Tomé Pires
| Tomé Pires | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1465 Lisbon, Portugal |
| Died | 1524 or 1540 China |
| Nationality | Portuguese |
| Occupation | Apothecary, diplomat |
Tomé Pires (1465?–1524 or 1540) was a Portuguese apothecary from Lisbon who spent 1512 to 1515 in Malacca immediately after the Portuguese conquest, at a time when Europeans were only first arriving in South East Asia. After his arduous experiences in India and the East Indies, he headed the first official embassy from a European nation in China (Portugal, to the Chinese Zhengde Emperor, during the Ming dynasty), where he died.
Pires was apothecary to the ill-fated Afonso, Prince of Portugal, son of King John II of Portugal. He went to India in 1511, invested as "factor of drugs", the Eastern commodities that were an important element of what is generally called "the spice trade". In Malacca and Cochin he avidly collected and documented information on the Malay-Indonesia area, and personally visited Java, Sumatra (the two dominant islands of modern-day Indonesia) and Maluku.
From his Malay-Indonesia travels, he wrote a landmark book on Asian trade, the Suma Oriental que trata do Mar Roxo até aos Chins (Summa of the East, from the Red Sea up to the Chinese). He wrote the book in Malacca and India between 1512 and 1515, completing it before the death of Afonso de Albuquerque (December 1515).
It is the first European description of Malaysia and the oldest and most extensive description of the Portuguese East. It is a compilation of a wide variety of information: historical, geographical, ethnographic, botanical, economic, commercial, etc., including coins, weights and measures. Pires was careful to investigate the accuracy of the information collected from merchants, sailors and others with whom he had contact. It shows him to be a discriminating observer, in spite of his tangled prose, but superior to other Portuguese writers of the time. The book, couched as a report to Manuel of Portugal, and perhaps fulfilling a commission undertaken before he left Lisbon, is regarded as one of the most conscientious first-hand resources for the study of the geography and trade of the Indies at that time, including one of the most important resources for the study of the contemporaneous Islam in Indonesia. Although it cannot be regarded as completely free of inaccuracies in its detail, it is remarkably consistent with evidence of the time and makes no fundamentally erroneous statements about the area. Its contemporary rival as a source is only the better-known book of Duarte Barbosa and, later Garcia de Orta.
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