Tomé Pires

Tomé Pires , often also Tomé de Pires , (* around 1468 in Lisbon , Portugal , † around 1540 in Sampitay , Jiangsu Province , China ) was a Portuguese pharmacist and pharmacologist , diplomat and writer.

He was the first European ambassador to the Chinese imperial court. With his only book he created a work that was the first literary work on the Far East by a Portuguese and one of the first by a European to describe the Moluccas and Spice Islands.

Life

Much data from Pires' life is not backed up. What we do know for sure is that he was born as the son of the state pharmacist of King John II of Portugal. He himself embarked on the career of his father and became the pharmacist of the heir to the throne, Prince Afonso (1475 to 1491).

From 1511 he was Feitor das Drogas (chief pharmacist of the city) in Cochin , where the Portuguese were active in the Indian trade . He then took part in a large trade expedition to the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, Sumatra and Java between 1512 and 1515 , where he worked as a clerk and accountant and which gave him the opportunity to research exotic plants in his traditional profession as a pharmacist. After this trip he wanted to go back to Portugal, but ended up in Goa instead , from where he was again sent back to Malacca . He was in turn commissioned by the local governor - on behalf of the viceroy - with a mission to China, which he began in 1517. He was to be the first official, permanent ambassador or envoy of Portugal to the Chinese imperial court. In fact, he also came to the court of Emperor Zhengde , who came from the Ming dynasty . But his job as ambassador was only brief.

A Portuguese privateer was up to mischief on the shores of China, and the envoy and his staff were held responsible, arrested, tortured and imprisoned for many years. Many of his personal collaborators in the small embassy died under torture, and the diplomat was also believed to have died in Portugal. However, after many years of not hearing from him, he was finally released but was never allowed to leave China. He was exiled to northern China, to Kiangsu Province (now Jiangsu ), where he married a Chinese woman with whom he had a daughter, became prosperous, and lived there peacefully with his wife for twenty-seven years. The exemplary Catholic faith that the family lived led almost the entire congregation to be baptized Catholics as well. Pires died there around 1540 at the age of well over 70. A few years after his death, the famous seafarer and writer Fernão Mendes Pinto came to the coast as a prisoner. Later, in his work "Peregrinacam", he reports about the encounter with the ancient wife and wife of Tomé de Pires, in whose house he lives for a good five days. This clears the fate of Pires.

The book Suma Orientalis

The book by Pires Suma Orientalis was written between 1512 and 1515 during his great trade expedition in which he took part as an accountant. The book contains geographical, anthropological and pharmaceutical reports and research on the places Pires visited in Malacca, Sumatra, Java, Moluccas and Spice Islands. It is the first book about the Far East to be written by a Portuguese. It is one of the most important to this day, and it accurately describes the cultures of the Malay Archipelago of that time. The book was lost until it was found again in the Paris National Library in 1944 . In the same year it was translated into English.

Coined by the term Cochinchina and Timor as a name for the Moluccas

Tomé Pires is still the official co-founder of the term " Cochinchina ", from Cauchy China, which he heard from Malay around 1515 from his stay in Malacca and incorporated it into his book. This meant the region of what is now Vietnam and parts of Cambodia . The term was used worldwide for the region until the 20th century.

In his work at that time, Pires referred to the entire islands and archipelagos that lay east of Java as Timor in the local language of the locals, as Timur means east. The islands are now known as the Lesser Sunda Islands and the Moluccas. The latter also spice islands. Timor is the name of the largest island in the Lesser Sunda Islands.

literature

• Serge Gruzinski : dragon and feather snake. Europe's reach for America and China in 1519/20. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Population Settlements in East Timor and Indonesia ( Memento of February 2, 1999 in the Internet Archive ) - University of Coimbra