Asian images of the Portuguese
The dawn of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of a long and multifaceted process of Asian observation of the Portuguese. From South Arabia to Japan many eyes were on the new arrivals, the only Europeans to systematically travel in maritime Asia for about a century.
Some of the native observers expressed their feelings about the Frangues9 in writing, while others focussed on visually representing the foreigners. Everyone was struck by the newcomers’ physical appearance and clothing, the exotic objects they brought, as well as the ships they sailed.10While certain Asian representations of the Portuguese are specific to particular cultures and societies, ‘hard’ tropes concerning the ‘Franks’ became recurring themes for discussion throughout the continent. Religion probably constitutes the strongest of these themes. The medieval Christian—Islamic tension found a fertile breeding ground in an Indian Ocean with a notable Islamic presence in the early modern period. The religious demonising of the ‘infidel’ Portuguese pirates that runs through the Hadrami chronicles from South Arabia is also the touchstone in Zain al-Din’s Tufhat al-Mujahidin (Gift to the Holy Warriors)—a text conveying the perspective of the Muslim communities of Kerala (South India) in the late sixteenth century—as well as in the words of Lutfi Bey, the Ottoman ambassador to the South-east Asian sultanate of Aceh in 1563—1565.11 Along the same lines, the ‘untrustworthy’ Portuguese were held responsible for the drowning of the Sultan of Gujarat (Bahadur Shah, r. 1526—1537) in 1537, a dramatic moment depicted in an early seventeenth-century Mughal miniature.12
The pictorial representation of the Mughal attack on Hughli (Bengal) in 1632 with the resulting expulsion of the Portuguese from the port follows a similar line.
Illustrated by the best artists in the service of Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628—1658), the Padshahnama, housed in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, includes two miniatures of this event with extremely rich iconology. The one representing the capture of Hughli appears to be inspired by European iconographic sources, as the depictions of both ships and landscape demonstrate. The streets and the port are teeming with Portuguese who, surrounded by sea and land, try both to flee and to defend themselves. The most marked distinctive features of the foreigners are their physiognomy, their clothes and in particular the hats, two of which are drawn floating calmly on the river. The prominence given to a twin- towered church is perhaps intended to transmit and reinforce the religious nature of the attack. Capturing the moment of flight, the anonymous painter of this miniature shows the Portuguese loading their vessels with a number of wooden boxes. The second miniature, in which the emperor receives the prisoners at his court in Agra, makes clear that, despite their exotic attire and the gifts they are bearing, the Portuguese are far from centre stage. The anonymous painter has intentionally relegated them to the bottom left corner, away from the emperor and outside the most prestigious area of the square. Moreover, the foreigners are being watched over by men wielding clubs, not the kind of characters and gestures associated with the depiction of courtly scenes in Mughal India.13Nevertheless, some significant nuances show up throughout Muslim lands. Even in the case of Mughal India, it is possible to identify an ambivalent yet pragmatic attitude to the Portuguese. Emperor Akbar (r. 1556—1605) often parleyed with the Jesuit missionaries in his court and was extremely interested in Christian doctrine. But for external consumption, when addressing someone like the Uzbek Sultan, he was particularly vocal regarding his intention to eliminate the numerous ‘Farangi infidels’ who were harassing and oppressing traders and pilgrims to holy places.14 Further east, in the Malay world, the traditional vocabulary of the Islamic jihad could be somewhat secondary when it came to reflecting on the Portuguese Catholics.
The popular epic Hikayat Hang Tuah does not make religion the point of contention between Malays and Portuguese, for it is clear that ‘a religious polarisation between Islam and its enemies became established in Southeast Asia only after 1550’.15Furthermore, anti-Christian rhetoric was by no means exclusive to the Islamic world. It can be traced in other religions and other societies through Sinhala war poems in Ceylon, Burmese chronicles, Chinese memorials and Japanese texts proclaiming the need to ‘destroy Deus’. The dismantling of non-Christian temples and the spread of Catholic churches, the en masse conversions and the felt danger of religious ‘contamination’ from the populations, all played a part in this radicalisation of Asian opinions concerning the Portuguese. And the Jesuit missionaries, the obvious face of Christianity in Asia, were often the main targets. Their enemies in the Mughal royal palace did not refrain from calling them ‘black devils’, even though court painters such as Narsingh, Manohar or Kesu Das were affable in their representation of them, clothing the priests in dark cassocks, Bible in hand.16 For Japan, the demonised image of the priests (bateren) expressed in the Kirishitan Monogatari (1639), which describes and visually depicts the arrival of Father Organtino, springs immediately to mind: ‘From this ship for the first time emerged an unnamable creature, somewhat similar in shape to a human being, but looking rather more like a long-nosed goblin or the giant demon Mikoshi Nyudo. Upon close interrogation it was discovered that this was a being called Bateren’.17
The pro-Portuguese writings penned by Asian converts to Catholicism, however, afford us a different picture. For Sri Lanka, various texts in Sinhala and Tamil written from this perspective are available, while in late seventeenth-century Burma, a history of Portugal and its empire (Putegue Yazawin), most probably authored by a Barnabite priest of Burmese ancestry called Inacio de Brito (1760—1832), stands out.18 The warm reception given to the Portuguese in South India by the local Syrian Christian hierarchy precedes these ‘hybrid’ texts in time and adopts the typical arguments of those who pushed for an alliance between Christian sects in the European Middle Ages.
