ABSTRACT

After the apparent deal struck between Leonel de Sousa and local mandarins in 1554, the Portuguese seem to have begun to settle on the Macau peninsula with effect from 1557. The profitability of the goods from outside China that the Portuguese brought, plus the even greater incentive of the large amounts of silver which they brought with them to buy Chinese goods, attracted large numbers of Chinese, even from more distant provinces, who brought their produce to Macau both by land and by sea. Ricci relates why in 1589 the Zhaoqing mission was forcibly closed, as the imperial viceroy became convinced that the Jesuits were spearheading a Portuguese incursion. The union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580 and the independence of the Netherlands from Spanish control in 1581 meant that Portuguese territories became increasingly prey to the Net he danders with the expansion of Dutch overseas trade in the last decade of the sixteenth century.