Tomé Pires

• 1. Introduction

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  Tomé Pires was a Portuguese apothecary who wrote the most trustworthy early European account of Asia east of India. He was also an ambassador whom the emperor of China never received. Almost nothing is known about his family or his youth. Only four of his letters survive, along with a scattering of mentions by people who knew him. Yet his book describes a region that Europe barely understood at the start of the sixteenth century. How does a man trained to prepare medicines end up chronicling sultanates and spice islands? Why did a royal mission to China collapse so badly? And why did his masterwork disappear for so long?

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• 2. An Apothecary's Road

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  Around 1468, Tomé Pires was born, possibly in the Portuguese town of Leiria, although the evidence for that birthplace is thin. His father served as apothecary to King João II. Pires followed the same trade and became apothecary to Prince Afonso, the heir apparent. That post ended with the prince's death in 1491. Pires had at least one brother, João Fernandes, and a sister, Isabel Fernandes.

  In 1510 the Portuguese court commissioned him as a "factor of drugs" for India. The drugs in question were Eastern commodities, an important part of what people call the spice trade. He arrived at Cannanore in 1511.

  In 1512 he was sent on to Malacca, a port city the Portuguese had recently captured. There he worked as chief accountant for the royal factory. From Malacca and Cochin he collected and recorded everything he could about the Malay and Indonesian world, and he personally visited Java, Sumatra and Maluku. Those journeys gave him the material for a book that would outlast him.

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• 3. The Suma Oriental

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  An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China is the English rendering of the book's Portuguese title, Suma Oriental que trata do Mar Roxo até aos Chins. Pires wrote it in Malacca and India between 1512 and 1515. He finished before the death of Afonso de Albuquerque in December 1515.

  Nothing like it existed. It was the first comprehensive and reliable account of Asia east of India, a region almost unknown in Europe. It contains the first European descriptions of the Malay Archipelago and the Spice Islands.

  His history of Malacca is the earliest known, and it preserves details found nowhere else. Pires was also the first to use the name Japan, which he spelled Jampon.

  His portraits of Sumatra and Java were called "remarkable" and went unmatched for a "couple centuries". Scholars still treat the book as one of the most important resources for studying Islam in Indonesia.

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• 4. A Careful Observer

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  A modern editor of the book gave a blunt verdict on its writing. "His style is far from clear," he noted, "and no doubt it often becomes more confused, owing to the transcriber's mistakes." The prose is tangled, but the mind behind it was not.

  Pires poured in history, geography, ethnography, botany, economics and trade, down to coins, weights and measures. He did not simply repeat what he heard. He checked the information he gathered from merchants, sailors and others he met, which marks him as a discriminating observer.

  The book is framed as a report to Manuel of Portugal. It may fulfil a commission Pires accepted before leaving Lisbon. Some details are inaccurate, yet the whole fits the evidence of its time and makes no fundamentally erroneous claims about the region.

  Only one book of the period rivaled it as a source, the better-known work by Duarte Barbosa.

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• 5. Embassy to Canton

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  In 1516, Tomé Pires reached Canton, now called Guangzhou, in the fleet of Fernão Pires de Andrade. He had returned to India in 1515 and was then sent as ambassador from King Manuel I to the Ming court. His audience was the Zhengde Emperor.

  The emperor never received him. Chinese officials grew suspicious, and Portuguese traders in the region behaved with increasing hostility. The deposed sultan Mahmud Shah, ousted when the Portuguese conquered Malacca in 1511, also schemed against the mission.

  The embassy fell into disgrace, and some of its members were killed. It opened a period of about three decades in which the Portuguese were persecuted in China. Pires never left the country.

  It had been the first official embassy from a European nation to China since Giovanni de' Marignolli, a legate of the Papacy, who was in Beijing from 1342 to 1345.

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• 6. Uncertain Fate, Recovered Book

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  Accounts of how Pires ended his life disagree. One tradition says the Chinese executed him in 1524. Another says he was banished for life to a remote province. A third says he died of disease in 1524, while some writers claim he lived on until 1540 in Jiangsu, forbidden to leave China.

  The paper trail is just as sparse. Four letters by Pires survive. One contemporary reference is a letter from Albuquerque to the King, dated the 30th of November 1513.

  His great book also vanished. The Suma Oriental went unpublished and was presumed lost. Then in 1944 a manuscript copy turned up in a Paris archive, and readers could finally judge what the apothecary had written in Malacca.

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