The Macanese migration to Hong Kong after 1841 actually began about three hundred years earlier in Portuguese India. The details of their passage toward Asia during a period when global commerce was introduced to the rest of the world are often overlooked, and have been generally lost from historical accounts until recently.
Introduction
Following the capture of Goa in late 1511, Portuguese general Afonso Albuquerque sent a small fleet to Malacca and the islands of “Insulindia” (present day Indonesia) to recover Portuguese captives who had been taken during an earlier diplomatic mission.[i] Albuquerque’s ambassador, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, was under standing orders to avoid direct conflict, seek out Christians-like peoples, and to inquire about trading with them. Following clashes with Malaccca’s king and the occupation of the territory in August 1511, the Portuguese began looking for potential allies against the Muslims who ruled the region.
Another envoy named Duarte Fernandes and two lieutenants were sent soon after to establish a diplomatic and military alliance with the kingdom of Siam. Fernandes returned with a Siamese emissary bearing a letter from King Prasat Tong in support of the Portuguese intervention and future trade relations. Among the impressions reported to Albuquerque was the monarch’s large standing army that relied on trained elephants. Fernandes described “… a King who is so powerful that he is able to maintain continuously, at his own cost, ten to twelve thousand war elephants which he rears for this purpose., … which the King has one that is white, so highly esteemed in all neighbouring countries that owing to this, he is called “the King of the White Elephant”.
Intrigued by the account, Albuquerque sent a second envoy to set the conditions for a treaty of peace and a commercial alliance, quickly consolidating the relationship between Siam and Portugal. Albuquerque was so sure of the alliance that he reported favorably on the situation to Portugal’s King Dom Manuel in April 1512. The news traveled quickly for the time. Receiving reports from India, the King sent a letter about the events to Pope Leo X in June 1513, effectively introducing Siam to Europe. Information regarding the newly discovered nation, and the variety and quantity of trade in the region, was carried regularly back to the Portuguese court and filtered out to other kingdoms. Diplomatic voyages and trade between Siam and Macau began soon after, but proceeded slowly.
For his part, the King of Siam welcomed the Portuguese allies, realizing that the growing naval power of the Dutch could overwhelm even his army of elephants. Having seized the throne from his predecessor, Prasat Tong withstood opposition from Muslim and Japanese merchants by driving them out and replacing them with Portuguese traders. The king then invited the Portuguese to establish themselves in the capital city of Ayuthia, and asked for missionaries to serve Christian converts in exchange for a promise of trade with China, which Siam had conducted for over two decades.
The request was fulfilled with the arrival of two Dominican monks who set up the first ministry in 1539. Portuguese chroniclers also indicate that Albuquerque sent several gifts to sweeten the deal, including jeweled bracelets and gold snuffboxes for the King’s mother. The new alliance led to the building of a port near the capital, through which a variety of goods could be obtained, including rice, dried fish, ivory, fine cloth, and precious metals such as tin, gold, silver and copper. In the process, a small group of 130 Portuguese who arrived by 1512 grew to a population of 1,300 by the end of the 17th century, including refugees from Malacca and Macassar after the Dutch takeover in 1641, and a large number of Portuguese-Siamese children.
Religion and Trade
Among Portuguese authorities, relations with Siam were focused on ministering to Christians and finding a way to trade in China, two goals influenced by religious clerics. Writing in 1552 a few months before his death, the Jesuit Francisco Xavier had hoped to enter Canton to begin his mission. But he wrote, “…if God does not wish it, I shall go to … Siam, and from Siam leave with the embassy which the King of Siam is sending to the King of China.” Siam’s relationship with China was also noted by others. Brother Luís Fróis, writing in 1555 to his fellow priests in Goa, described the sea voyage between Goa and Japan by indicating that one had to spend the winter in Siam during the monsoons, as did all traders of the time, before finding passage to China.
The actual “carrot” of the Siamese alliance was bilateral trade, especially with Portuguese India, which the Siamese coveted. In 1561 another Jesuit named Jerónimo Fernandes wrote that Malacca is considered by Siam to be “the door to the most glorious missions and enterprises that there are in India”. Fernandes emphasized that Malacca is close to all kingdoms, which send their ships loaded with merchandise, including to the kingdom of Siam.
After Macau was founded in 1557, Chinese mandarins opposed Siamese traders landing in the port, even for repairs, and blamed the Portuguese for creating bad relations. The King of Siam had already violated China’s sovereignty by sending ships to Cambodia, a vassal state, to fight against Chinese pirates without approval from the Imperial Court. Trade, however, remained paramount to the future of the European enclave. The sudden loss of revenue after the Dutch capture of Malacca in 1641 plunged Macau into a deep crisis.
In 1667, as Portuguese ships remained hemmed in by the Dutch blockade, Macau’s Leal Senado (Loyal Senate) was granted a large loan of silver and merchandise from Tong’s successor, King Narai of Siam. When Macau’s economic crisis continued, payments had to be made in small installments. Assuming that the final payment sent in March 1720 had been received, the worried Senators ordered Jesuits living in Siam to present more gifts to the King and his family in hopes of reestablishing the trade. According to Father Francisco Telles, acting Captain-Major in Siam, however, the situation was complicated by the “disappearance” of the final payment before it arrived in Ayuthia, evidence of corruption that still plagued the Portuguese enterprise. The revelation may account for the official declaration of repayment being delayed until July 1723.
