Gaspar da Cruz, the plague friar who wrote Europe's first book on China

On 20 February 1570, in the house of André de Burgos in Évora, the last sheet of a short book on China was printed. Burgos, a Granada-born printer who had worked in the city since the early 1550s, signed himself printer and knight of the household of the Cardinal Infante, Henrique. He closed the book with the usual printer's note giving the place and the day.2 sources2 sources

The author never held a copy. Gaspar da Cruz, a Dominican friar who had spent many years in the East, had died fifteen days earlier at Setúbal, south of Lisbon. He had caught the plague while caring for its victims, first in Lisbon during the epidemic of 1569 and then at Setúbal.2 sources2 sources

Historians count his book as the first printed in Europe that dealt with China and nothing else. Marco Polo had described Cathay long before, but as one marvel among many in the East. Cruz wrote about one country, from what he had seen himself in a few weeks at Canton and from the reports of Portuguese who had been prisoners inside China.3 sources3 sources

Even its date is split. The title page says 1569, the colophon February 1570, so catalogues usually give both. The book was dedicated to King Sebastião, who had turned sixteen that January.4 sources4 sources

Portuguese ships had been trading on the south China coast since about 1513. China was then ruled by the Ming dynasty, which forbade its own subjects to sail abroad. Cruz explained the ban to his readers as the decision of an emperor long before, who saw his kingdom decaying while his men chased conquests overseas.2 sources2 sources

So the Portuguese traded where they could, often in partnership with Chinese merchants and with the connivance of provincial officials, and sometimes at a high price. In 1549 Chinese forces seized two junks belonging to the merchant Diogo Pereira, and their crews were taken inland as prisoners. Some of them later wrote or told what they had seen, and those reports became a main source for Cruz's book.1 source1 source

By the time Cruz arrived the trade was moving to safer ground. Portuguese merchants settled on the Macau peninsula in the mid-1550s with the consent of Chinese officials; sources give 1553, 1554 or 1557 for the start.2 sources2 sources

Almost nothing is known of Cruz's early life. He was probably born in Évora around 1520 and became a friar of the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, at their convent in Azeitão, near Setúbal. In 1548 he sailed for India as one of twelve missionaries led by the Castilian Diego Bermúdez, superior of the convent of São Domingos in Lisbon. King João III and the order had agreed to plant Dominican houses in the East, and this was the group sent to do it.2 sources2 sources

Cruz helped found the convent in Goa and houses at Chaul and Cochin, and visited Ceylon. Then he went to Malacca, the Portuguese port on the strait between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, to start another convent there. The Dominican chronicler João dos Santos later remembered him as a man of great virtue and a good preacher.2 sources2 sources

In September 1555 he left Malacca for Cambodia, where he had heard there was a great opening for the Gospel. He found the opposite. The king did nothing without consulting Brahmins and diviners, the monks held the people's loyalty, and the Portuguese there quarrelled among themselves. In his own telling, the king's first question was whether Cruz was a witch.2 sources2 sources

After about a year, ill and with a single baptism to show for it, he gave up. People told him “many things of China, and the people of it to have a disposition to Christianitie, and that they loved reason”. He took passage on a Chinese ship then in Cambodia, whose crew gave him the best room on board and charged him nothing.2 sources2 sources

By December 1556 Cruz was on the China coast, and he went up the Pearl River to Canton (Guangzhou), the capital of Guangdong province. The mandarins, the officials who ran the province, did not allow Portuguese to stay long in the city, and Chinese were forbidden to lodge them. His stay was short: Francisco Roque de Oliveira, who has studied the book closely, puts it at five or six weeks.3 sources3 sources

He used the time well. He walked the city, saw an official deal with a woman's petition, and went with other Portuguese to the house of a senior provincial official, the ponchasi, to bargain for the release of Portuguese prisoners with eight ounces of ambergris. Portuguese friends took him to see a banquet a rich merchant gave, with tables set in three parts of the house and fruit piled in little towers. He questioned an old Chinese man, a Venetian merchant who had come in on a Portuguese ship, and a lord from Persia.2 sources2 sources

One rich merchant, asked about recent disasters in the interior, could not explain them in words and handed him a letter instead. Cruz had it translated into Portuguese with the help of an interpreter and put it in his book as its final chapter: a report to the emperor of earthquakes, storms and days that turned dark as night in inland provinces in 1555 or 1556.3 sources3 sources

He also preached, in public and in private conversation, and once tested his welcome too far. In a temple he knocked over the stones on an altar. The worshippers ran at him, angry. He answered, smiling, that men who could see and walk should not worship stones, and he says they agreed with him and left the temple with him. The Chinese seem to have taken him for an eccentric rather than a threat.2 sources2 sources

No Chinese dared convert without the mandarins' leave, and preaching freely would need a licence from the emperor himself. Cruz came to the conclusion the Jesuits had reached before him: only an embassy could open China.2 sources2 sources

Nothing of the kind was within reach of one friar. Early in 1557 he was back in Malacca.1 source1 source

The Tractado runs to 29 chapters, moving from geography to society and from the street to the throne. It ends with a separate chronicle of the kings of Hormuz, which the printer may have added on his own account.2 sources2 sources

Cruz looked closely at daily life. He described the men's long gowns and long fingernails, the many dishes at a meal, and the two little sticks people ate with, so deftly that not a grain of rice fell. He also described the drink that guests were offered on arrival.2 sources2 sources

He noted that girls of good family had their feet bound: “From their child-hood they wrap their feete in cloathes, that they may remayne small”, a custom, he added, “used yet among the noble people, and not among the basest”.2 sources2 sources

