Gaspar da Cruz
Based on Wikipedia: Gaspar da Cruz
The Friar Who Died of Plague After Writing Europe's First Book About China
In 1556, a Portuguese friar named Gaspar da Cruz stood in the streets of Guangzhou, preaching to Chinese crowds who had never heard of Christianity. He was allowed exactly one month. Then, like so many European missionaries before and after him, he was asked to leave. But during that brief window, Cruz observed everything—the government, the punishments, the writing system, the tea. Thirteen years later, dying of plague in a Portuguese convent, he published what would become one of the most consequential books about China that almost nobody read.
This is the strange story of how a book can change history while remaining almost completely obscure.
A Dominican's Journey East
Gaspar da Cruz was born around 1520 in Évora, a city in southern Portugal's sun-baked Alentejo region. He joined the Order of Preachers—more commonly known as the Dominicans—at their convent in Azeitão. The Dominicans were, and remain, one of the great preaching orders of the Catholic Church. Their Latin motto, Veritas, means "Truth," and their members had a reputation for intellectual rigor and missionary zeal.
In 1548, Cruz set sail for Portuguese India with ten other friars under the command of Friar Diogo Bermudes. Their mission: to establish a Dominican presence in the East. For the next six years, Cruz moved through the jewel-like string of Portuguese trading posts that dotted the Indian Ocean—Goa, Chaul, Kochi, and Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). These weren't colonies in the later British sense. They were fortified trading stations, small European enclaves clinging to Asian coastlines, buying spices and selling European goods.
By 1554, Cruz had reached Malacca, a strategic port on the narrow strait between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. Whoever controlled Malacca controlled the spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The Portuguese had seized it from its Muslim sultan in 1511, and they would hold it until the Dutch took it in 1641. Here, Cruz founded a Dominican house—essentially a small monastery and base of operations—and lived for about a year.
The Failed Cambodian Mission
In September 1555, Cruz shipped out for Cambodia. This was adventurous even by sixteenth-century missionary standards. The Portuguese presence in Cambodia was marginal at best—a few traders, no permanent settlement. What happened during Cruz's Cambodian mission isn't entirely clear, but by late 1556, he had given up.
The failure pushed him toward China.
One Month in Guangzhou
Cruz made his way to Lampacao, a tiny island in the bay near Guangzhou (known to Europeans as Canton). Lampacao sat about six leagues—roughly eighteen miles—north of Shangchuan Island, where Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, had died just four years earlier while waiting for permission to enter China that never came.
Lampacao existed in a legal gray zone. The Ming dynasty officially prohibited foreign trade, but local officials tolerated Portuguese merchants on this small island as a way to conduct commerce without technically breaking the law. It was, in effect, an early free trade zone operating on plausible deniability.
From Lampacao, Cruz somehow obtained permission to enter Guangzhou itself. This was extraordinary. The Ming government was deeply suspicious of foreigners, and with reason—the Portuguese had already caused diplomatic disasters. Just a few decades earlier, the embassy of Tomé Pires had ended catastrophically when the Chinese discovered that Portuguese traders had been kidnapping Chinese children to sell as slaves.
Yet Cruz got in. For one month, he preached in Guangzhou, observing everything around him with the curiosity of a trained theologian and natural reporter. Then his permission expired, and he left.
The Long Road Home
Cruz returned to Malacca in 1557. Three years later, he was in Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf, providing spiritual support to Portuguese soldiers at their fort there. This was another crucial Portuguese outpost—whoever held Hormuz controlled the entrance to the Persian Gulf and thus the sea route from India to the Middle East.
Sometime around 1563, Cruz likely returned to India. By 1565, he was probably heading back to Portugal. The journey from Asia to Europe by sea typically took about a year, following the monsoon winds around Africa and up to Lisbon.
He arrived in Lisbon by 1569, just in time for the plague.
A Book Born in Plague Time
The 1569 plague that struck Lisbon was devastating. Cruz, true to his calling, stayed to help the sick and dying. Meanwhile, his book was being printed in his hometown of Évora by a publisher named André de Burgos.
