The Bank of the Great Western Ocean
- Spencer Low
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
First in a series on Portuguese companies and investors in Asia — what they built, what survived, and what is still being built today.
其人奉天主教，善行賈，多富厚。 Its people follow the Catholic faith; they are skilled in trade, and many of them are wealthy. From《皇清職貢圖》, "Illustrations of the Tribute-Bearing Peoples of the Imperial Qing", compiled from 1751
There is a hundred-pataca note in my study. It was printed for circulation in a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. It carries Portuguese and Chinese in parallel, in that order. And in the corner it names the institution that issued it: Banco Nacional Ultramarino — the National Overseas Bank — a company founded in Lisbon in 1864 to finance an empire that no longer exists.
That is not an antique. Notes in that series are being issued now. A Portuguese colonial bank, founded to serve the Ultramar, is still one of the two institutions licensed to print the currency of a Chinese city. The other is the Bank of China.
This series is about Portuguese money in Asia: the companies, the concessions, the family firms and the investors. It begins here because BNU is the only one you can hold in your hand.
What the Chinese name actually says
The bank's Chinese name is 大西洋銀行 (Dàxīyáng Yínháng).
Read that with a modern dictionary and it comes out as "Atlantic Bank" — 大西洋 is the ordinary modern Chinese word for the Atlantic Ocean. That is how it is usually translated in English-language writing about Macau, and it makes for a tidy irony: a bank named after the wrong ocean, marooned on the South China Sea.
The tidy irony is wrong. I went back to the sources I had used for How Portugal charmed China, where these characters kept appearing in Qing documents — not as a body of water, but as a country.
Here is the Qing court's own entry, from the imperially commissioned Huáng Qīng Zhígòng Tú (皇清職貢圖), the illustrated survey of the peoples who came to the throne, begun in 1751. The album pairs each description with a painted figure, and gives the text twice, in Chinese and in Manchu:
大西洋，明永樂間有古里、瑣里、忽魯謨斯凡數十國來朝貢，後多不復至。萬曆中，西洋人利瑪竇航海來中國，自稱意大里亞國人。本朝康熙六年通朝貢，雍正三年意大里亞教化王來貢，五年博爾都噶爾亞國來貢，乾隆十八年復來。其人奉天主教，善行賈，多富厚。肌膚白晳，鼻昂而目深碧，不畜鬚髮，別編義髮，蒙首以黑氈折三角為帽，短衣革履，褲襪束迫如行縢。婦螺髮為髻，領懸金珠寶石，上衣下裳，用錦帕覆背，謂之巾縵。俗重女輕男，相悅為婚。有僑居香山縣之澳門者，統以夷目，歲輸地租。
The Great Western Ocean. In the Yongle era of the Ming, several dozen countries — Calicut, Chola, Hormuz and others — came to present tribute; afterwards, most came no more. In the Wanli era, the Westerner Matteo Ricci came to China by sea, calling himself a man of the country of Italy. Under the present dynasty, tributary relations were opened in the sixth year of Kangxi [1667]. In the third year of Yongzheng [1725] the Pope of Italy sent tribute; in the fifth year [1727] the country of Portugal sent tribute; and in the eighteenth year of Qianlong [1753] it came again. Its people follow the Catholic religion, are skilled in trade, and many of them are wealthy. Their skin is fair, their noses high, their eyes deep-set and blue-green. They do not grow beards or long hair, but plait false hair separately; they cover the head with black felt folded into a three-cornered hat; short coats and leather shoes; breeches and stockings bound tight like puttees. The women coil their hair into a chignon; from the collar hang gold, pearls and gemstones; an upper garment and a lower skirt, with a brocade cloth covering the back, which is called a jinman. By custom they esteem women and slight men, and marry by mutual liking. Some of them sojourn at Macau in Xiangshan county; they are governed through a headman of their own, and pay ground rent annually.
Three things are worth pausing on.
First, the term's range. In this cosmographic register 大西洋 covers the Far West broadly, and the entry transliterates Portugal separately as 博爾都噶爾亞 — Bó'ěrdūgáěryà. But in the diplomatic register, and above all in anything concerning Macau, 大西洋國 is Portugal and nothing else. When China's first modern foreign ministry, the 總理衙門 (Zǒnglǐ Yámén), wrote to the British Minister to China, Sir Rutherford Alcock, in 1868 about Macau, it stated flatly that 「澳門本係中國地方，久經大西洋人在彼租居」 — Macau is originally Chinese territory, long since rented and occupied by the people of the Great Western Ocean. That is not a sentence about the Atlantic. That is a sentence about Portugal, addressed to Portugal, over a lease.
Second, the last line. 統以夷目，歲輸地租 — governed through a headman of their own, paying ground rent annually. That is the Qing position on Macau in nine characters: a tenancy, not a cession. Everything that happened between 1849 and 1999 is an argument about that sentence.
