Topic
The silver, silk, ships, and silver-tongued captains of the Nanban trade, the commerce that made the encounter possible and the rivalries that ended it.
A Chinese pirate king, a brawl over a bolt of cheap cotton, and a stone warehouse pulled down because of the number carved into its gable. For 90 years the Matsuura domain of Hirado grew rich on a trade it never once controlled, until the shogunate closed Japan's first window on the maritime world.
They smelled terrible, ate with their fingers, had grotesquely long noses, and could not read a single Chinese character. They also carried miraculous weapons and sailed ships the size of small castles, and the Japanese spent a century deciding what to make of them.
To travel from Lisbon to Nagasaki in the 16th century was to board a wooden box that leaked, rotted, starved you, infested you, and, on a bad voyage, stood a one-in-two chance of killing you before you sighted land. We look at five rival seafaring nations and compare how they fared.
When Portuguese merchants introduced the matchlock arquebus in 1543, they unknowingly handed the warring daimyō a tool that would reshape Japanese warfare. Within decades, Japan possessed more firearms than any European nation.
A royal surgical license, 2,000 cruzados sunk into silk for the Society of Jesus, and a hospital in Bungo built to look like a Portuguese achievement. It was Japanese physicians, converts and a freed Javanese surgeon who actually kept it running whenever its founder was away, which was most of the time.
How a strip of sand at the mouth of the Pearl River became the richest European settlement in Asia, the improbable story of Macau, from smuggling outpost to mercantile republic to the longest-surviving European colony in China.
The annual carrack from Macau to Nagasaki was the lifeline of Nanban commerce. Carrying Chinese silk, European curiosities, and Jesuit missionaries, these vessels, among the largest afloat, shaped the economic and cultural fabric of the exchange.
Cosme de Torres left Yokoseura burning behind him, in a small boat, at night. Within a year he had come ashore for good at a fishing village under a volcano. For a quarter of a century the harbor at Kuchinotsu was where Europe landed in Japan, until Nagasaki took the ships and the law settled the argument.
A Jesuit's letter of 1 June 1569 listing a flask of confeitos and some wax candles, a clock the warlord admired and declined, 3,000 kin of sugar sent to Nobunaga in 1580, and a Nagasaki townsman who worked out the method and sold it cheap. The most famous sweet of the Nanban century has one documented moment and a much longer history.
A Muslim trading town on the Pasig became the western terminus of a transpacific money-pump, drawing American silver across the Pacific and exchanging it for Chinese silk. It was also the Spanish asterisk to the Portuguese century in Japan: the harbor the friars sailed from, and the one the exiles fled to.
From a small fishing village to the nexus of global trade, Nagasaki's transformation under Portuguese influence was dramatic. Ceded to the Jesuits, rebuilt by the Tokugawa, its story encapsulates the entire arc of the Nanban encounter.
A reference guide to the weights, distances, volumes, and currencies that made the Portuguese-Japanese trade possible, and profitable. The cheat sheet that makes the stories make sense.
From the markets of Nagasaki to the streets of Goa, the docks of Lisbon, and the textile mills of Puebla, how the Nanban encounter produced one of the least-known slave trades in early modern history.
A reckless king rode a borrowed horse into a battle that was already lost, and Portugal came home without its sovereign, its army or its ruling class. What returned instead was a dying cardinal, a bastard pretender, and a Habsburg king who said he had inherited it, bought it and conquered it.
Portugal had spent a century carefully staying out of other people's fights. In a single dynastic accident it inherited them all, and 60 years later the Dutch had taken Malacca and Ceylon, the English had taken Ormuz, and the empire that pioneered the sea route to Asia was paying protection money to the nation that had followed it there.
A Spanish Jesuit knocking at the gate of Macao with news nobody wanted, and a magistrate at Nagasaki telling Portuguese merchants they were answerable for what Spaniards did in Siam. For 60 years Portugal kept its laws and its language, and lost the one thing its Japan trade had always rested on, which was being nobody's enemy.
A Dutch clerk in Portuguese Goa spent five years copying classified sailing charts and cataloging colonial rot. The book he published when he got home broke the Iberian monopoly on the East and launched the fleets that would eventually replace Portugal in Japan.
A failed Jesuit pupil turned Nagasaki trader walked into the court of the most powerful man in Asia and sold him a war that did not yet exist. The crisis that followed was engineered, mistranslated and forged into being by a single merchant, and it ended with 26 crucifixions in Nagasaki.
In 1592, English privateers seized a Portuguese carrack so enormous and so rich that it rewired England's understanding of what the East was worth. Hidden among the pepper and silk was a little Jesuit book that would help birth the East India Company.
In 1596, a Spanish galleon limped into a Japanese harbor and a pilot opened his mouth. The wreck of the San Felipe, and the boast that followed, triggered the first state-sponsored execution of Christians in Japan and poisoned European-Japanese relations for a generation.
On a September morning in 1598, the most senior Jesuits in Japan gathered in a room in Nagasaki to answer a question their institution had spent 50 years explaining away: were they complicit in a crime against humanity?
A parish register in Lisbon, a collar-presser's shop in Lima, a Japanese painter decorating a Macanese altarpiece: the Nanban century scattered Japanese people across every Iberian port on earth. Within 100 years they had ceased to exist as a distinct people anywhere.
