Tomé Pires
Tomé Pires was the apothecary who wrote the first European description of the trade of Asia, and who was then sent to China as Portugal's first ambassador and died in a Chinese prison. He was born in Lisbon around 1465, the son of the king's apothecary, and held the same post for the prince John's household; in 1511 the crown sent him to India as factor of drugs, to learn the spice trade from the inside. Afonso de Albuquerque had just taken Malacca, and Pires reached it in 1512 and spent the next three years there as accountant and controller of the drugs, asking every merchant in the port where his goods came from and what they were worth. The result was the Suma Oriental, a survey of the world from the Red Sea to Japan port by port, with prices, the shahbandars of Malacca who handled each region's traders, the Javanese states, the Chinese junk trade, and the sentence the Malacca page quotes: that whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice, because the spices that reached Venice overland all passed through it first. The manuscript was sent to Lisbon, used and then lost, and was found in Paris in 1937 and printed in 1944. In 1516 Albuquerque's successor chose him to lead the embassy that the fleet of Fernão Peres de Andrade carried to Canton in 1517, the first official European mission to China since the Mongols. He waited two years for permission, went north by the Grand Canal, reached Beijing in 1520, and the Zhengde emperor died in 1521 before receiving him. By then the deposed sultan of Malacca had complained to the court, the Portuguese at Canton had built a fort and taken captives, and the embassy was sent back to Canton in chains. Pires died in prison there in 1524, or, in one Portuguese account, lived on in a Chinese village with a wife and daughter for twenty years. His book is the reason the sultanate's page can say what the port charged.
- Lived: 1465 CE – 1524 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: apothecary, diplomat, writer
