Tamão

Tamão was a trade settlement set up by the Portuguese on an island geographically part of modern-day Hong Kong, in the Pearl River Delta in China. This was the first contact between Europeans and China via the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. The settlement lasted from 1514 to 1521, when the Portuguese were expulsed by the Ming Chinese navy.

In May 1513, the Portuguese explorer Jorge Álvares arrived on the Chinese coast at an island in the Pearl River Delta they called "Tamão", which is understood as a corruption of "Tunmen" (屯門, Túnmén), the name for the western Hong Kong and Shenzhen area that has existed since the Tang dynasty. Chinese sources state that the Portuguese settled around the Tunmen Inlet (屯門澳, Túnmén Ào), but the current whereabouts of the Tunmen Inlet is unknown, so the precise location of the Portuguese settlement remains under debate among historians.

In the present day, "Tunmen" refers to Tuen Mun, the Cantonese reading of the same Chinese characters. This leads some researchers to link the Tunmen of Ming times to Tuen Mun in the New Territories of Hong Kong. "Tunmen Inlet" would then refer to one of two bays around Tuen Mun: Castle Peak Bay, next to the current Tuen Mun New Town; or Deep Bay between the New Territories and Nantou in present-day Shenzhen, where a Ming coastal defense force was stationed.

Adding to the confusion is the description in Portuguese sources that Tãmão was an island. As Tuen Mun is not an island, researchers have proposed that Tãmão actually refers to one of the nearby islands. Nei Lingding Island is identified by J. M. Braga to be the Tamão of the Portuguese sources, and is widely followed by Western scholarship; however, recent Chinese scholarship finds this identification to be insufficiently proven, and suggests a number of other potential islands like the nearby but larger Lantau Island.

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