here's the thing — the Suma Oriental survived. Pires had sent a copy back to Portugal before the disaster, and it became one of the most important European sources on Asian trade of the era. It describes everything from the spices of the Moluccas to the tea culture in Fujian. So in a way, his legacy isn't diplomatic — it's ethnographic. Luna: It's ironic that the diplomat failed but the writer succeeded. Lucas: Exactly. And the failure also taught the Portuguese a lesson. They realized they couldn't just show up with guns and demand trade. For the next few decades, they operated more quietly, using smugglers and go-betweens on islands like Liampó — near Ningbo. Eventually, that led to the establishment of Macau in 1557, which we covered in episode 68. Lucas: But the Pires embassy casts a long shadow. It set back official Sino-Portuguese relations by nearly forty years. And it shows how much depended on the personality of individual captains in the early empire. Luna: Honestly, if today's episode was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, listener support really keeps this show ad-free and independent. Even a small gesture goes a long way. Luna: So back to the embassy — what happened to Simão de Andrade? Did he face any consequences? Lucas: Not really. Simão returned to Portugal and actually received a commendation from King Manuel I for his services. The king didn't seem to care about his brutality in China. He later died in a shipwreck off the Azores in 1523. But the damage he did was permanent. Lucas: And there's another layer to this story. The Ming court was deeply divided between the eunuch faction, which was more open to foreign trade, and the Confucian scholar-officials, who saw it as a threat. Zhengde had favored the eunuchs, but after his death, the scholars purged them. Pires was caught in that power struggle. Luna: So it wasn't just about the Portuguese — it was internal Ming politics too. Lucas: Exactly. The Ming had a whole system for managing foreign relations — the so-called tribute system. All foreign embassies had to present themselves as tribute missions, and the emperor would grant trade as a favor. The Portuguese didn't understand that, and they refused to perform the required rituals, like the kowtow. Lucas: Pires did actually perform the kowtow — we have records of that — but the damage from Simão's actions made it irrelevant. The Ming saw the Portuguese as barbarians who couldn't be trusted. Luna: I've also heard that the Portuguese at Tamão were mistaken for pirates from the Ryukyu Islands. Lucas: That's a fascinating detail. There's a theory that the Ming officials initially confused the Portuguese with the Ryukyuan pirates because both groups had similar ships and weapons. It took a while for the Ming to even figure out who these 'Folangji' — the Franks — were. The term itself came from a Persian word for Europeans. Lucas: So the whole embassy was built on a foundation of mutual misunderstanding. And yet, despite that, the Portuguese eventually found a way back in through Macau, where they adapted to the tribute system and became a model tributary — at least on paper. Luna: It's amazing how much of history hinges on personality and luck. Lucas: Absolutely. If Fernão Peres de Andrade had stayed instead of his brother, the whole story might have been different. But history doesn't deal in what-ifs. It deals in what happened — and what happened was a pharmacist from Portugal got caught in the gears of the Ming Empire.