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.
To travel from Lisbon to Nagasaki in the sixteenth century was to board a wooden box that leaked, rotted, starved you, infested you, and 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.
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.
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.
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 fifty years avoiding: were they complicit in a crime against humanity?
In 1600, a dying English pilot washed ashore in Japan and quietly destroyed a sixty-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 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 message to Canton, 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 neighbours, 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.
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, and it ended the Fleet of Defence, the English factory, and Dutch hopes of fighting their anti-Portuguese war from Japanese waters.
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, criminalising European dress, and tearing Eurasian families apart ship by ship.
In May 1628, a Spanish commander sent to punish the Siamese went hunting for Japanese instead. He took forty-two prisoners, stole the Shogun's personal seal, 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, nine years later, with his head on a stake above Nagasaki.
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 unarmed 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.
Seven years after the expulsion, four years after sixty-one 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.