“White Peril” in the East: The Response of China and Japan

Abstract

In 1515 a group of Portuguese traders and buccaneers — Arab, Persian, and Indian sea-traders had long preceded them — appeared off the southern Chinese coast. In 1543 a group of Portuguese merchants, bound from Indonesia to China, were blown off course and shipwrecked at Tanegashima, an island off Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Chinese government having forbidden its subjects to trade directly with Japan, the Portuguese at Macao on the Chinese coast controlled the carrying trade between China and Japan. By then, the western invasion of eastern Asia by sea was underway.