The book's title, in its original sixteenth-century Portuguese spelling, was Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso as cousas da China—"A Treatise in which the things of China are recounted at great length." It was dedicated to King Sebastian of Portugal, then a teenager who would later die leading a disastrous crusade against Morocco.
Cruz's treatise is often called the first European book devoted primarily to China. This requires some qualification. Marco Polo's famous account had been circulating in Europe since the early 1300s, but it was a travel narrative covering much of Asia, not focused specifically on China. Galeote Pereira, another Portuguese, had published a shorter account in 1565. But Cruz's book was more comprehensive, more systematic, and more intent on explaining China as a civilization.
Shortly after his book appeared, Cruz returned to the Dominican convent at Setúbal, just south of Lisbon. The plague followed him, or perhaps it had never left. On February 5, 1570, Gaspar da Cruz died of the disease he had been fighting.
The Book Almost Nobody Read
Here's the peculiar thing about Cruz's treatise: it shaped European understanding of China for decades, but almost nobody read it directly.
The problem was language and timing. Cruz wrote in Portuguese, and Portuguese was not a major literary language in sixteenth-century Europe. Spanish, Italian, Latin, French, German—these were the languages that got translated and distributed. Portuguese works tended to stay in Portugal and its empire.
Worse, the book appeared in 1569, during the plague. Publishing a book during a major epidemic is not a recipe for bestseller success. Distribution networks collapse. Bookshops close. People have other concerns.
So Cruz's book remained obscure in its original form. But its information spread through other channels.
The Information Pipeline
In 1577, a Spanish writer named Bernardino de Escalante published his Discurso de las grandezas del Reino de la China—"Discourse on the greatnesses of the Kingdom of China." Escalante had never been to China. His main sources were Cruz's treatise and the earlier Décadas of João de Barros, a Portuguese historian. Escalante essentially translated and compiled Portuguese knowledge into Spanish.
Then came the real hit. In 1585, Juan González de Mendoza published his Historia del gran reino de la China—"History of the great kingdom of China." Mendoza hadn't been to China either. He was an Augustinian friar who had been assigned to prepare an embassy to China that never happened. Instead, he wrote a book compiling everything available in European sources: Cruz, Escalante, Pereira, and accounts of Spanish expeditions to China including that of Martín de Rada in 1575.
Mendoza's book was a sensation. It was translated into English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Dutch within a few years. For the next generation, it was the book on China in Europe. And running through it, unacknowledged by most readers, was the information that Gaspar da Cruz had gathered during his single month in Guangzhou.
What Cruz Actually Saw
Reading Cruz's treatise today, several things stand out.
First, there's the language barrier. Cruz makes clear that in 1555-1556, communication between Portuguese and Chinese happened primarily because some Chinese people had learned Portuguese—not the reverse. His book mentions Chinese interpreters repeatedly but never a Portuguese person speaking or reading Chinese. The Portuguese knew individual words: cha for tea, titles for various officials. But sustained communication required Chinese intermediaries.
This remained true for decades. When Spanish Augustinians visited Fujian in 1575, they faced the same situation. Europeans simply hadn't yet invested the years of study needed to master Chinese.
Cruz was, however, fascinated by the Chinese writing system. His brief description of it has been called "the first Western account of the fascinatingly different Chinese writing" by the linguist John DeFrancis. Cruz grasped that Chinese writing worked fundamentally differently from European alphabets—that it used characters representing meanings rather than sounds—and he tried to explain this to readers who had never encountered anything like it.
The Slavery Question
One of the most revealing sections of Cruz's book deals with slavery—specifically, the Portuguese habit of buying, stealing, or otherwise acquiring Chinese children and taking them as slaves to Portuguese colonies or back to Europe.
