Directory_and_Chronicle_1868 — Page 641

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MACAO.

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China. Alvaro Semedo, who governed in 1621 a Roman Catholic Church at Nan-chang-foo, in his “Relatione de la China,” and Manoel de Faria e Souza, in his " Asia Portuguesa, allege that the Portuguese obtained permission to inhabit. Macao, because they had cleared the island of pirates. Diogo de Couto came in 1556 to India; he served eight years in the army, visited Lisbon and came back to Goa. Phillipe I., proclaimed 1581 King of Portugal, commanded him to continue De Barros' Asia, making him Royal Chronicler of ladia. The silence of Diogo, an accurate engineer, proves evidently the fallacy of the above allegation. According to De Guignes, in his “Voyage to Pekin," the pirates were vanquished 1563, an epoch at which the Portuguese had been six years in possession of Macao. The mighty sea-rover, denominated by him and others Chang-si-lao, kept the provincial capital, Canton, besieged, when Kea-tsing was on the throne-according to other writers during the reign of Kang-he, May not Chang-si-lao be a corrupt and foreign pronunciation of Chin-chi-lung, the father of Chin-chin-king or Hoxinga by changing Chin to Chung, chi to si, lung to lao? For in the historical abridgment by Duhalde of these sovereigns, the man with whom either one or the other must have been contemporary is not mentioned. However, one of these two emperors rewarded, it is pretended, the Portuguese, by whose valour and victory the siege of Canton was raised, the pirates destroyed, and their chief slain, granting to them in perpetuity the island on which Macao is actually standing. But as no authentic act of donation ever was produced, the cession, resting merely upon traditional presumption, shall we not be justified in agreeing with Frigauld, that the Chinese, having by degrees overcome the panic at first sight excited by the tremendous Portuguese ships, petitioned the emperor to grant to foreign merchants a residence on a peninsula, or rather a rock, constituting a part of a greater island. "To this proposal the sovereign acceded, stipulating that the strangers should pay tribute or ground-rent, and duties on their merchandise. Of this opinion are both the Chinese and Tartars. Neither a few chops--official documents-suspended in the Senate house, nor those two hundred which Jesuits translated at Goa, by command of Marquis de Alorso, who governed Portuguese India in 1744, prove anything to the contrary; we therefore willingly side with La Clede, who, in his "Historia de Portugal,”" avers that "the Portuguese demanded leave to move to a desert island, called Macao, it wis granted, and sometime after liberty to built a few houses;" and we likewise agree with the opinion of Dom† Alexandre da Silva Pedroso Gaimir ums, bishop of M cao, who, as acting governor, wrote (1777) to the Senate, by paying grond-rent, the Portuguese acquired the temporary use and profit of Maran, ad libitum, of the emperor."

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Unwilling to deprive its natural subjects of the advantages of trade, and still more unwilling to expose them to the violence of rapacious and unruly guests, the government resolved (it appears from the concession) to place the strangers in such a situation that they may feel their dependence on the empire, without forcing it a third time to the exter- mination of men and the destruction of property. In my opinion, it is safer to ascribe the possession of Macao to imperial bounty rather than to conquest; for the conquerors would be compelled to give up the place, were the Chinese government but to command th tradesmen, mechanics, and servants, to leave off their business and retire, and there- upon issue an order not to furnish the inhabitants with provisions. The first settlers wore in a less precarious state, if it be true that many of them held, in the conquered part of Keang-shan, landed property, for its produce rendered them (the Portuguese) independent of China, so far as the supply of the necessaries of life went. By whose hand the earth was cultivated is not mentioned in the memorandum we have noted; but it blames the owners for supineness, in not strenuously opposing the Chinese when they began to encroach upon the domain of Portugal. The intruders appropriated to them- selves, not only the whole of this fruitful island, but they likewise drew across the isth- ans that separates it from Macao, a will-it was constructed in 1573 for the protection of the country, and to prevent their children from being kidnapped. In the middle of the

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• The Dutch and Spaniards, established on the island Fornrosa, know the man under the name of Ikoan, Equan, Iquon, Equam; and by the name of Nicolas, for he had been baptize, it is said.

† Doia is an honorary epithet in Portugal, written Dm.-Don is Spanish.

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