Tomé Pires (1465–1540)
Born 1465 CE, died 1540 CE.
Tomé Pires (c. 1468 — c. 1524/1540) was a Portuguese apothecary, colonial administrator, and diplomat. Tomé Pires served as apothecary to Prince Alfonso until the prince's death in 1491. In 1510 he was commissioned by the Portuguese court to serve as a "factor of drugs" in India, arriving at Cannanore in 1511. In 1512 he was sent to the port city of Malacca, recently captured by the Portuguese. There he served as the chief accountant for the royal factory. Upon his return to India in 1515, Pires was sent to China as ambassador from the King of Portugal to the Ming Court. His mission failed when the Chinese court refused to recognize him because of the increasingly hostile activities of Portuguese traders in the region. Pires never left China; he was either executed by the Chinese in 1524 or possibly banished for life to a remote Chinese province. During his stay in Malacca, Pires wrote the Suma Oriental, a landmark description of the geography, ethnography and commerce of the Asian coastline stretching from the Red Sea to Japan. The manuscript is an important record of the region at the start of European colonization in the early sixteenth century.
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