Trade between Macao and Siam was eventually restored with favorable custom duties paid by ships sailing to each port. To encourage the alliance, Portuguese officials sent cargos that included incentives requested by Siamese officials, including Persian rugs which merchants obtained from their extensive networks. The large loan, periodic gifts, and the final resolution of payments to Siam came at a fortuitous time, for it allowed Macau to begin its recovery just before the British East India Company was granted permission to build factories and house traders there in 1728.
Despite close ties with Portugal, Siam throughout the 18th century was embroiled in rivalries between Dominican and Jesuit clerics, an effect of a purge of the Society of Jesus in Europe beginning in 1759. The disagreements grew to such intensity that French priests were barred from entering local churches, and parishioners hid paintings and relics until receiving instructions from officials in Goa. The crisis lingered until the early 19th century, when the attraction of commerce across Asia began to outweigh religion. In those years, businessmen, educators, and diplomats from Macau began migrating to Siam seeking a revival of the Portuguese community.
Familial Ties to Macau
The impact of this new group is documented by three modern day researchers previously stationed in Thailand: Jorge Morbey, a cultural counselor in the Portuguese embassy in Bangkok in the 1990’s, Pedro Daniel Oliveira, Portugal’s assistant consul-general to Thailand in 2003, and Miguel Castelo-Brown, who spent three years in Bangkok beginning in 2007 studying early relations between Portugal and Siam. Each wrote about the connections among several families with links to Macau’s institutions and Siamese businesses. One of the features of this new migration was the Siamese government’s reliance on Portuguese from Macau as the nation began to modernize and develop closer ties to Europe. Since most of those who migrated were born in the Portuguese city, I will refer to them collectively as “Macanese”.
Morbey’s research includes a profile of Zeferino Demétrio Cordeiro, who was born in Macau in 1824 and came from a long line of merchants who were elected “brothers” of the Santa Casa de Misericordia, Macau’s Holy House of Mercy founded in 1569 and well known for charitable work. Both his paternal grandfather and several uncles served on the Misericordia’s board of directors. Zeferino Cordeiro became a wealthy ship owner and merchant specializing in beverages from Bangkok, where he died in 1889. His marriage to a Thai woman, Ana ou Magdalena Sai, produced a son named Floriano Demetrio Cordeiro (1844 –1910), who became a leading English language educator at Bangkok’s Assumption College.
Oliveira and Castelo-Brown wrote that another member of the family, Miguel Francisco Cordeiro (1822 – 1905), was head of the maritime guard in Macau, and fathered several children who worked for European companies in Bangkok, where Miguel also died. Another native of Macau, Jose Maria Fidelis da Costa (1837 – 1895), was a merchant and served as Portugal’s consul in Bangkok by 1868. He later joined Siam’s customs service, where he reached the rank of Chief Inspector and became an advisor to King Rama V.
Another prominent member of the Macanese community in Siam highlighted by Castelo-Brown was Celestino Maria Xavier (1863-1922), whose grandfather was a merchant and business owner in Macau before relocating to Bangkok around 1840.[ii] His son, Celestino’s father, Luis Maria Xavier (1804-1922), owned a rice mill in Bangkok, held important positions in Siam’s Ministry of Finance in 1875, and was Vice Consul to Portugal in 1890. As an influential leader of the expatriate community, Luis Xavier sent his son Celestino to study in England, where he learned French, Italian, and English in addition to his native Portuguese, and later translated Dante’s “Inferno” into Thai.
After university, Celestino worked as a principal manager overseeing Siam’s Maeklong Railway in 1905. He then pursued a career as a diplomat, serving first in Siam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris and London, then returned in 1906 as the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs just as Siam began its transition to modernity. Xavier then headed the delegation of his adopted country at the International World’s Fair in Turin (1911) and at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (1915). He also negotiated Thailand’s entrance among the allies during the First World War. His career culminated as Thailand’s chief envoy to the peace conference at Versailles in 1919, and with ambassadorial appointments to Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon until his death in 1922.
There are numerous other examples of people from Macau who expanded commercial and institutional ties in Siam and across Southeast Asia. They included Joaquim Vicente d’Almeida, a business executive attached to the Portuguese Consul in 1866; Senibaldo del Aguila, who in 1890 founded the first telegraph service in Bangkok; Elmínio Maria Sequeira, a photographer in 1890, and Joaquim Marques António, an interpreter with the Portuguese Consul in 1904.
The largest concentration of Macanese outside Hong Kong, however, migrated to Shanghai, where they made their greatest impact beginning around 1860. It is there, in the largest “treaty port” ceded by the Chinese at the end of the Opium Wars, that we next turn our attention.
Here’s the link to the next article on Shanghai.
Notes
[i] Much of the primary research and sources used in this paper was compiled by Jorge Morbey, cultural counsellor of the Portuguese embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, and is used with his permission. Additional information is provided in Pedro Daniel Oliveira’s article, “Macanese That Helped Build Bangkok”, Macao Magazine, Issue 16, May 2013: https://www.macaomagazine.net/history/macanese-helped-build-bangkok)., and several other sources used in my research. Morbey collected this research in the Portuguese archives while stationed in Bangkok, and supplemented it with documents from the Historical Archives of Macao obtained when was the Director of the Instituto do Cultural in the 1980’s. He granted use of his research notes, including a detailed chronology and a bibliography of sources, during a meeting in Macau in 2016. I am indebted to his generosity and dedication to the project.
[ii] The following information was derived from Oliveira’s article, op. cit. 2013.
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