He wrote about plays, music and painting, about fishing with trained cormorants, and about a writing system of more than 5,000 characters, each standing for a thing, which people of different regions could read even when they could not understand each other's speech. The Chinese, he added, had been printing books and pictures for more than 900 years.2 sources2 sources

Five chapters deal with government. Cruz set out the ranks of the mandarins, the examinations held every three years, the inspectors sent to check on officials and the monthly couriers to Beijing. He admired the system but did not idealise it: he wrote that some posts went by favour or as rewards rather than by merit, and that eunuchs, officials and their deputies were inclined to take bribes.1 source1 source

Justice impressed and horrified him. He praised the care taken over witnesses and the rule that death sentences went to the emperor for confirmation, then described the floggings with canes in detail, the 15,000 or more prisoners he was told were held in Canton, the chains and the wooden collars put on the condemned.2 sources2 sources

He named some of his sources. Besides Galeote Pereira and other former prisoners, he drew on Chinese he talked to in Canton and, it seems, on the third Década of João de Barros's history of the Portuguese in Asia, printed in 1563. His great weakness was to take what he saw in one southern city, and what Pereira saw in two provinces, as true of the whole empire.1 source1 source

Cruz did not go home at once. He was still in Malacca in September 1557 and seems to have sailed on to Makassar and to Mylapore, on India's east coast. In mid-1560 he went from Goa to Hormuz, the Portuguese fortress at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, with other Dominicans who were to found a house there. The chronicle of the kings of Hormuz printed at the end of his book, summarised in Portuguese from a chronicle said to have been written in Arabic by a king of Hormuz, was probably his work or a companion's.2 sources2 sources

When he returned to Portugal is uncertain. The usual date is 1569. The historian Rui Manuel Loureiro has argued for an earlier return, leaving India in 1564 and landing in the first months of 1565. One line in the book points to Portugal as the place where at least part of it was written: he mentions the serpents woven in gold thread on Chinese officials' robes, “of which many have come to Portugal” to be used in church vestments (as he put it, in translation).1 source1 source

André de Burgos addressed his own prologue to the young king. He wrote that Sebastião loved new things, especially from China, and that Francisco Henriques, the new captain of Malacca, had already given him a short report on the country. That report has been lost.2 sources2 sources

In 1569 Lisbon was struck by the epidemic remembered as the Peste Grande, the Great Plague. The first deaths came in the spring, perhaps earlier. On 21 June the king left for Sintra, and on 8 July the people were officially warned. Those who could leave the city did; the poor stayed behind with the sick.2 sources2 sources

By late August 500 to 600 people were dying every day. Sebastião named three governors to run the city and sent for two doctors from Seville, who arrived on 2 August and wrote a set of health rules. The epidemic eased from September and was largely over by Christmas, but the city gates stayed shut until 28 July 1570.2 sources2 sources

Members of the religious orders stayed to confess the dying and nurse the sick. One anonymous Dominican, who said he had worked among them, wrote a short account that year comparing Lisbon to a ship wrecked in a storm, abandoned by its officers and crew and left with only the poor clinging to the hull.2 sources2 sources

Gaspar da Cruz was among the friars who went round the stricken city confessing and caring for the sick. When the epidemic in Lisbon was under control he went on with the same work at Setúbal. There he caught the disease, and he died on 5 February 1570.2 sources2 sources

The Tractado was not reprinted until the nineteenth century and drew little notice in Portugal; the humanist bishop Jerónimo Osório took no account of it in his history of King Manuel. The historian Francisco Roque de Oliveira blames above all the narrow reach of Portuguese and of the country's book trade, and notes that the book came out in a plague year. Yet it was read, and copied, often without credit.2 sources2 sources

The Goa chronicler Diogo do Couto used it in his Soldado Prático of about 1573. The Spaniard Bernardino de Escalante drew on it for his Discurso de la navegación in 1577. Above all, the Augustinian Juan González de Mendoza leaned on Cruz and on the friar Martín de Rada for his Historia del gran reino de la China, first printed in Rome in 1585 and a European success from its first edition.1 source1 source

In 1625 the English editor Samuel Purchas printed a translation in his collection of travels, cut by about a third; from the chapters on justice he kept mostly the cruel parts. The inventory of books left by Philip II's architect Juan de Herrera in 1597 lists a “tratado de la China, por fray Gaspar de la Cruz en portugués”.2 sources2 sources

Modern editions have followed. The Macau Maritime Museum published a Chinese translation in 1996, Rui Manuel Loureiro a modernised Portuguese text in 1997, reissued in 2010, and U.Porto Press a new edition by Zulmira Santos and Luís de Sá Fardilha in 2019.4 sources4 sources

Cruz's book gave Europe its first book-length printed portrait of China, and its details of daily life were copied for decades. It also set a tone. He wrote it, he said, to show how the Chinese excelled all known peoples “in multitude of people, in greatness of kingdom, in excellence of order and government and in abundance of possessions and riches” (translated from Portuguese), and so that readers would pity “so many souls lost in ignorance of the truth” (also translated).2 sources2 sources

The word cha in his chapter on customs, from the Chinese ch'a, is the word Portuguese still uses for tea. Through Mendoza, who borrowed so much of the Tractado, Cruz's China reached readers across Europe who never heard his name.2 sources2 sources

Cruz wrote in the years when the Portuguese were settling at Macau, which Portugal ran until 1999. Macau's Maritime Museum chose his treatise for a Chinese edition in 1996, three years before the handover.2 sources2 sources