Portuguese presence in Asia

The Portuguese presence in Asia was responsible for what would be the first of many contacts between European countries and the East, starting on May 20, 1498 with the trip led by Vasco da Gama to Calicut, India (in modern-day Kerala state in India). Aside from being part of the European colonisation of Southeast Asia in the 16th century, Portugal's goal in the Indian Ocean was to ensure their monopoly in the spice trade, establishing several fortresses and commercial trading posts.
The inaccuracy of geographical knowledge before the discoveries led people to believe that Asia lay at the beginning of the Nile River and not the Red Sea, allowing the inclusion of Ethiopia in Asia and the extension of the word India to incorporate these and other parts of Eastern Africa. Here, according to an old legend, lived a Christian emperor, wealthy and powerful, known as Prester John.
The name Prester John seems to derive from zan hoy (my master), an Ethiopian term used by the population designating its king. In the fifteenth century, Prester John was identified with the king of Ethiopia; after a few contacts the Portuguese needed to know how to get to Ethiopia, although they had little information about that empire. This knowledge was transmitted by travelers, geographers, pilgrims, merchants and politicians returning home after long trips.
Official Portuguese presence in Asia was established in 1500, when the Portuguese commander Pedro Álvares Cabral obtained from the King of Cochin Una Goda Varma Koil a number of houses to serve as a feitoria, or trading post in exchange for an alliance against the hostile Zamorin of Calicut. In 1503 Afonso de Albuquerque built Fort Manuel in Cochin with the authorization of its ruler. In 1505, King Manuel of Portugal appointed Dom Francisco de Almeida as viceroy of India, with jurisdiction over all Crown domains east of the Cape of Good Hope. Official Portuguese territory in Asia included:
The Suma Oriental, the first European description of Malaysia, is the oldest and most extensive description of the Portuguese East. Tomé Pires was a prominent Portuguese apothecary who lived in the East in the sixteenth century and was the first Portuguese ambassador to China. The Suma Oriental describes the plants and medicinal drugs of the East and beyond medicine also thoroughly describes trading ports, of potential interest to the Portuguese newcomers in the Indian Ocean, electing as its main objective the commercial information, including all products traded in each kingdom and each port, as well as their origins and the merchants that undertook the traffic. This study precedes Garcia da Orta, and was discovered in the 1940s by the historian Armando Cortesão.
Duarte Barbosa was an official of Portuguese India between 1500 and 1516-17 holding the post of scrivener in Kannur and at times local language interpreter (for Malayalam). His "Book of Duarte Barbosa" describing the places he visited is one of the oldest examples of Portuguese travel literature soon after their arrival in the Indian Ocean. In 1519 Duarte Barbosa went on the first circumnavigation with Magellan, his brother-in-law. He died in May 1521 at the poisoned banquet of King Humabon in the island of Cebu in the Philippines.
Domingos Pais and Fernão Nunes made important reports on the Vijayanagara Empire, or "Reino de Bisnaga" (as it was referred to by the Portuguese) located in Deccan in southern India during the reign of Bukka Raya II and Deva Raya I. Its description of Hampi, the Hindu imperial capital, is the most detailed of all historical narratives on this ancient city.
It was Coimbra that printed eight of the ten books that Fernão Lopes de Castanheda had scheduled about the history of the discovery and conquest of India by the Portuguese. He wished his work to be the first to celebrate historiographically the Portuguese effort. The first volume came out in 1551. Volumes II and III appeared in 1552, the fourth and fifth in 1553, the sixth in 1554 and the eighth in 1561. The seventh was published without place or date. After the publication of the eighth volume, Queen Catherine, yielding to pressure from some nobles who did not like the objectivity of Castanheda, banned the printing of the remaining volumes, IX and X. His work, still valid for its vast geographic and ethnographic information, was widely translated and read in the Europe of the time.
Written by João de Barros following a proposal of Dom Manuel I from a story narrating the achievements of the Portuguese in India and thus titled because, like the work of the Roman historian Livy, he also grouped the events in periods of ten years. The first decade came out in 1552, the second in 1553 and third was printed in 1563. The fourth decade, unfinished, was completed by engineer, mathematician and Portuguese cosmographer João Baptista Lavanha (Lisbon, c 1550 -. Madrid, March 31, 1624) and published in Madrid in 1615, long after his death. The Decades met little interest in their author's lifetime. It is known that only an Italian translation came out, in Venice in 1563. John III of Portugal (Dom João III), enthusiastic about its contents, asked the author to draw up a chronicle on the events of the reign of Dom Manuel, which Barros could not do, and the chronicle in question was drafted by Damião de Gois. As a historian and linguist, de Barros made "Decades" a precious source of information about the history of the Portuguese in Asia and the beginnings of modern historiography in Portugal and worldwide.
Written in Portuguese in the form of a dialogue between Garcia da Orta and Ruano, a newcomer colleague in Goa looking forward to encountering the materia medica of India. A literal translation of its title would be "Colloquium of simple drugs and medicinal things in India". The Colloquium includes 57 chapters covering an approximately equal number of oriental drugs such as aloe, benzoin, camphor, the canafistula, opium, rhubarb, tamarinds and many others. It presents the first rigorous description by a European of the botanical characteristics, origin and therapeutic properties of many medicinal plants, which though previously known in Europe, were wrongly or very incompletely described and only in the form of the drug, i.e. the part of the plant collected and dried.
The "Treatise of things from China," published in 1569 by Friar Gaspar da Cruz was the first complete work on China and the Ming Dynasty in the West since Marco Polo published in Europe. It includes information about geography, provinces, royalty, employees, bureaucracy, transport, architecture, agriculture, handicrafts, trade matters, clothing, religious and social customs, music and instruments, writing, education and justice, thus containing a text which had a role in influencing the image Europeans had of China.
The Lusíadas of Luís Vaz de Camões (c 1524-1580) is considered the Portuguese epic par excellence. Probably completed in 1556, it was first published in 1572, three years after the return of the author from the East. En route from Goa to Portugal, Camões in 1568 made a stopover on the island of Mozambique, where Diogo do Couto found, as was related in his work, "so poor living friends" (Decade 8th Asia). Diogo do Couto paid for the rest of his trip to Lisbon, where Camões arrived in 1570.
Nippo Jisho, or Vocabvlário of Lingoa of IAPAM was the first Japanese-Portuguese dictionary created and the first to translate Japanese into any Western language. It was published in Nagasaki (Japan) in 1603. It explains 32,000 Japanese words, translated into Portuguese. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits), with the collaboration of the Japanese, compiled this dictionary over several years. This was meant to be of help to missionaries in studying the language. It was thought that the Portuguese priest João Rodrigues was the main organizer of the project.
The "Pilgrimage" of Fernando Mendes Pinto is perhaps the most translated book of travel literature. It was published in 1614, thirty years after the author's death. What is striking is its exotic content. The author is an expert in describing the geography of India, China and Japan, laws, customs, morals, festivals, trade, justice, war, funerals, etc. Noteworthy also is the forecast of the collapse of the Portuguese Empire.
Manuel Dias (Yang Ma-On) (1574-1659) was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary undertook some notable activities in China, particularly in astronomy. This work presents the most advanced European astronomical knowledge of the time in the form of questions and answers to questions posed by the Chinese.