Everything about Fern O Pires De Andrade totally explained
Captain
Fernão Pires de Andrade (also spelled as
Fernão Perez de Andrade; d. September 1523) was a
Portuguese merchant, pharmacist, and official diplomat under the explorer and
Malacca governor
Afonso de Albuquerque. His encounter with the
Ming Dynasty in 1517—after initial contacts by
Jorge Álvares and
Rafael Perestrello in 1513 and 1516, respectively—marked the beginning of direct
European commercial and diplomatic contact with
China. Although the mission was initially a success that led the embassy all the way to
Beijing, relations were soon soiled by culminating events that led to an extremely negative impression of the Portuguese in China. This included acts of his brother Simão that enraged the Chinese, false reports of the Portuguese being cannibals of kidnapped Chinese children and true reports of their conquest of
Malacca, a
loyal Ming tributary vassal state. Normalized trade and relations between Portugal and the Ming Dynasty wouldn't resume until the late 1540s and the 1557 establishment of Portuguese rule over
Macau.
Andrade was referred to as a "Folangji" (佛郎機) in Ming dynastic archives.
Folangji comes from
Franques or
Franks, which was a generic name the
Muslims called Europeans since the
Crusades, and which spawned the Indian-Southeast Asian term
ferengi. The Portuguese historian
João de Barros (1496–1570) wrote that when a violent storm arose as Albuquerque's fleet entered the vast waters between
Sri Lanka and
Aceh, a ship commanded by Simão Martinho was sunk, but his entire crew was rescued by Fernão and taken aboard his ship. according to Barros, they fought against this ship for two days, while the enemy crew employed tactics of lighting fire to its own ship as a means to burn Albuquerque's ships as they employed ramming techniques and close-range volleys of artillery. After two days, the ship surrendered; yet the Portuguese apparently had gained an admiration for the junk and its crew when they nicknamed the ship
O Bravo (The Brave Junk). The Portuguese crew pleaded with Fernão Pires to convince Albuquerque that the crew should be spared, freed to go, and viewed as simple vassals of Portugal who were unaware of who they were actually fighting; Albuquerque agreed with this. Barros also noted that while Fernão Pires was loading Southeast Asian spices onto his ship in Pacem (a kingdom in Sumatra) in order to sell or present them as gifts in China, two different kings were killed and their position usurped. Apparently the usurpation of kings caused little tumult or crisis in this state, as Barros noted any leader there was believed by the locals not to have divine right to rule if he was able to be killed by a royal kinsman. D'Albuquerque sent
Jorge Álvares to explore northward; his expedition sailed along the coast of
Guangdong in 1513 and hoisted a flag on "
Tuen Mun island". This mission was followed up later that year by
Rafael Perestrello, who later traded with Chinese merchants of
Canton in 1516, giving an enticing report to other Portuguese on the lucrative trade there, which prompted Andrade to speed up the course of his mission while stalled in Malacca and debating on whether to go to China or
Bengal.
Mission of Manuel I to China
Choosing the ambassadors
King
Manuel I authorized a trade mission in 1517 when Andrade set sail with 7 cannon-armed merchant vessels with a Muslim interpreter on
June 17,
1517. Andrade had been chosen for this mission in
Lisbon back in 1515, so that—as a pharmacist—he could investigate the types of
pharmaceutical drugs used in East Asia for the benefit of the Portuguese and Europe.
Tomé Pires, a royal
apothecary who had also traveled to India and written a landmark work in 1515 on Asian trade, was chosen as the chief ambassador for the mission. After Andrade threatened to sail upriver without permission, the naval commander finally decided to let him pass, granting him pilots to assist his travel.
Andrade's brother and soiled relations
Simão de Andrade, brother to Fernão Pires, sailed from Malacca to China with a small crew on three
junks in August of 1519. Simào immediately made a bad impression upon the Chinese when he built a fort at the center of
Tuen Mun, an island designated for all foreigners to trade.
The greatest offense to the Chinese was the supposed kidnapping of children by the Portuguese so they could eat them. Simào continued to defy local Chinese laws at Ningbo, and when his men were cheated on a trade deal with a Chinaman in 1545, Simão sent a band of armed men into the town, pillaged it, and took local women and young girls as their captives. The outraged locals banded together and slaughtered the Portuguese under Simão. There were also reports sent to Beijing by Canton officials stating that the Portuguese were bothersome foreigners who sought to build their own trading post. The new Grand Secretary, Yang Tinghe, soon turned against the powerful eunuch influence at court, which had grown even more powerful under the Zhengde Emperor. Two of his ships were captured in a surprise Chinese attack, while the survivors escaped back to Portugal on the third ship. These encounters and others with the Portuguese brought the first
breech-loading culverins into China, mentioned even by the philosopher and scholar-official
Wang Yangming in 1519 when he suppressed Zhu Chenhao's rebellion in
Jiangxi.
The prisoners of these sea battles were eventually executed in 1523 for crimes of "robbery in the high seas" and cannibalism, Tomé Pires died while living as a prisoner in China; Two survivors of this embassy were still alive around 1536, when they sent letters to Malacca and
Goa detailing plans for how the Portuguese could capture Canton by force. In the early 1550s, Leonel de Sousa—a later
Governor of Macau—established positive relations with Ming merchants and officials and, in 1557, the Ming court gave their consent for a permanent establishment of a Portuguese trade base at Macau. Although Fernão Pires de Andrade and his Portuguese comrades were the first to open up China to the West, another significant diplomatic mission reaching all the way to Beijing wouldn't be carried out until an Italian, the Jesuit
Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) ventured there in 1598.
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