Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

47 results

Page 1 of 3

  • 10 - Portugal and China: An Anatomy of Harmonious Coexistence (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

  • from Part Three - Adversity and Accommodation
  • Book:
    Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, vol. 2
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    21 October 2015
    Print publication:
    11 April 2012, pp 225-242

  • Summary

    The history of Sino-Portuguese encounters — their initial years in particular — has often been told. Cultural dimensions of the exchanges between the two parties also have been studied repeatedly. While there is no need to reiterate those investigations, we obviously cannot proceed without taking into account some of the known details and therefore we will start out by giving a chronologically arranged synoptic introduction. Not that the events “in themselves” are essentially of interest to us here, but rather the structural principles underlying these contacts; in other words, the conditions which were to shape certain modes of interaction over a long period of time. We must take into account the fact that these principles evidently have been subject to change, that they were not always consistent, and that some of the images that the scholarship has maintained to this day would indeed have to be redrawn. There is a central element in particular which is pertinent to this: speaking of “China” as an entirely self-contained entity in its own right — in terms of economy and culture — seems only partly correct for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A more useful assumption would be to consider that the Portuguese were in fact facing a number of various local Chinese groups and regions. And something similar applies to the Portuguese side of the matter: the Portuguese-speaking population living in permanent residency in Macao did indeed act and think in quite different ways from those recently arrived from Europe or India. One might almost speak of different identities, though I would not want to go so far as that.

    CHRONOLOGY

    Let us begin then with a briefly summarized chronology of important events. The first Sino-Portuguese encounters on record took place in Malacca. Several Chinese groups seem to have welcomed the Portuguese conquest of the locale (in 1511) — its part in international trade at the time has been vastly overstated — and henceforth worked together with the Portuguese.

Page 1 of 3