Battle of Tunmen: The first clash between China and Europe

This Week in China’s History: May 1521

It sounds pretty innocuous, presented matter-of-factly by historian Tonio Andrade in The Gunpowder Age: “In the spring of 1521, a fleet of Portuguese ships had sailed up the Pearl River to trade in Guangzhou. City officials told them to leave. The Portuguese refused.” The result, though, was momentous: what Andrade calls “the first major conflict between Chinese and European military forces,” and came to be known as the Battle of Tunmen.

The Portuguese had arrived in South China several years earlier, in 1517, and petitioned the government at Guangzhou to establish relations. Unable to fit Portugal into the existing list of known nations, Ming officials began a process that took three years of negotiations, bribes, and rumors, eventually leading to a Portuguese embassy to Beijing in 1520.

This was far from the end of it though. Ming and Portuguese officials were struggling with what Cool Hand Luke might have noticed as a failure to communicate, with neither side recognizing the opportunities and limitations present in their relationship. The Portuguese behaved as though they had no need to await Chinese permission, and set about fortifying their positions in Guangzhou, intimidating Ming officials, and establishing a permanent trading presence along the southeast coast. Ming officials, on the other hand, were worried not only by Portuguese disregard for Ming diplomatic institutions and processes, but by reports of Portuguese cannibalism — many Ming sources describe how the Portuguese captured, killed, and devoured young children.

The key element in the debate was the Ming emperor, who resisted the protests of his court and permitted the Portuguese to remain at court in good standing (some say driven by curiosity, others by bribery). But all this changed when the Zhengde emperor died suddenly at age 30, in the spring of 1521. With their protector and advocate removed, the Portuguese ambassadors were expelled from the capital, and headed for Guangzhou. The journey would take five months.

In the meantime, familiarity had bred contempt for the Ming and the Portuguese in Guangzhou. The city had of course been a major commercial port for centuries, but the four years of Portuguese presence had not conformed to the familiar pattern or accepted practices, disrupting trade and diplomacy in the city, angering Ming officials, and destabilizing the city’s trade. With the emperor’s protection of the Portuguese removed, local officials moved swiftly to suppress Portuguese trade, leading to the impasse described at the opening of this column.

The Portuguese fleet — if five ships can be properly called that — sailing to Guangzhou was led by two brothers, Vasco and Diogo Calvo. Confronted with the Ming order to leave, the two brothers refused to comply: Diogo dropped anchor and Vasco led a party ashore.

Several Portuguese defied the order to leave and tried to establish trade; they were quickly arrested and imprisoned. Aboard the largest of the Portuguese vessels, Calvo not only refused to leave, but demanded that the prisoners be returned. As tensions escalated, the Chinese assembled a fleet to expel the Europeans. Under the command of Wáng Hóng 王鋐, the Ming fleet approached the Portuguese, intending to board them, but were kept at bay by Portuguese artillery. The Ming vessels were able to encircle and contain the Portuguese ships, and sank two of them, but were unable to sink or capture the remaining three foreign ships. The battle that began in May (or April; it is not possible to determine for sure) became a maritime siege that lingered for months. In June, two more Portuguese ships arrived, probably staving off the Europeans’ surrender.

Wang Hong resolved to settle the issue in early September. Waiting for auspicious winds, he orchestrated a fire-attack, reminiscent of the famous Red Cliffs battle. Andrade notes that many Chinese sources declared the fire-attack decisive, leaving no European survivors. These sources contradict the fact that many Portuguese did escape, including the infamous Calvo brothers, who had set off the entire affair. How did so many Portuguese escape the blazing ships closed in on their starved caravels? Some sources credit the Virgin Mary for sending a thunderstorm that opened a gap in the Chinese ranks.

It was not until the following summer that the crisis concluded. In August 1522, a new set of Portuguese ships arrived. Whether bent on revenge or simply refusing to acknowledge the new shape of Sino-Lusitanian relations, the Portuguese fleet approached Guangzhou.

As they had been before, the Portuguese were outnumbered and in need of some advantage to turn the tide. “This time,” Andrade writes, “the Virgin Mary didn’t help.”

A fleet of 80 Ming vessels bore down on the Portuguese with cannons firing. Whereas the previous year, Wang Hong intended to capture the European vessels by boarding them, in 1522 he was committed to barrage, and his weapons were able to inflict fast and deep damage upon the Portuguese ships. In 1521, the Portuguese possessed a significant advantage in armaments; in 1522, that advantage was very small, if it existed at all. Sources are inconclusive about the origins of the Chinese weapons. Firearms had existed in China long before they had in Europe, but Portuguese artillery technology in the early 1500s was recognized as the world’s best, with superior range and accuracy.

Within decades, at the urging of Wang Hong, “Portuguese” cannon emplacements were soon atop the Great Wall. Andrade notes that although Wang Hong’s reputation suffered for a time, he has become rehabilitated as “an anti-imperial hero and the first successful partisan of learning from the west,” taking his place alongside other Chinese, as well as Korean and Japanese, who innovated cutting-edge military technology at the time.

Andrade argues that the events of the 1520s were “a watershed in military history, inaugurating a period of deep military innovation in China. Wang Hong, famous for defeating the Portuguese, became a proponent of technology transfer, and he wasn’t the only one. Chinese officials at all levels proved eager to learn about and adapt foreign arms. Although today many scholars still argue that China post-1433 was conservative and closed to innovation, that notion does not stand up to the evidence.”

Whatever the details of technology transfer and innovation in the 1520s, events clearly show that technologies and ideas are going to move, often without the consent or control of the ones who create or deploy them first. The world of today is orders of magnitude more porous than that of the 16th century. It is best we understand, and embrace, this.

This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.