This is how, in 1504, four bishops from Kerala narrated to the Catholicos of the East, Mar Simeon, the first Portuguese voyages to India:May you also know, Fathers, that from the Occident powerful ships have been sent to these countries of India by the King of the Christians, who are our brethren the Franks... By this way thus explored the said King (whom may God preserve in safety!) sent six huge ships, with which they crossed the sea in half a year and came to the town of Calicut, people extremely well versed in nautical science... The number of the said Franks is estimated as about 400 men. And the fear and dread of them fell on all infidels and Ismaelites of these countries. The country of these Franks is called Portkal, one of the countries of the Franks, and their king is called Emmanuel. We beseech Emmanuel, that He may conserve Him!19
Another prevailing image of the Portuguese, which spread fast throughout Asia, was their seafaring nature. The ships in which they roamed the Asian seas are frequently depicted, from Ottoman miniatures, Persian carpets and Mughal paintings to Thai temple murals and Japanese screens. The omnipresence of the Franks at sea is associated with the idea of extreme mobility and ceaseless movement. This is how they are presented in the Japanese chronicle Teppo Ki, or in the Sinhala chronicle Rajavaliya. It is worth noting the portrait of the first Portuguese landing in Colombo conveyed by the latter text:
There is in our port of Colombo a race of people very white in colour and of great beauty; they wear jackets and hats of iron and pace up and down without resting for a moment. Seeing them eating bread and grapes and drinking arrack, they reported that these people devour stones and drink blood... The sound of their cannon is louder than thunder at the end of the world. Their cannon balls fly many leagues and shatter forts of stone and iron.20
Hence it is not unusual for the Portuguese to be seen in Asia as ‘frogmen’ who are more at ease at sea than on land.
This is exactly how the Koreans classified them in the late sixteenth century, when describing the Portuguese soldiers incorporated in the Chinese armies that fought the Japanese invasion of the country. In the annals of the Choson dynasty for 1592—1599, the Portuguese are ‘Demons from the Sea’ (Haegui), ‘bearded, curly haired’ beings who ‘spent days at the bottom of the sea feeding themselves on fish’. Contemporary Chinese perceptions were not far from this view. Cristovao Vieira, one of the captives from Tome Pires’ embassy to Beijing in 1517—1521, notes from Canton (Guangzhou) in 1534 that the Chinese compared the Portuguese to fish ‘who die as soon as they are taken out of the water or the sea’.21 As late as 1666, the governor of Guangdong/ Guangxi still wrote in a memorial to be presented in the Forbidden City ‘that the Portuguese had no lands and, even if they did, they would not know how to cultivate them’.22Fish or frogmen, the Portuguese are invariably described as skilled warriors. The admiration evoked by their vessels coupled with the surprise their firearms caused were further heightened by the exotic nature of their armour and helmets. Cannon and muskets became the trademark of Portuguese warriors in most contemporary South Asian texts. Parasikas mercenaries populate South Indian texts, and the Marathi chronicles often repeat the expression ‘warriors like the Portuguese’.23 Stone and wood carvings depicting them are often found in Hindu and Buddhist temples, such as Srirangam, in Tiruchirapaly (Tamilnadu, South India) or Embekke, in Kandy (Sri Lanka). Portuguese and Eurasian mercenaries and sailors are recurrently represented in early modern Burmese and Siamese temple murals,24 while the Malay chronicles, as well as texts and images from China and Japan, reveal a great fascination with the military technology displayed by the Franks. In the Malay accounts dealing with the Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511, it is the military apparatus of the foreigners that mostly impresses the besieged.25
As symbols of power, Portuguese cannon often were absorbed by local societies, soon acquiring a supernatural dimension.
