Tomé Pires (c. 1468 — c. 1524/1540)^[a] was a Portugueseapothecary, colonial administrator, and diplomat. In 1510 he was commissioned by the Portuguese court to serve as a "factor of drugs" in India, arriving atCannanore in 1511. In 1512 he was sent to the port city ofMalacca, recentlycaptured by the Portuguese. There he served as the chief accountant for the royal factory. Upon his return to India in 1515, Pires was sent to China as ambassador from the King of Portugal to the Ming Court. His mission failed when the Chinese court refused to recognize him because of the increasingly hostile activities of Portuguese traders in the region. Pires never left China; he was either executed by the Chinese in 1524 or possibly banished for life to a remote Chinese province.

During his stay in Malacca, Pires wrote theSuma Oriental, a landmark description of the geography, ethnography and commerce of the Asian coastline stretching from theRed Sea to Japan. The manuscript is an important record of the region at the start of European colonization in the early sixteenth century.

Very little is known about the life and family of Pires prior to his arrival in India. He was born around 1468, possibly in the Portuguese town ofLeiria but evidence of his birthplace is tenuous. He had at least one brother, João Fernandes, and a sister, Isabel Fernandes. His father was apothecary to KingJoão II of Portugal and Pires himself was apothecary to PrinceAfonso, the heir apparent until his untimely death in 1491.^[1]

He went to India in 1511, invested as "factor of drugs",^[2] the Eastern commodities that were an important element of what is generally called "thespice trade". In Malacca andCochin he avidly collected and documented information on theMalay-Indonesian area, and personally visitedJava,Sumatra andMaluku.^{[citation needed]}

From his Malay-Indonesia travels, he wrote a book on Asian trade, theSuma Oriental que trata do Mar Roxo até aos Chins (An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China). He wrote the book in Malacca and India between 1512 and 1515, completing it before the death ofAfonso de Albuquerque in December 1515.^[3]

It was the first comprehensive and reliable account of Asia to the east of India, a region that was almost unknown to Europe at the time.^[4] Among its many accomplishments, it contained the first European descriptions of theMalay Archipelago and theSpice Islands. The historical account of Malacca is the earliest known and contains much information not found anywhere else. Pires was also the first to use the name Japan, spelling it asJampon. The details and accuracy of his descriptions of Sumatra and Java are "remarkable" and were not surpassed for a "couple centuries".^[4] It remains one of the most important resources for the study ofIslam in Indonesia.^{[citation needed]}

TheSuma Oriental 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. "His style is far from clear," his modern editor has noted, "and no doubt it often becomes more confused, owing to the transcriber's mistakes."^[3]The book, couched as a report toManuel of Portugal, and perhaps fulfilling a commission undertaken before he leftLisbon,^[3] 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. 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 was only the better-known book byDuarte Barbosa.^{[citation needed]}

TheSuma Oriental was unpublished^[5] and presumed lost until 1944 when a manuscript copy was discovered in a Paris archive. Four letters written by Pires survive, and there are a scattering of references to him by contemporaries, including a letter from Albuquerque to the King, 30 November 1513.^{[citation needed]}

In 1516, Tomé Pires went toCanton (Guangzhou) in the fleet ofFernão Pires de Andrade leading an embassy sent by kingManuel I toZhengde Emperor ofChina.^[6] However, he was never received by the emperor, due to several setbacks, including the suspicion of the Chinese, and the plot moved by deposed sultanMahmud Shah after the Portuguese conquest ofMalacca in 1511. The embassy fell in disgrace, with some of its members killed, starting a period of three decades of Portuguese persecution in China. Tomé Pires is said to have died of disease in 1524 in China, although some state he lived up to 1540 inJiangsu, but without permission to leave China.^{[citation needed]}

This was the first official embassy from a European nation to China afterGiovanni de' Marignolli was sent as legate by the Papacy (inBeijing from 1342 to 1345).^{[citation needed]}

• Fernão Pires de Andrade
• Jorge Álvares
• History of Indonesia

• Albuquerque, L.“Tomé Pires”, inDictionary of Scientific Biography. 1974. Vol. 10, p. 616.
• Cortesão, Armando, ed. (1944).The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires 1512-1515. London: The Hakluyt Society.
• Diffie, Bailey W. (1977).Foundations of the Portuguese empire, 1415-1580. George D. Winius. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 383–386.ISBN 978-0-8166-8156-3.OCLC 227038282.
• Fujitani, James (2016)."The Ming Rejection of the Portuguese Embassy of 1517: A Reassessment".Journal of World History.27 (1):87–102.ISSN 1045-6007.JSTOR 43901825.
• Howgego, Raymond John, ed. (2003). "Pires, Tomé".Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800. Hordern House. pp. 831–832.ISBN 1875567364.
• Madureira, Luis. "Tropical Sex Fantasies and the Ambassador's Other Death: The Difference in Portuguese Colonialism,"Cultural Critique (Number 28; Fall of 1994): 149–173.
• Muller, Karl, and David Pickell (eds) (1997).Maluku: Indonesian Spice Islands. (Singapore: Periplus Editions), p. 86.
• Ricklefs, M.C. (1991).A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300 (2nd ed.). London: MacMillan.ISBN 0-333-57689-6.
• Wills, John E., Jr. (1998)."Relations with Maritime Europe, 1514–1662" inThe Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2, 333–375. Edited by Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote. New York: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-24333-5.

• Cortesão, A.A Suma Oriental de Tomé Pires e o Livro de Francisco Rodrigues. Coimbra, 1978.
• Cortesão, A.Primeira embaixada europeia à China. o boticário e embaixador Tomé Pires. Lisboa, 1945.
• Cortesão, A.A propósito do ilustre boticário quinhentista Tomé Pires., Revista Portuguesa de Farmácia, 13,3 (1963), p. 298-307.
• Dias, J. Lopes.Medicinas da 'Suma Oriental' de Tomé Pires. Porto, 1947. Sep.Jornal do Médico, vol. 9, n.º 208, pp. 76-83.
• Dias, J. P. Sousa.A Farmácia em Portugal. Uma introdução à sua história. 1338-1938. Lisboa: ANF, 1994.
• Loureiro, Rui M.O manuscrito de Lisboa da "Suma Oriental" de Tomé Pires (Contribuição para uma edição crítica). Macau: Instituto Português do Oriente, 1996.
• Donald Ferguson, ed. (1902).Title Letters from Portuguese captives in Canton, written in 1534 & 1536: with an introduction on Portuguese intercourse with China in the first half of the sixteenth century. Educ. Steam Press, Byculla. - letters from the survivors of the Pires' embassy, imprisoned in Canton. According to Cortesão's later research, the letters were actually written in 1524.

• 1460s births
• 15th-century Portuguese people
• 16th-century deaths
• 16th-century Portuguese explorers
• Ambassadors of Portugal to China
• Explorers of Indonesia
• History of Malacca
• People from Lisbon
• Portuguese colonialism in Indonesia
• Portuguese diplomats
• Portuguese expatriates in China
• Portuguese expatriates in Indonesia
• Portuguese Renaissance writers
• Portuguese travel writers

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