Akar Nusa
A man in Portuguese dress sits at a desk in Melaka, in the new fort, with ink on his fingers. Around him are traders from many lands. He asks each of them what they sell, where they come from, and what they know.
The story
Tome Pires was born in Portugal around 1468. He was an apothecary (a maker of medicines) who served a prince, and then he was sent east as "factor of drugs": someone who bought and sold medicinal spices and other drugs for the Portuguese crown. He went to India in 1511. In 1512 he moved to Melaka, which the Portuguese had just captured, and worked there as chief accountant of the royal trading house.
While in Melaka and India he wrote a long report to the Portuguese king called the Suma Oriental ("An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China"). He finished it between 1512 and 1515. It describes the coasts, ports, goods, weights and coins, and peoples from the Red Sea to Japan. It was the first thorough account of Asia east of India written for Europeans, and it gives the earliest known history of Melaka. Pires was careful to check what traders told him, and later scholars found it largely reliable, though his writing is tangled.
For readers today, the book is like a photograph of Melaka just after the great port fell. It shows Gujarati, Tamil, Chinese, Javanese and island traders living and trading side by side.
The story of the book is odd. It was not published in Pires's day and was thought lost. A copy was found in an archive in Paris in 1944.
In 1516 Pires was sent to China as an ambassador. The mission failed. The Chinese court was angry at the Portuguese conquest of Melaka, and the embassy was treated badly. Pires never returned. Some say he died in China around 1524; others say he lived there until about 1540.
Pires's own life is a lesson about Melaka's weight. His mission to China failed largely because of the conquest of Melaka. The deposed sultan, Mahmud Shah, sent envoys to China to complain, and the Ming court reacted with anger toward the Portuguese. So one man's report on Melaka and the fate of his embassy both trace back to the same port. Few single books give so clear a picture of a place at a turning point.
Where you can still see it today
- Melaka's museums show the Portuguese era and its records.
- Published editions of the Suma Oriental can be read in libraries.
- Many Melaka stories (the sizes of the old Gujarati and Chinese communities, the old port's goods) trace back to him.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
Pires wrote down who traded in Melaka, which is a clue to the mixed ancestry of its families today. DNA can show a family's broad roots, such as Southeast Asian, East Asian and South Asian threads. It cannot tell you whether an ancestor was in Pires's lists.
DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status.
