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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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