This trade was smaller than the Atlantic slave trade, which would eventually transport millions of Africans to Brazil. But it was significant enough to poison Sino-Portuguese relations. Back in 1521, when Tomé Pires's embassy fell apart, one of the contributing factors was the discovery that a Portuguese trader named Simão de Andrade had been kidnapping Chinese children—including some who had merely been pledged to creditors, not sold into slavery.
Portuguese slavers apparently justified their actions by claiming they were merely purchasing people who were already slaves in China. Cruz examined this claim carefully and found it wanting.
Chinese law, Cruz explained, did allow impoverished widows to sell their children. But this wasn't slavery as Europeans understood it. The conditions were heavily regulated. Children sold this way had to be freed upon reaching a certain age. Reselling them was restricted. And selling any of them to Portuguese foreigners carried "great penalties."
Cruz's conclusion was damning: the Portuguese had no legal or moral right to these children. As he put it, those commonly sold to the Portuguese were not legitimate servants but kidnapping victims, "stolen" and "carried deceived and secretly to the Portuguese." Anyone caught doing this in China faced death. And even if some corrupt official did authorize such a sale, that authorization was worthless because "such an officer would have done what he did for the sake of the bribe."
This is a remarkable passage. Here is a Portuguese friar, writing for the king of Portugal, flatly stating that his countrymen's slave trade in Chinese children was both illegal and immoral. It didn't stop the trade, but it put the moral argument on the record.
God's Punishment
Cruz was, after all, a sixteenth-century Dominican friar. His worldview was shaped by medieval theology as much as by Renaissance curiosity. This shows most clearly in his final chapter, where he discusses homosexuality in China.
Cruz was scandalized. He described it as "a filthy abomination" that the Chinese did not reprove or punish. The rest of the chapter discusses the catastrophic Shaanxi earthquake of 1556—one of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history, killing an estimated 830,000 people—and various floods of that year. Cruz interpreted these natural disasters as divine punishment for sexual sin.
To modern readers, this seems bizarre and cruel. But it was entirely conventional for Cruz's time and place. The belief that God punished collective sin through natural disasters was nearly universal in sixteenth-century Europe. What's notable is that Cruz bothered to record the Chinese perspective at all—he notes that the Chinese themselves did not share his interpretation of these events.
The Treatise's Afterlife
Cruz's book finally appeared in English in 1625, more than fifty years after its original publication. The translator was Samuel Purchas, an English clergyman who compiled a vast collection of travel narratives called Purchas his Pilgrimes. But even Purchas only published an abridged version, noting that the full text had been "here abbreviated."
By 1625, Cruz's information was outdated anyway. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci had spent nearly thirty years in China, learned to read and write Chinese, gained access to the imperial court, and died in Beijing in 1610. Nicolas Trigault had published Ricci's journals in Latin in 1615. These works made Cruz's one-month visit seem like a brief glimpse through a crack in a door.
The complete English translation of Cruz's treatise finally appeared in 1953, when the historian Charles Ralph Boxer published it alongside other sixteenth-century accounts of China. Boxer's edition, with extensive commentary, revealed Cruz to a new generation of scholars. But by then, Cruz had been dead for nearly four centuries.
Why He Matters
Gaspar da Cruz was not the most important European observer of China. He wasn't even the first. He spent only a month in the country, didn't learn the language, and wrote a book that hardly anyone read in its original form.
Yet he matters. He matters because he was there, early, when almost no Europeans could get access. He matters because he asked questions and recorded answers that would otherwise be lost. He matters because his information, passing through Escalante and Mendoza, shaped how millions of Europeans first imagined China.
And he matters because of the slavery chapter. In an era when Europeans routinely justified the enslavement of non-European peoples, Cruz examined the specific case of Chinese children and concluded that his own countrymen were engaged in kidnapping, not legitimate trade. He didn't have the power to stop it. But he bore witness.
He died helping plague victims in a Portuguese convent, having traveled across the world and back, having seen things few Europeans of his era would ever see. His book, overlooked for centuries, turns out to be a window into a moment when two great civilizations were just beginning to understand—and misunderstand—each other.