ABSTRACT
This essay draws attention to an unexpected consequence of the arrival first of the Portuguese and then of the Spanish in East and Southeast Asia: the Asian Diaspora. In effect, from the ports of Macau and Cavite, Asian men left their homeland—either by their own will or by force of European travelers—and undertook transoceanic journeys to the New World and to Europe. Yet very little is known about the experiences of the earliest of Asian migrants in Spain in the sixteenth century. What follows is a summary of what I have learned from documents I have discovered in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, regarding three particular men—presumably Chinese—and their travels to Europe. Their documented experiences provide a glimpse of the conditions under which they lived upon taking residence in Spain, reveal common beliefs about the lands of the Far East, and suggest how those perceptions shaped their experiences.