Third, and for the purposes of this series, the sentence that matters most: 善行賈，多富厚. Skilled in trade; many of them wealthy. Whatever else the Qing court thought of the Portuguese — and the album is not flattering about the hair — what it recorded first, after their religion, was that they were businesspeople.
So when the bank opened in Macau in 1902 and took the name 大西洋銀行, it was not reaching for a body of water. It was using the name by which the Chinese state had addressed the Portuguese state for at least two centuries. To a literate reader in Macau in 1902, the sign over the door did not say Atlantic Bank. It said the Bank of Portugal.
Three names, three imaginations of the same institution. In Portuguese, National Overseas Bank — the view from Lisbon, looking out. In Chinese, the Bank of the Great Western Ocean — the view from Beijing, looking at a tenant. In English, BNU is a mere acronym, which is why the mistranslation has been so entrenched.
What the bank actually did, and how it survived
BNU was founded in Lisbon in 1864 as a bank of issue for the overseas territories: an instrument of state, not a private venture. It reached Macau in 1902 as the territory's first commercial bank, and was authorized to issue patacas in 1905.
Then it simply did not stop. It kept operating through the Republic, through the Estado Novo, and through the Second World War, when Macau's Portuguese neutrality made it one of the few functioning European financial institutions on the China coast. It was nationalized in 1974 after the Carnation Revolution, partly privatized in 1988, and in 2001 merged into Caixa Geral de Depósitos — at which point the Macau operation was re-incorporated locally as a Macau company, wholly owned by CGD.
The interesting date is 1995. Four years before the handover, BNU's note-issuing monopoly ended and was split with the Bank of China, fifty-fifty. That arrangement survived 20 December 1999, and the issuing mandate now runs to at least 2030. A Portuguese state-owned bank shares the printing of a Chinese city's money with a Chinese state-owned bank, and has done for three decades.
This is the thing about Portuguese assets in Asia that the standard telling misses. Portugal did not build a Dutch East India Company, and this series will spend a whole instalment on why not. What it built instead were positions — concessions, monopolies, contracts, licences, tenancies. Positions are fragile, but they are also negotiable, and a negotiable thing can survive a change of sovereign in a way that a fleet cannot.
BNU survived because it was useful to whoever was in charge.
The other branches
There is a second BNU, in Dili. The bank's modernist headquarters there was restored in 2000–01, and Caixa trades from the building today as BNU Timor — issuing no currency at all, because Timor-Leste uses the US dollar. A Portuguese bank, in a Portuguese-speaking country, handling American money. Nobody planned that; it is what independence in 2002 made available.
BNU will reappear in this series, and readers may find it worth keeping an eye on. In 1940, the shareholders of Timor's largest plantation company were the heirs of a former governor, the Portuguese state, Banco Nacional Ultramarino — and a Japanese firm. That company, and what it did to the people who grew its coffee, gets its own instalment.
What I could not find
BNU also had branches in Goa, Damão and Diu, and I cannot tell you with any confidence what became of them after December 1961.
The Indian annexation transferred a functioning colonial banking network — deposits, mortgages, the accounts of the mining houses that were by then shipping iron ore to Japan — into the Indian financial system, and I have not been able to establish through which institution, on what terms, or what happened to depositors. English-language sources are silent. The Portuguese sources I have found stop at the political rupture and do not follow the money. I suspect the answer sits in Reserve Bank of India records and in the Goa state archives, and I would rather say so than guess.
If you know, or if your family banked with BNU in Goa, I would like to hear from you. The same goes for anything material: passbooks, share certificates, letterheads, staff photographs, pension correspondence. Luso-descendente families across Asia are holding paper that exists in no archive, and over the course of this series I would like to gather some of it.
O que sobrou — what is still there
The notes. Current-issue BNU patacas are in circulation and in every ATM in Macau. This is, at a guess, the most widely handled surviving artefact of Portuguese administration anywhere in Asia, and almost nobody who handles it thinks about it for a second.
The Avenida Almeida Ribeiro premises in Macau, and the restored BNU building on Dili's waterfront — one of the earliest modernist buildings in Timor, and worth seeing for that reason alone.
The name. 大西洋銀行 is still the bank's legal Chinese name, still on the signage, still meaning what it meant in 1902 to anyone who reads it in the older register.
Next
If the Portuguese were 善行賈 — skilled in trade — and if they held Macau, Goa, Malacca, Nagasaki's silk route and the Timor sandalwood trade, then why was there never a Portuguese equivalent of the Dutch VOC or the East India Company?
There was. It lasted five years.
Next in the series: the Companhia da Índia Oriental Portuguesa, 1628–1633, and the very different kind of capitalism that replaced it.
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