Portuguese First See Southern China

1509

The captain Diogo Lopes de Sequeira reached Malacca and sent men east, reporting back to Lisbon that beyond lay the coast of a vast empire called Cathay, whose merchants wore silk and paid in silver. Portugal had not yet touched Chinese soil but was already calculating how to. The reports sparked a decades-long Portuguese effort to establish trade with the Ming, culminating in the lease of Macao.