Portuguese names in British ports
Updated: Sep 20
Third in a series on Portuguese companies and investors in Asia — what they built, what survived, and what is still being built today.
Portuguese (Goa and Macau) — 459 Europeans and Americans — 476 — Hong Kong census, 1853
Part of José d'Almeida's gravestone is set into the wall that runs around the former cemetery at Fort Canning in Singapore. I have written about him before, as one of a group of Portuguese pioneers whose stones survive there when almost everything else about them has gone.
That earlier post was about a man and a grave. This one is about a firm.
By the time d'Almeida died in October 1850, José d'Almeida & Sons was among the largest and most respected houses in the Straits Settlements. The Governor was one of his pallbearers, and the newspapers reported that scarcely a merchant in the settlement was absent from the funeral. There is a street named after him in the middle of Singapore's financial district, which is a rare thing for a man who was neither British nor Chinese.
The previous instalment ended with a question. The Companhia da Índia Oriental Portuguesa collapsed in 1633 partly because Portuguese merchant families in Asia refused to submit to it. So what happened to those families?
The short answer is that they went to work for somebody else's empire. The longer answer is more interesting, because they did not go as employees only. They went as contractors, and some of them ended up owning parts of the machinery the empire ran on.
A surgeon in Commercial Square
D'Almeida was born at São Pedro do Sul in 1784, trained in medicine and surgery at Coimbra, and joined the Portuguese navy as a ship's surgeon. What matters for this series is what happened after the navy: he married in Macau in 1810, and he was in Macau when Raffles founded Singapore.
In 1825 he set up a dispensary in Commercial Square — today's Raffles Place — and within a few years had stopped practising medicine and started trading. This is a familiar shape in early Singapore, but the reason a Macau man could do it so quickly is worth stating plainly. He arrived with the two things the new port could not manufacture: relationships and credit. The traders coming in from China, the Malay peninsula, Java, Sumatra and Siam had been dealing with Macau for generations. He knew them, or knew who they were, and they knew whether he was good for money.
He became Portuguese Consul-General to the Straits Settlements, was knighted by the Queen of Portugal and by the King of Spain, and was addressed as Sir José by a British establishment that did not normally extend that courtesy to foreign honours. He also lent his house on Beach Road for Mass, before the Portuguese Mission had a church, which is how St Joseph's came to be built.
None of that is a story about Portuguese state power in Asia. Portugal had almost none in Singapore. It is a story about a private individual monetizing a position — bilingual, Catholic, connected in Macau, trusted in a British port — and doing it well enough to be buried with the Governor carrying his coffin.
A schoolboy and a second-hand press
The same pattern, sharper, appears in Hong Kong.
In the 1830s, Macau was losing its trade to British competition, and the old Portuguese families were suffering for it. The Seminary of St Joseph responded to the decline in a way that turned out to matter enormously. It acquired a disused printing press — reportedly from the Gazeta de Macau, a newspaper that had folded in 1826 — and began training its students as printers.
The reasoning was social as much as practical. That a Portuguese gentleman's son might do manual work was unthinkable, but printing was a craft, and a craft was permissible. A school responding to poverty by teaching a respectable trade is not the sort of thing that gets into imperial histories. It produced two of the most successful Macanese businesses in Asia.
Delfino Noronha was thirteen when his father died in 1837, and was sent to St Joseph's. His family had probably come to Macau from Goa in the early eighteenth century — which is worth noticing, since it means the man who became the largest Macanese employer in Asia descended from a movement of people across the Portuguese Asian world that had already been going on for a century before the British arrived.
In 1844, at about nineteen, he crossed to Hong Kong and set up a printing plant. He did not go as a clerk, which is what nearly every other Macanese arrival did. By 1849 his firm, Noronha & Co., had the contract for the Hongkong Government Gazette, the colony's official record. From 1859 until 1941 the firm were printers to the Hong Kong government, and the business eventually became the Government Printer itself.
He hired compositors from his old school in Macau and produced work in several languages to a standard that outcompeted established British printers. He became the largest employer of Macanese in Asia. In the 1870s he went into land with another Macanese immigrant, Marcus Calisto do Rozário, taking ten acres in Tsim Sha Tsui. He also ran a steam vessel between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon — the ancestor of the Star Ferry, which still runs the same crossing. In December 1866, with J. A. Barretto, he founded the Club Lusitano.
Note what the core asset was. Not a fleet, not a factory, not a share register. A government printing contract. Noronha's business was, at bottom, a licence to do something the state needed doing — the same structure the last instalment traced back to the captaincy of the Japan voyage.