The Si Jagur cannon, taken from Malacca to Batavia after the Dutch conquest of the former city in 1641, became the object that sterile women from VOC Batavia were eager to touch hoping to get pregnant.26 The figure of the Portuguese (often Eurasian) artilheiro (gunner), fundidor (cannon-maker) or mercenary in the service of a given Asian ruler populates both Portuguese documents and indigenous texts. The case of Joao da Cruz, a mestizo from Macau who became highly influential in midseventeenth-century Indochina due to his cannon-foundry, is exemplary.27Deft in the water and expert at handling firearms, the Portuguese were quick to enter into the history and imagination of certain societies in maritime Asia. This happened particularly in the microcosms of the most important river deltas where bands of ‘sea gypsies’—rather difficult to characterise and identify given their diversity—abounded. So we find the Portuguese mixed with Turks and Muslims from Malabar, cruising the Indus Delta and resisting the Mughal conquest of Sind in the late sixteenth century.28 We also come across them roaming the Ganges Delta, under the name of harmad, evidently a corruption of armada, or fleet. Somewhere between 1594 and 1624, a Bengali landlord called Mukundaram Chakravati wrote a poem that repeatedly mentions the Portuguese pirates in the region, while many local temples show terracotta paintings depicting Portuguese ships and sailors.29
These Portuguese people lived as pirates among pirates, taking advantage of the commercial strength of ports like Chittagong and controlling the intricate river channels that led to them. Just as in Sind, they engaged in ‘guerrilla’ opposition to the imperial authority in Bengal throughout the seventeenth century. The Farangian-i-harmads are seen as a local tribe and texts like the Bhararistan-i Ghaybi, penned by the Persian Mirza Nathan, provide a clear picture of an interesting process of ‘Bengalisation’ of the Portuguese.30 Curiously enough, the impression that the folangji left along the Chinese littoral before the ‘invention’ of Macau in the mid-sixteenth century is not substantially different. One may recall the forceful imperial reaction in 1549 to the unrest caused by groups of ‘bandits’ along the Fujian coast. Several dozen ‘white barbarians’ and ‘black barbarians’ were among those held responsible.31
Despite being invariably identified as Franks and hence from the West, the geographic origins of the Portuguese often remain ambiguous in Asian texts and the idea of a ‘European Other’, conceived as the absolute opposite, is not always in keeping with the reality. Some Chinese were convinced that the Portuguese came from a country near Malacca, while others believed them to be members of a Buddhist sect. In Malacca, according to the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), the Portuguese were taken for ‘white Bengalis’, while the city of Goa was considered the capital of Portugal. Further east, the Japanese thought them to be Indians (Tenjiku jin, ‘men of India’) before they started calling them barbarians (or savages) from the South (Nanban jin). The same applies to the Burmese texts where the Portuguese are presented as ‘white Indians’ (Kalapyu) or ‘feringgi Indians’ (Kala-bayin-gyi). These constitute fragments of an unfolding phenomenon of ‘Asianising’ the intruders which clearly illustrates a tendency to absorb what is different and to categorise what is strange within the human landscape and the civilisational grammar of maritime Asia.
In turn, Europe was little more than a vague notion. The Kiristan Monogatari refers generally to ‘South Barbary’, while the Chinese speak of Portugal (Pulidujia) for the first time in 1565, but knew very little of its whereabouts by that time. Tamil Christian literature is seduced by an idyllic Spain (or Iberia), a picture predominantly shaped by the certainly enthusiastic descriptions of Western missionaries.32 Concurrently, the Mughal painters usually included classical Western landscapes in their miniatures. But these are mainly copies of European engravings and in all probability such views were primarily intended to emphasise the vastness of the emperor’s authority. As noted by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Asian societies in an early moment conceived ‘Europeans without Europe’; when later, through travel and direct observation, Europe enters the picture, the tone is not always enthusiastic.33 In a letter sent by his parents in China to a young Chinese who lived in Portugal in the late eighteenth century, the image of the distant European country is a dark one: ‘From the letter arrived from Portugal, we can see how bad things are in that place. It will be best for you to return home and make your living here’.34
Paradoxically, the supposed Asian origin of the Portuguese did not render them any less strange in the eyes of many native observers. First and foremost, they were physically different: the colour of their skin and hair, their eyes and noses. Hence the undeniable surprise with which they were received in the different port-cities. They were often seen as exotic beings bringing exotic animals, like the turkey acquired in Goa by an ambassador of Jahangir (r. 1605—1628)—a strange animal that the Mughal sovereign described in his memoirs and asked Mansur to paint.35 The same holds true of the lion sent as a gift to the Chinese emperor Kangxi (r. 1662—1722) in 1678, which is known to have caused a great sensation in the Forbidden City.36
The status of the foreigner is reaffirmed at every step by the use of a specific set of markers. Of all these, clothing is the one that best ties in with physiognomy as a sign of difference: most of the Asian societies thought the Portuguese were well dressed, and people were generally fascinated by their bell-shaped trousers, their lace-trimmed collars, the capes and especially their hats. In Asia, the Portuguese—like the other Europeans who followed them—were the ‘hat-wearers’, and hats truly dominate the Asian iconography of the Franks.
