Tomé Pires

Portuguese pharmacist, diplomat, writer

• Born: c. 1468
• Birthplace: Portugal
• Died: c. 1540
• Place of death: Jiangsu province, China

Pires traveled through Southeast Asia between 1512 and 1516 and wrote a famous treatise, Suma Oriental(sum of the things of the Orient), which contributed much knowledge of the region for the time.

Early Life

Little information is available on the details of the life of Tomé Pires (toh-MAY PEE-resh). He was the son of an apothecary, and was a pharmacist for the short-lived prince Afonso (1475-1491) before he sailed for India in 1511. He was, however, initially of greater service to his king as scribe and accountant for the Portuguese trading factory in Melaka (Malacca). During these years, he also traveled to such destinations as Java.

Life’s Work

Despite his desire to return to Europe, Pires was instead sent on a sensitive diplomatic mission to China in 1516. The chronicler Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (d. 1559) suggested that Pires was nominated for the mission on the understanding that he was “discreet and eager to learn, and because he would know better than anyone else the drugs there were in China.” With great ceremony, the ambassador went ashore with a retinue of sixty-seven companions, bearing presents and letters for the emperor in Beijing. Only after a three-year delay, however, could he proceed from Guangzhou (Canton) to Beijing. Once there, he was ill received for many reasons: the misbehavior of Portuguese traders and sailors who had preceded him; denunciations of the Portuguese seizure of Melaka in 1511 by the ousted sultan, one of the Chinese tributary rulers; breaches of protocol in the letters that Pires bore; and reports of unscrupulous Portuguese business practices. Pires, ultimately, was refused an audience with the emperor.

Returning to Guangzhou, he was imprisoned together with three or four compatriots. This situation resulted from the Portuguese refusal to leave China on the death of Ming Dynasty emperor Zhengde (Zhu Houzhao) in 1521 and the Portuguese military presence in Guangzhou and on islands in the Pearl River Estuary. It is not clear from circumstantial accounts such as a report given by the Portuguese traveler Fernão Mendes Pinto whether he was liberated (as the Portuguese historian Luís de Albuquerque maintained) or remained incarcerated. Some accounts hold that he remained in China until his death in 1540, others suggest that he died in 1524 after prolonged suffering, privations, and probably torture.

Pires’s legacy is most comprehensively and impressively contained within his great Suma Oriental (wr. 1512-1515; English translation, 1944), an encyclopedic work that he probably started to write in Melaka and finished in Cochin during the years 1512 to 1515. The work served as a report to be sent to King Manuel and was divided into six books dealing with different geographical areas: Egypt to Cambay, Cambay to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Bengal to Indochina, China to Borneo, the Indian archipelago (Indonesia), and Malacca (Melaka). The work is particularly detailed on what is now Malaysia, Java, and Sumatra, areas Pires knew from experience. It was also particularly valuable to historians for the last four books, which shed light on areas hitherto little, if at all, known in western Europe.

The text frequently supports the importance that Pires places on information gathered from experience and firsthand encounters. Regarding a story about the kings of Cambay being “brought up on poison,” for example, he remarks, “But I do not believe this, although they say it is so.” Where it was not possible to confirm information from firsthand experience, Pires relied on informants. In China, for example, these informants were not only mariners, such as Pedro Álvares Cabral, but also traditional Chinese and Malay merchants.

Pires was particularly interested in trading matters, but his work was more often cited for its potted (dull) history of Asian trading cities. The Suma Oriental reads like a report and is not written with great style. Despite this flaw, certain observations that Pires makes on wider concerns, such as the geopolitical realities of the Eurasian spice trade, have gone down in history for their acuteness and vision. “Whoever is Lord of Malacca,” he observed, “has his hand on the throat of Venice.” Elsewhere, he reminds readers of the importance of trade with Asia, stating, for example, that “the world could not otherwise sustain itself: it ennobles cities and kingdoms and makes men; it decides on the destiny of war and peace in the world.”

Although manuscript copies of the Suma Oriental circulated in Portugal, Pires’s work was not published until 1551, when it appeared anonymously, incompletely, and in Italian translation as part of the first volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s compilation Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550-1559; of voyages and travels). The Portuguese text was not published until 1944 in an edition with English translation by Armando Cortesão, exhaustive annotations, and a biographic and bibliographic introduction. In one of his letters, Pires refers to another book on measures and weights used in the Orient that he wrote or was thinking of writing. It has, however, been lost.

Beyond this, Pires may be the author of some letters of 1524 that the envoy smuggled out from his Guangzhou jail, which urged the Portuguese king to mount a military expedition against China. In the Suma Oriental, Pires advanced the preposterous claim that the Chinese war junks and coastal defenses were so weak that the dispatch of ten Portuguese ships from Melaka could subjugate the entire Chinese coast. Although his recommendation was wisely never undertaken, it nevertheless had far-reaching consequences. The conquest of China was an idea entertained not only by the Portuguese but also by the Spanish, through the sixteenth century.

Beyond the impact of his written legacy, many of the opinions voiced by Pires spread, such as his belief that Chinese clothing gave them the appearance of Germans. The spread of these rumors was probably the result of Pires’s stay in Cochin in 1515; it was an opinion reiterated by other Portuguese travelers of the era.

Significance

Pires is to be remembered far more for his book than his failed diplomatic mission. The Suma Oriental, which in its most complete version lay forgotten in manuscript form in Paris until first published in 1944, is probably the most important and complete account of the East produced in the first half of the sixteenth century. It stands as testament to the great sweep of Portuguese navigation across the Indian Ocean and charts its territory with directness and honesty. This straightforward approach clearly differentiates the text from the fables of fifteenth century writers on the East. It is written with a tremendous curiosity for places and products of trade, is quick to use indigenous sources, and overturns the long-held body of Anglo-Saxon historical opinion that, since William Marsden’s The History of Sumatra came out in 1783, the Portuguese “were more eager to conquer nations than to explore their manners and antiquities.”

Bibliography

Cortesão, Armando. The “Suma Oriental” of Tomé Pires . . . and “The Book” of Francisco Rodrigues. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1944. The definitive edition of the text for English readers, together with lengthy introduction. The edition comes together with Francisco Rodrigues’s The Book, consisting of a selection of rutters of the East, which Cortesão found together with the Suma Oriental in the same Paris Codex. The full title reads The “Suma Oriental” of Tomé Pires, an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, Written in Malacca and India in 1512-1515, and “The Book” of Francisco Rodrigues, Rutter of a Voyage in the Red Sea, Nautical Rules, Almanack and Maps, Written and Drawn in the East Before 1515.

Ptak, Roderich. “Sino-Portuguese Contacts to the Foundation of Macao.” In Portugal the Pathfinder: Journeys from the Medieval Toward the Modern World, 1300-ca. 1600, edited by G. Winius. Madison, Wis.: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1995. Chapter 14 explores the circumstances surrounding Pires’s diplomatic mission to China and the state of affairs between the two nations, especially in the Pearl River Delta.

Tracy, James D. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Contains discussions of Pires and his place in European trade with Asia. Includes illustrations and maps.

Willis, Clive, ed. China and Macau. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002. Extracts relating to Pires’s embassy to Beijing are translated from the Portuguese chroniclers Barros and Correia, as is the purported letter of Cristóvão Vieira. Further references to Pires can be found in Castanheda’s account of the expedition of Fernão Peres de Andrade, also translated here.