For 43 years, a vermilion stamp on a sheet of paper was the most valuable object in the South China Sea. Then the regime that created it decided the ocean was more trouble than it was worth.
In 1600, a dying English pilot washed ashore in Japan and quietly destroyed a 60-year Catholic monopoly. William Adams became a samurai, an advisor to the shōgun, and the man who proved that European trade could be separated from European God.
The world’s first multinational corporation was built to destroy an empire, monopolize a spice, and wage a private war across three oceans. That in Japan it ended up confined to a three-acre artificial island in Nagasaki harbor was not part of the original plan.
Three Portuguese ships, all named for the patron of lost things, fell to Dutch privateers between 1605 and 1618. The capture off Meshima in 1615 forced Tokugawa Ieyasu to arbitrate the first international legal case in Japanese history.
Two Dutch warships sailed halfway around the world to capture the richest Portuguese carrack afloat. They missed it by two days and a fog bank. What they found instead was a trade permit that would underpin two centuries of Dutch commerce in Japan.
A 1,000-ton Spanish galleon broke up on a Kazusa beach in September 1609 and put the former governor of the Philippines on the wrong side of a law that gave every wreck to the shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu waived the law, sent William Adams to fetch him, and spent the winter trying to buy the secret of Mexican silver.
A message to Fujian, a treaty in Pusan, and a shadow diplomacy run on forged letters and altered seals. In a single year, the retired shogun tried to rebuild Japan's relationships with its two great continental neighbors, and almost no one involved was telling the truth.
A brawl in Macau, a siege in Nagasaki harbor, and a captain who chose to detonate his own carrack rather than surrender, the destruction of Portugal’s richest ship set off a chain of events that ended the Christian Century in Japan.
After the explosion of the Madre de Deus, Portugal and Japan had to rebuild their trade from the paperwork up. Letters, edicts, red-seal permits and one embassy whose three demands were comprehensively refused show how two empires who did not trust each other, and could not quite replace each other, kept doing business anyway.
On a June afternoon in 1613, a ship called the Clove anchored in a small Kyushu harbor and a captain named John Saris stepped ashore carrying a letter from King James I, a cargo of unsold broadcloth, and a grudge against the only Englishman in Japan. 10 years later, the English would sail away in debt, in disgrace, and in tears.
In the summer of 1621, the Tokugawa shogunate did something no European power had managed: it looked at the Dutch and English privateering fleet operating out of Hirado, waging a private corporate war on Iberian shipping, and reclassified it as common piracy. The word it chose was bahan; it hastened the end of the Fleet of Defense and the English factory, and ended Dutch hopes of fighting their anti-Portuguese war from Japanese waters.
A gift of sharkskin and gunpowder that left two Tokugawa councillors asking who had sent it, a votive ship lost to a shrine fire, and a governorship that was a promotion and a dismissal in the same document. A Japanese merchant became one of Siam's most powerful men, and a 1942 schoolbook turned his career into a national glory it never actually claimed.
The 1614 edict had banned a religion. The 1639 edict would banish a people. In between, a quieter decree dismantled the fabric of daily life that had made Portuguese Nagasaki possible, ending permanent residency, criminalizing European dress, and tearing Eurasian families apart ship by ship.
In 1626 a Macao merchant sailed into Nagasaki with six galliots and a fortune in Chinese silk, and left having signed away the priests who had made him rich. 14 years later the same man knelt on Martyrs' Mount with his neck against a Tokugawa sword.
In May 1628, a Spanish commander sent to punish the Siamese went hunting for Japanese instead. He took 42 prisoners, stole the Shogun's vermilion-seal pass, and watched his countrymen in Manila refuse to pay for it. The bill landed on the Portuguese merchants of Macau, and on one Lisbon-born factor whose career with the incident would end, 12 years later, with his head on a stake above Nagasaki.
25 merchants ordered to pay for their own jail, 800 Portuguese walked across a bridge and counted, and a chief factor crawling on his knees down the length of a Tokugawa audience hall. For 218 years nearly everything Japan knew about Europe passed through an artificial islet in Nagasaki harbor.
Four galliots loading for Macao, a mud flat rented back to its tenants at extortionate rates, and 287 people who had committed no act at all. The fourth Kan'ei decree was the moment a war on belief became a war on ancestry.
The Tokugawa shogunate locked the country shut and kept just a few windows open. What happened next, two centuries of domestic revolution in agriculture, commerce, culture, and science, would ensure that when the doors were finally forced open, the nation behind them was anything but medieval.
In the summer of 1640, 74 men sailed from Macau into a harbor they had been explicitly forbidden to enter. 61 of them would lose their heads. The 13 who survived were meant to send a message.
Five years after the expulsion, four years after 61 men lost their heads, Portugal sent two galleons back to Nagasaki, armed with a new king, a new argument, and an old refusal to take no for an answer.
46 years after the expulsion, 45 after the Nishizaka massacre, a single Portuguese frigate sailed back into Nagasaki harbor carrying no silk, no priests, no ambition. Only a handful of shipwrecked Japanese sailors, and the final, quiet question of whether something could be salvaged.