Some Asian sovereigns violated codes and transgressed identities by wearing Western clothing in public, perhaps in this way expressing the universality of their authority. The Chinese emperor Yongzheng (r. 1723—1735) was painted wearing European clothing and it is well known that Akbar and Jahangir often dressed in Portuguese style. On receiving a gift of a number of hats from the viceroy of Goa, Jahangir threw ‘his cap aside, put one of them on his head and kept it on for several hours ordering a mirror to be brought so that he could see himself.37 Toyotomi Hideyoshi (r. 1585—1598) did likewise in Japan, and it was not unusual for his subjects to wear nanban clothes, propagating the illusion of him being a Western monarch governing a Western court. The nanban clothes and related markers were also used for a long time as a sign of national difference, as many Japanese screens represented other foreigners (Chinese, Koreans) in exactly the same way as they represented the Portuguese.38
There were many other distinguishing features besides dress. In South Asia, the Portuguese were noted for not piercing their ears and not chewing betel. But they were also known for walking their dogs and always being accompanied by black slaves. Winedrinking was perhaps one of the most striking features of the Franks. Most Asian observers associated the Portuguese with wine, and sometimes painted them with glass in hand.39 On the one hand, the habit of drinking alcohol was often linked with decadence and immorality, an impression that is gathered both from the Burmese chronicles and the Malay accounts. However, on the other, it was wine that the Portuguese offered Akbar in late 1572 when they were brought for the first time to the Mughal emperor. A good choice, if we are to believe the words of Muhammad Arif Qandhari, who poetically describes the magical effects of wine on Akbar’s state of mind as well as on those who accompanied him on that occasion:
By chance it so happened that the messengers of the Firangan who were settled in the port of Daman on the coast of the Arabian Sea came and brought some card loaded with Portuguese wine with them. Its scent turned the lions of skies deaddrunk, and even the innocent denizens of earth thought of enjoying its effect... The fact was that the collection of provisions of enjoyment induced the emperor to drink and for this purpose he adorned the throne in the Diwan-i-Khas. The wine served shone in the cups like the light in the eyes of noble man. The hiding screen was removed away from the face and the swab of forgetfulness had been taken away from ears, and the senses had been plundered from the head. His [Akbar’s] face was shining like the sun by the effect of wine, as fire rising from the earth... The emperor enjoyed the assembly till the end. Let us hope that the emperor’s mind would not be dim by the dust of intoxication.40
There was, then, an ambivalent reaction to the Portuguese and their ways in early modern Asia. Curiosity and the desire to emulate alternated, or became frequently intertwined, with disgust and the wish to underscore differences. In the Malay chronicles, the Portuguese are uncouth people, without manners, unfit to attend the most refined of social and political circles. Even their characterisation as ‘white Bengalis’ is far from flattering; the picture of a certain ‘Don Jamilu’ in a Malay account describing the arrival of a group of Portuguese to Ambon in 1512 demonstrates this precisely. Jamilu is depicted as a proud, inebriated and non-religious man.41
At the Mughal court, the chronicler Abu’l Fazl describes Akbar’s approach to the Portuguese as the expression of the imperial desire to civilise a savage race,42 while the observations about the Portuguese made from Goa by an imperial envoy in 1579—1580 called Tahir Muhammad would certainly have shocked the elite in the capital of the Estado da India who hosted him at the time. The ambassador, who authored a work entitled Rauzat al-Tahirin (The Garden of the Immaculate), reports some interesting news about the battle of al-Qsar al-Kibir (Morocco) in 1578, the death of the Portuguese King Sebastian (r. 1557—1578) and the early steps of the Iberian Union (1580—1640). At some point he states that the ‘Franks wear very fine clothes but they are often very slovenly and pimply. They don’t like to use water. They bathe very rarely. Amongst them, washing after relieving oneself is considered improper. They are very good at using firearms, and they are particularly brave on ships and in the water. But in contrast to this, they are not so brave on land’.43 In East Asia, the topic of the barbaric, uncivilised people who had no manners was repeated and there was even a certain demonisation of the Portuguese. In China, just as in Japan, there were people who doubted that they were human and it was not unusual for the stigma of cannibalism to overshadow their image.44
