Ming China’s support for Sultan Mahmud of Melaka and its hostility towards the Portuguese after the fall of Melaka in 1511
Cheah Boon Kheng’s 2012 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 85, Part 2) reconstructs the decade-long diplomatic crisis that followed the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511, drawing on Ming dynasty court records, Portuguese travel accounts, and the Sejarah Melayu to demonstrate that Ming China’s response was not the passive non-intervention often assumed but a sustained policy of moral condemnation, trade prohibition, and military engagement against Portuguese ships and personnel in Canton. The article challenges the widespread misconception that Sino-Melakan tributary relations lapsed after Admiral Zheng He’s final voyage in 1433, showing instead that tribute missions continued unabatedly into the 1520s and that the Ming court treated the Sultan of Melaka as a legitimate vassal entitled to protection.
Summary
The article’s central problem is the gap between what Albuquerque claimed in his Commentaries—that the Ming Emperor refused to support the Sultan of Melaka out of commercial self-interest—and what the Ming Shi Lu (Veritable Records) actually reveals about court deliberations. Cheah demonstrates that the imperial court did in fact endorse strong condemnation of the Portuguese, ordering that their tribute be refused, that they be instructed to return Melaka to its king, and that Siam and other vassals be urged to assist the Sultan. The delay in action was not indifference but a combination of the Sultan’s own tardiness in dispatching envoys (his first confirmed mission arrived only in 1520–21) and the Portuguese embassy’s equally late arrival (Tome Pires reached Canton in October 1517 but was not received at court until 1521). The escalation into open hostility was triggered not by the Melakan appeal alone but by the convergence of that appeal with Portuguese coastal piracy, the kidnapping of Chinese children, and the arrogant behaviour of merchants like Simao de Andrade, which confirmed the Sultan’s envoys’ accusations that the Portuguese were “sea-robbers” with designs on China itself.
The article gives particular attention to the enigmatic figure of Khoja Hassan (Huo-zhe Ya-san), a Melakan Chinese or half-Chinese Muslim who served as laksamana under Sultan Mahmud, was castrated by the Sultan after falsely accusing the Bendahara of treason, and then appears in Ming records as a Portuguese emissary who won the Emperor Wu-zong’s personal confidence, accompanied him on his southern tour, and even claimed to be an envoy of Melaka. His execution after the Emperor’s death in 1521 illustrates the tangled loyalties and the role of Chinese merchants as intermediaries in this crisis. Cheah also corrects the historiographical error, repeated by Edward Dreyer and others, that Ming foreign relations with Southeast Asia ceased after 1433, citing continuous Ming Shi Lu entries documenting tribute missions from Melaka, Siam, Champa, Java, and numerous Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern states well into the sixteenth century.
The narrative is informed by a careful cross-reading of the Ming Shi Lu (contemporary court records), the Ming Shi (Qing-era dynastic history), Albuquerque’s Commentaries (which Cheah treats as a source of Portuguese intelligence rather than neutral observation), Mendes Pinto’s Peregrination, the letters of the Portuguese captives Vieira and Calvo, and Geoff Wade’s translations and analyses of Ming texts. The author is explicit about the limitations of each source: Albuquerque’s account relies on informers and reflects Portuguese self-justification; Pinto’s memoirs are legendary in parts; the Ming Shi was compiled by the succeeding dynasty and follows conventional historiographical framing.
Key Findings
- The Ming Shi Lu entry of 31 August 1521 records that the Ministry of War proposed “Imperial orders of castigation be sent to the Fo-lang-ji, instructing them to return Melaka’s territory,” and that Siam and other vassals be instructed to assist the Sultan; the Emperor approved all proposals (p. 68–69).
- On 23 September 1523, twenty-three Portuguese prisoners were dismembered in the streets of Canton—their heads, limbs, and private members displayed publicly—as a deterrent against further Portuguese incursions (p. 68).
- A memorial dated 6 April 1523 records the capture of 42 persons including the Portuguese captain Bie Du-Lu (Pedro Hommen?), the taking of 35 heads, the seizure of 10 men and women taken by force, and the capture of two ships (p. 70).
- The Portuguese embassy led by Tome Pires arrived in Canton in October 1517, was detained for over 15 months, reached Nanking in May 1520, and was finally sent to Peking; after Emperor Wu-zong’s death in February 1521, the new Emperor Shi-zong (aged fourteen) refused Pires an audience, and the entire embassy was imprisoned (pp. 57–59).
- The Malay envoy (identified as Tuan Nasim Mundeliar, an uncle of the Sultan) stayed in China for three years awaiting military assistance; he died of apoplexy while preparations were reportedly under way, and was buried at Sampitay near Nanking with a tomb inscription reading “Here lies Trannocem Mudeliar, uncle to the king of Malaca, whom death took out of the world before he could be avenged of Captain Afonso Albuquerque, the lion of the robbers of the sea” (pp. 60–62).
- Following the 1523 executions, the Portuguese were effectively banned from China for approximately 20 years; they did not re-establish a legal trading presence until settling on Macau by 1535 and securing official permission to dry cargoes there, with the Ming Court constructing a control wall along the Macau isthmus in 1573 (pp. 70–71).
Conclusion
Cheah’s definitive takeaway is that Ming China’s response to the fall of Melaka was neither the cold commercial calculation Albuquerque portrayed nor the total abandonment implied by the absence of military intervention. The court did issue formal condemnation, refused Portuguese tribute, demanded the return of Melaka, and engaged Portuguese ships militarily at Canton. However, the commitment to protect a vassal had already degraded from the muscular naval enforcement of the Zheng He era (1405–33) to mere diplomatic rhetoric by the late fifteenth century—the 1481 precedent of merely warning Annam when the Sultan appealed against it being the clearest indicator. The Portuguese conquest of Melaka thus exposed the limits of the tributary system’s protective function at a moment when Ming China’s strategic attention was fixed on the northern frontier and its navy had been dismantled.
Context
- The article draws primarily on Geoff Wade’s open-access translations of the Ming Shi Lu (hosted by NUS Press), the Ming Shi (via Groeneveldt’s 1876 compilation), and Portuguese sources including Albuquerque’s Commentaries (Birch translation, Hakluyt Society), Mendes Pinto’s Peregrination (Ley edition), and the Vieira–Calvo letters (Ferguson 1902). The National Archives of Malaysia’s collection of Portuguese documents in English translation is also acknowledged.
- Historiographically, the article corrects Dreyer’s (2007) and Miksic’s claims that Sino-Southeast Asian relations ceased after 1433, and builds on Wade’s (1997, 2000, 2005) foundational work on Melaka in Ming texts and the identity of Huo-zhe Ya-san. It contributes a synthesized narrative that integrates the Chinese, Portuguese, and Malay source traditions into a single chronological account of the 1511–1523 crisis.