Re-examining Portugal’s 16th-century diplomatic failure in China

The story of this failed mission offers insights about the challenges of diplomacy, not only in the early modern era, but in our own as well. But the explanation for why it ended the way it did may be unexpected.

The demise of this embassy came in 1521, when the Ming expelled the Portuguese at the Battle of Tunmen. I wrote about this episode already, focusing on the transfer of technology and the relative capabilities of the two sides. This time, I emphasize the diplomatic aspects of this Chinese-Portuguese encounter and attempt to understand why — not so much how — the Ming rejected Portugal’s advances.

The Portuguese fleet was staffed by some of Europe’s most capable and knowledgeable men. Fernāo Peres de Andrade, who commanded the fleet, had extensive experience in the Portuguese colonies in Southeast Asia, serving in India and playing a key role in the conquest of Malacca in 1511. Tomé Pires, appointed by the King of Portugal to be his ambassador to the Ming Court, was perhaps the most insightful European on Asia. He too had served the colonial enterprise at Malacca, and traveled extensively in Southeast Asia overseeing trade missions. Between 1512 and 1515, he wrote his Suma Oriental, considered by many to be the first comprehensive account of East Asia in a European language, based on intelligence and observations collected in his journeys across the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. Florentine merchant Giovanni da Empoli also accompanied the embassy, bringing additional experience in Southeast Asian trade.

The Portuguese arrived from Melaka, which they had recently captured, emboldened by reports of the thriving trade in China. What followed was a familiar script of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, clumsy gestures, and arrogance. Portuguese cannon salutes were considered hostile. Chinese insistence that the Portuguese comply with established procedures was seen as narrow-minded. Chinese bureaucracy — as bureaucracy tends to be — was slow and inefficient, frustrating the Portuguese who had traveled a long way and were now within sight of their prize.

After fits and starts, though, prospects seemed to be improving. A mixture of clumsy ignorance and compromise had brought the Portuguese vessels up the Pearl River from Nantou to Guangzhou. There, after a delay, they were allowed to unload their cargo: they were impressed with Chinese management of their goods brought from Melaka. Ming provincial officials came to meet with the Europeans. The Portuguese sailors — and probably some enslaved attendants, a reminder that the slave trade accompanied early Portuguese missions to China — were provided lodging in Guangzhou. Despite misgivings on both sides, a start was being made.

After two years in Guangzhou, the Portuguese were permitted to move to the capital, stopping first at Nanjing before heading to Beijing in 1520 (their movements matched the return of the emperor following the rebellion of the Prince of Ning).

The Portuguese mission collapsed along with Zhengde emperor’s reign. When Zhengde died in early January — having never recovered from a drunken accident on the Grand Canal — the Portuguese fate was sealed. As John Wills wrote in the Cambridge History, “The embassy was hurried out of Peking by the Chinese the day after the emperor died, and arrived in Canton in September.”

The rejection of the Portuguese embassy is customarily attributed to a blend of European racism and Chinese xenophobia, with each side arrogantly convinced of its own virtue. But there are other possibilities. Historian James Fujitani, writing in the Journal of World History, proposes another explanation, one that makes sense of why such an apparently momentous event as the first formal Chinese-European contact in centuries was relegated to trivia: Did the Chinese perceive the Portuguese as European?

Fujitani relies on Anthony Reid’s analysis of trade in Southeast Asia, along with contemporary accounts from Melaka and other ports in the region, to note that even in those places controlled by Portugal, most “Portuguese” ships were crewed predominantly — three-fourths or more — by local sailors, not Europeans. The flotilla that arrived in the Pearl River Delta in 1517 included the intimidating Portuguese carracks, but also Chinese junks, some of them commanded by overseas Chinese in the employ of the Portuguese. Moreover, eyewitnesses to the Portuguese mission saw them not as exotic outlanders, but typical of the mix of peoples — primarily from Southeast Asia — that typified Guangzhou. Fujitani quotes a young man named Wang Xiwen who described the visitors as “anonymously blended in and thrust into the city,” and described the Portuguese ships as just several among many foreign vessels. Another observer mistook the Portuguese for their Muslim interpreters. For these and other reasons — including the established fact that the visitors had arrived from Melaka — the Ming court concluded that the Portuguese had come not from Europe, but Southeast Asia.

But if this is so — if the Portuguese were seen as a normal part of the South China Sea trading network — why were they evicted from the capital and forbidden to return? The problem, Fujitani argues, was not that the Portuguese represented something new and threatening, but something old and intractable: piracy. All the accusations against the Portuguese — that they maintained fortresses in defiance of local laws, that they took captives and enslaved them, that they appropriated trade routes and took what they pleased — simply made the point. As Fujitani put it, “for the Chinese officials, the Portuguese did not represent an entirely strange, unfamiliar force, but rather a new variation on an old theme of piracy.”

When the official He Ao persuaded the court to banish the Portuguese, he did so not out of xenophobia, but as part of a centuries-long attempt to regain control over coastal trade.

The Europeans felt they were singled out; the truth may have been that the problem was they blended in with the dozens of other people trying to trade in Guangzhou. Viewed from the perspective of Europe, this was a singular event: the rejection of European overtures to bridge East and West. But from the Chinese perspective, it was just another local power trying to join in the Chinese maritime economy but refused to wait their turn.

This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.

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