The Nanban Trade: Japan and Portugal, 1543–1639
What was the Nanban trade?
The Nanban trade was Japan’s first sustained commerce with Europe. From 1543 to 1639, Portuguese ships — above all the annual “great ship”, the Nau do Trato from Macau — carried Chinese raw silk and gold to Japan and returned with Japanese silver, at profits that financed both Portugal’s Asian empire and the Jesuit mission.
The exchange rested on a peculiarity of East Asian politics: Ming China had banned direct trade with Japan, so the Portuguese, established at Macau from the 1550s, stepped in as indispensable middlemen between the two largest economies of the region.
Full article: The Nau do Trato: Portugal’s Great Ship to Japan
Full article: A Complete Timeline of Portuguese-Japanese Exchange, 1543–1650
Why is it called “Nanban”?
Nanban (南蛮) means “southern barbarians”. The word came from Chinese usage for the peoples south of China, and the Japanese applied it to the Portuguese and Spanish because their ships arrived from the south, by way of Macau and the Philippines.
What began as a dismissive label became simply descriptive: nanban-jin for the people, nanban-sen for their ships, nanban byōbu for the painted screens that depicted them, nanban bōeki for the trade itself.
Full article: Nanban Screens: Imagining the Foreign
When did the Nanban trade begin and end?
From 1543 to 1639 — ninety-six years. It began on a documented day: Portuguese castaways aboard a Chinese junk landed at Tanegashima in the autumn of 1543. It ended by decree: the edict of 1639 banned Portuguese ships from Japan, and the execution of Macau’s embassy in 1640 sealed it.
The century between is conventionally divided into five eras — each links to its own hub page with every article of the period:
| Era | Years | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Early Contact | 1543–1568 | Tanegashima, the arquebus, Xavier’s mission, the silk-for-silver trade takes shape |
| Azuchi–Momoyama | 1568–1600 | Nobunaga’s patronage, the rise of Nagasaki, the mission’s peak, Hideyoshi’s first edicts |
| Early Tokugawa | 1600–1614 | Ieyasu’s pragmatic opening, Dutch and English rivals, the 1614 expulsion |
| Persecution | 1614–1635 | The underground church, the martyrdoms, trade under tightening control |
| Sakoku | 1635–1650 | Dejima, Shimabara, the 1639 expulsion, the Dutch monopoly |
Full article: Tanegashima, 1543: First Contact and the Gun that Changed Japan
Full article: Sakoku: How and Why Japan Closed Its Doors
What goods were exchanged?
Silk for silver, above all: Chinese raw silk and silk cloth flowed to Japan, and Japanese silver — from mines that made Japan one of the world’s great silver producers — flowed back through Macau into the Chinese economy.
Around that core moved firearms and saltpetre, Chinese gold, porcelain and lacquerware, European clocks, wine and woollens — and, on the darkest page of the ledger, a traffic in Japanese slaves that crown and Church repeatedly tried and failed to stop.
The exchange was so profitable because two of the world’s largest economies were forbidden to deal with each other directly. Ming China had banned commerce with Japan after a century of wakō raiding, yet its appetite for silver had just been made official: the Single Whip tax reform of 1581 converted the entire Chinese fiscal system to payment in silver, on a scale no domestic supply could meet. Japan, meanwhile, sat on some of the richest silver deposits on earth. Chinese silk was the supreme luxury of the Japanese elite; Japanese silver was the metal China could not do without; and the Portuguese, sitting at Macau between the two, simply carried each to the other — buying silk at Canton prices and selling it at Nagasaki prices, at margins neither state had reason to close.
Turning that arbitrage into a ledger entry took real machinery. Prices ran on the picul–catty–tael system of weights understood from Canton to Malacca to Nagasaki — decimal at the top, a hundred catties to a picul, and hexadecimal at the bottom, sixteen taels to a catty — while Japan reckoned its own wealth in the rice-measured koku and weighed out payment silver in momme, gram by gram, on balance scales. To damp the price wars a single shipload of silk could set off, the bulk of each cargo was sold in one negotiated lot, the pancada; and from 1604 a shogunal silk guild, the itowappu, fixed the purchase price before the Portuguese could put it to auction.
Full article: The Weight of Silver: Measurements, Money, and the Mechanics of Nanban Commerce
Full article: The Price of a Person: The Portuguese Trade in Japanese Slaves
Which ports and routes did the Nanban trade use?
One long line and two anchor ports. Portuguese ships ran the carreira from Goa through Malacca to Macau, and from Macau the annual great ship crossed to Japan — first to Hirado and the Kyushu bays, then, from the 1570s, to a single engineered harbour: Nagasaki. Macau, a Chinese peninsula held by permission from the 1550s, and Nagasaki, a fishing village rebuilt into a global port, were the two hinges the whole trade turned on.