The grandson, the mint, and the power company
Noronha's grandson was José Pedro Braga, 布力架 (1871–1944), and his career says almost everything about what this community became.
Braga worked for his grandfather, then went to India and took a degree at the University of Calcutta. He was managing editor of the Hongkong Daily Telegraph from 1902, Reuters' correspondent in Hong Kong for some three decades, and in 1910 set up his own printing firm. In the 1930s he became chairman of the Hongkong Engineering and Construction Company, which — financed by Sir Elly Kadoorie — developed the estate in Ho Man Tin whose two streets, named in 1936, are Kadoorie Avenue and Braga Circuit. He sat on the board of China Light and Power, and was its chairman in 1934 and again in 1938.
In 1929 he became the first Portuguese member of Hong Kong's Legislative Council, serving until 1937. He was made Comendador da Ordem de Cristo by Lisbon in 1929 and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935. In Council he spoke for Kowloon, for New Territories farmers, for junior civil servants and for rickshaw pullers.
His first book, published in 1895 when he was twenty-four, was called The Rights of Aliens in Hongkong. It was a reply to letters in the English-language press objecting to Macanese being hired into the civil service. That is the position in one title: indispensable to the colony's administration, and formally an alien in it.
There is one detail in Braga's family history that I want to leave here without making much of it. His father, Vicente Emílio Braga, was Chief Accountant at the Imperial Japanese Mint at Osaka from 1871 to 1875, and then taught bookkeeping at the 大蔵省 (Ōkurashō), the Finance Ministry in Tokyo, until 1878. A Macanese from a Hong Kong printing family spent the first decade of the Meiji era helping Japan's new government put its accounts in order.
The community behind the names
Three successful men are not a community, and the wider story is the reason they existed at all.
The 1853 Hong Kong census counted 459 "Portuguese (Goa and Macau)" against 476 "Europeans and Americans" — the two categories separated, and the Portuguese counted with Goa in the same breath as Macau. In a colony of some thirty-seven thousand Chinese residents, the Portuguese were a rounding error demographically and indispensable operationally.
They worked as clerks, bookkeepers, interpreters and merchants' assistants: at Jardine Matheson, at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, at Cable and Wireless, at the Kowloon-Canton Railway, in the colonial government. The pattern held for a very long time. There were still vacancies for Portuguese bank clerks at HSBC in the 1960s, and when Hong Kong's Macanese youth had begun emigrating to the United States, Canada and Australia, the bank recruited directly from Macau to fill them.
They also spread. A Shanghai census in 1895 listed 1,936 Portuguese; by the end of the 1940s there were perhaps four thousand. For a century there were three Macanese communities — Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai — with families circulating between them and children sent up the coast to learn languages.
This was human capital deployed as an asset, and it was recognized as an asset by the institutions that used it. But it was never secured by anything. There was no company that owned it, no charter that protected it, and no state willing to defend it. When Japan took Hong Kong in December 1941, the community went back to Macau as refugees, and Noronha & Co.'s eighty-two-year run as government printers ended with it.
O que sobrou — what is still there
D'Almeida Street, in the middle of Singapore's financial district, and the fragment of his gravestone in the wall at Fort Canning. St Joseph's Church, which began in his front room, opened in 1853, three years after he died.
Club Lusitano, founded in December 1866, still operating from Ice House Street in Central and still counting several hundred members, many of them now living abroad. The Club de Recreio, founded in Kowloon in 1905, is still there too.
Braga Circuit and Kadoorie Avenue in Ho Man Tin, and Soares Avenue nearby. Street names are the cheapest form of survival, but they are survival.
China Light and Power, today one of the largest power utilities in Asia, twice chaired in the 1930s by the grandson of a Macau printer.
The Braga Collection at the National Library of Australia — the papers gathered by Jack Braga, J. P. Braga's eldest son, and one of the great archives of the Portuguese in Asia, held about as far from Macau as it is possible to be.
Next
An intermediary owns nothing that cannot be taken away. That is what December 1941 exposed, and it is the weakness running beneath every career in this instalment — the printing contract, the consulship, the seat on the board, all of them held at someone else's pleasure.
There was one Portuguese-ruled territory in Asia where families did not work on another party's account. They held the asset itself, by a grant of the Portuguese state that ran in perpetuity, and what came out of the ground went straight to the furnaces of a country rebuilding from ruins.
Next in the series: Goa's mining houses, and a company founded under Portuguese rule that still carries a Portuguese name in an Indian state.
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