The complexity of the Asian impressions of the Portuguese is revealed in a last and somewhat unexpected phenomenon. In Sri Lanka, as in Southeast Asia, there were often cases of Portuguese and other Europeans who, despite being considered strangers and enemies, were recognised for their magical power, thereby acquiring the status of local divinities and objects of worship. Constantino de Sa de Noronha, the Portuguese captaingeneral of Ceylon who was killed at the battle of Randenivala in 1630 fighting the Kandyan army, is one such case. He was soon transformed from hated enemy to local deity, worshipped by the Sinhalese in the ‘pagode of Constantino de Saa’—‘those of Candea [Kandy] respecting the valour which they beheld that morning in the Captain-General, gave him a place among their gods, and today they honour him under the name of Cussal nete deiyo, which in the Chingala language means “Luckless God”, a name of great wit’.
Noronha thus became a bandara deity with a tangible regional impact. Another contemporary Portuguese text states that the Sinhalese worshipped Noronha after his death as ‘God of War’ and it is known that other ‘pagodes have been built to other Captains of His Majesty’ in the island.45 Concurrently there is evidence of Dutchmen being depicted in mythical terms in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka: the salagamas (cinnamon-peelers), for example, regarded the Dutch ‘cinnamon captain’ as a ‘god’ and his clerk as a ‘tiger’.46
It may be appropriate to draw a parallel between the cult of Noronha and other Europeans in Sri Lanka, and a similar phenomenon that occurred roughly in the same period in lower Burma: the public worship of two sons of the Portuguese entrepreneur Filipe de Brito e Nicote and his wife, the Arakanese princess Sawthanda. In the stupa of the ‘One Hundred Thousand Emeralds’ (Mye Thein Tan) built around 1628, an inscription states that when Syriam was conquered by King Anauk-hpe-tlun (r. 1606—1628), two of Nicote’s children managed to escape, seeking refuge in Arakan. However, the two princes did not succeed and died when crossing lower Burma, in the very same location of that temple. Soon after, they became nats (the local equivalent of the Sinhala cult of the bandaras), deities whose worship was reserved for people of royal blood who met premature or violent deaths.47
This intriguing indigenisation process of the Franks resulted from the need to ‘domesticate’ and integrate the power of the enemy, placing it in the realm of what was familiar and controllable. Hence it was not unusual for the authority of a foreigner to be considered divine, even though he was just a barbarian. Moreover, the indigenisation and divinisation of Europeans in Asia was not exclusive to Buddhist states. In the Moluccas, as well as in other islands of the Indonesian archipelago, the Portuguese were often seen as persons endowed with magical power, while in Java it did not take long until the governors-general of Dutch Batavia were Javanised’ and incorporated into court historiography and mythology. In Serat Sakondar, Jan Pieterzoon Coen (the founder of Batavia in 1619) becomes Mur Djangkung, son of a princess of Padjadjaran.48 Like their European predecessors in the region, the Dutch had to go through a process of identity change, which turned them into Malays in the eyes of the Malays themselves. Batavia is often presented as a state and its leader as a ‘father’ or ‘grandfather’, a source of (native) authority and respect.
From a broader perspective, one might also draw a parallel between the cases of Asian divinisation of Europeans and similar phenomena occurring in other early modern cultures and societies. Even if highly controversial among modern-day scholars, the proposed identification of Hernan Cortes with Quetzalcoatl and of Captain Cook with the Hawaiian god Lono resembles that of Constantino de Sa de Noronha with a Sinhala deity.49 Reflecting on the ‘stranger-effect’ in disparate early modern societies, Felipe Fernandez- Armesto has argued that in those cases it was not uncommon to ‘allow the divine horizon a role in sanctifying strangers’ authority’.50