The route was a relay, not a single voyage. Goods and silver changed hands at every link in a chain that reached from Portuguese India to the coast of Kyushu. Afonso de Albuquerque’s capture of Malacca in 1511 opened the doorway to the South China Sea; from there Portuguese captains pushed north to the Pearl River, where Jorge Álvares reached the delta in 1513. What they still lacked was a base close enough to China to load silk and close enough to Japan to sell it, and around 1555–57 they improvised one: a foothold on the narrow peninsula the Chinese called Macau, tolerated and monitored by a Ming administration that could close a single land-gate and starve the settlement if it misbehaved.
Japan was the harder half. Early trade scattered across the Kyushu bays — Funai in Bungo, Hirado under the Matsura — wherever a Christian or Christian-curious daimyō would host the carrack; but a ship that shifted ports each season was one no lord could reliably tax or protect. The answer, from the 1570s, was to concentrate everything in one place. Nagasaki, “the Long Cape”, was a near-empty fishing harbour around 1560; within a generation it was rebuilt into the nexus of a global exchange, ceded outright to the Jesuits in 1580 and later taken under the shogun’s own control. The deep, sheltered bay that could hold the great ship, reached by a single watchable approach, was the port that silver built — and, in the end, the port through which the closing of Japan was most easily enforced.
Full article: The City at the Edge of Empire: A History of Portuguese Macau
Full article: Nagasaki: How a Fishing Village Became the Trade Capital of the World
Who were the key figures?
On the European side: Francis Xavier, who opened the mission in 1549; Alessandro Valignano, who reorganised it; the interpreter João Rodrigues. On the Japanese side: Oda Nobunaga, the mission’s great patron; Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who first turned against it; the Tokugawa shoguns who ended it; and the Christian daimyō of Kyushu who anchored the trade.
Full article: Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Mission in Japan
What role did Christianity play?
Trade and mission arrived on the same ships and could never be fully separated — that entanglement is the central drama of the period. The Jesuits financed their mission through a share of the silk trade; the daimyō who wanted the carrack accepted the priests; and when the shogunate concluded that Christianity was a political threat, the trade became hostage to the faith.
Japanese Christianity grew to perhaps 300,000 believers at its peak before persecution drove it underground.
Full article: The Christian Century in Japan
Full article: Number of Christian Converts in Japan, 1549–1700
How big was the Nanban trade, and why did it matter?
Out of all proportion to the number of ships. A single great ship a year moved enough silk and silver to underwrite Portugal’s empire in Asia and the whole Jesuit mission in Japan — and to help feed a silver-hungry Chinese economy at the far end. For a century, one carrack a season was a load-bearing beam of three worlds’ finances at once.
The volume was astonishing precisely because the traffic was so thin. This was not a fleet but, in most years, a single vessel — yet the silver it carried west helped satisfy a Chinese demand that an empire’s tax reform had unleashed, and the profit it carried east financed the Estado da Índia, the sprawling, chronically cash-short Portuguese establishment that ran from Mozambique to Macau. The Jesuit mission was wired into the same current: the Society drew a fixed share of the annual silk cargo, so that the priests’ work and the merchants’ work were funded from one purse — an entanglement that became the central drama, and the fatal weakness, of the whole enterprise.
The impact was not only monetary. The same ships that carried silk carried the arquebus, which reached Tanegashima in 1543 and remade Japanese warfare within a generation, and the mission, which grew to perhaps 300,000 Japanese Christians at its height. A commerce that looked, on the water, like one ship a year was in fact one of the hinges on which the early-modern histories of Japan, China, and the Portuguese seaborne empire all turned at once.
Full article: The Nau do Trato: Portugal’s Great Ship to Japan
Full article: The Christian Century in Japan
How did the Nanban trade end?
Step by step, by decree: the 1614 expulsion of the missionaries; the sakoku edicts of 1633–1636; the island of Dejima, built in 1636 to confine the Portuguese; the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38; the 1639 ban on Portuguese ships; and the execution of sixty-one members of Macau’s embassy in 1640. The Dutch, who kept religion out of their trade, inherited a reduced monopoly on Dejima from 1641.
For the closed-country edicts one by one — what each said, and how the isolation ended two centuries later — see the sakoku FAQ.
Full article: Sakoku: How and Why Japan Closed Its Doors
Full article: The Shimabara Rebellion: The Siege That Sealed Japan
What legacy did the Nanban century leave?
A permanent one, on both sides. In Japan: firearms that changed its warfare; loanwords like pan, tempura and botan; the nanban byōbu screens; castella cake; and the hidden Christian communities that resurfaced two centuries later. In Europe: the first substantial knowledge of Japan — grammars, dictionaries, histories, and the Jesuit letters that fed a century of fascination.
Full article: From Tempura to Castella: The Culinary Legacy of the Nanban
Full article: Portuguese Words in Japanese