In the long history of East-West relations, few sagas are as misunderstood as the diplomatic dance between the Portuguese Crown and the Chinese Imperial Court. Often dismissed as a footnote to the eventual rise of the British Empire, these embassies were, in fact, masterclasses in cross-cultural navigation. While other European powers approached the "Middle Kingdom" (the direct translation of China in Chinese—中国) with a mixture of commercial aggression and Protestant rigidity

Book by Aren Noronha, available at Goa 1556 (excerpt can be downloaded below) The Portuguese first reached India on 20 May 1498, when Vasco da Gama and the fleet he commanded reached Calicut (now Kozhikode in the state of Kerala) on the Malabar Coast along the southwest of India. It was only with the seventh armada to India in 1505 that King Manuel I of Portugal named Francisco de Almeida the first Viceroy of India, on condition that he build a string of forts along the Malab

The familiar Typus Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius (c.1589). For the early 1600s, the world was suffering from a bit of a geographic identity crisis. As we’ve explored in my post about how China became known as "China" thanks to the Portuguese, the seafaring Portuguese had popularized the name China (derived from the Sanskrit Cina, likely referring to the ancient Qin dynasty). But while the sailors were docking in the south, ancient legends—and the ghost of Marco Polo—insi

For most of the 16th century, the Portuguese had a "No Trespassing" sign over the sea routes to Asia. They kept their navigation charts—the roteiros —under literal lock and key. But every secret has a price. Enter Jan Huygen van Linschoten , a Dutch spy working as a secretary to the Portuguese Archbishop in Goa. He spent years copying top-secret Portuguese sailing directions and trade secrets. In 1595, he published them in a blockbuster book, the Reys-gheschrift vande navigat

I had visited all the countries of Southeast Asia until October 2025, when Timor-Leste became the 11th member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). I therefore took advantage of my son’s Easter school holiday to visit the former Portuguese territory, so here’s a bit of a photo essay. We arrived in the capital Dili, a town of 300,000 inhabitants. The Portuguese influence was immediately apparent: the language of Camões is one of two official languages, the oth