Macau and Asia

The Portuguese presence in Asia is the oldest outside Europe and, at the same time, the one that left the fewest speakers. Begun with Vasco da Gama’s arrival at Calicut in 1498, it spread through a network of coastal trading posts — not settlement colonies — reaching from Hormuz to Japan. Of that web of factories, fortresses and port cities, what survives today is mostly traces: one enclave, a few dying creoles, and a handful of words that Portuguese absorbed and handed on to the world.

The Estado da Índia: Goa, Daman and Diu

The axis of the Asian empire was the Estado da Índia (State of India), whose capital, Goa, was taken by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510. Together with Daman and Diu in Gujarat, Goa remained Portuguese until December 1961, when the Indian Union annexed it by force (Operation Vijay), ending four and a half centuries of rule.

There Portuguese was the language of administration, the Church and the elite, but it never displaced Konkani, the mother tongue of the Goan majority. With the annexation and the generation that followed, its use receded sharply; today it survives in surnames, place names, religious vocabulary and an elderly minority. The more durable inheritance is a different one: the Goan Catholic community and its culture, which Portuguese helped to shape.

Macau: the gateway to China

Around 1557, Portuguese merchants secured permission to settle on a peninsula in the Pearl River delta — Macau — which would become the great entrepôt between China, Japan and Europe. Unlike Goa, Macau was never conquered: it grew out of a commercial arrangement tolerated by Chinese authority, and that ambiguity marked its whole history.

Portuguese administration ended only on 20 December 1999, with the transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China. Macau is today a Special Administrative Region in which Portuguese keeps the status of co-official language, alongside Chinese, chiefly in the law and the administration — a rare case of official status outliving its own speaking population, since Portuguese is the mother tongue of only a tiny fraction of residents.

The posts: a network, not a territory

Trading post	Portuguese period	Associated creole
Goa, Daman, Diu	1510–1961	Goa Indo-Portuguese
Malacca	1511–1641	Papiá Kristang
Ceylon (Colombo)	1518–1658	Ceylon Indo-Portuguese
Bombay	1534–1661	— (ceded to England)
Macau	1557–1999	Patuá

Bombay neatly illustrates the nature of this presence: the city was ceded to the English Crown in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and would become Bombay (Mumbai). The English name itself preserves the Portuguese origin Bom Baim.

The Portuguese-based creoles

The long contact between sailors, merchants and local populations gave rise, in almost every post, to Portuguese-based creoles — new languages, mostly Portuguese in vocabulary and restructured in grammar. Today nearly all are extinct or close to it.

• The Patuá of Macau (Macanese, patois macaense) blends old Portuguese with Malay, Cantonese and Sinhalese; it is classed as severely endangered, with a few hundred elderly speakers. Its chief literary voice was José dos Santos Ferreira (“Adé”, 1919–1993).
• Papiá Kristang of Malacca, carried also to Singapore by the Christian community, is the liveliest of the Asian creoles, though likewise in decline.
• Traces of Ceylon Indo-Portuguese, tied to the Burghers, still survive.

The lexical legacy

More influential than the number of speakers was the role of Portuguese as a lexical intermediary between Asia and Europe. It was along the Portuguese route that many Eastern words entered the European languages — mandarin, pagoda, bamboo — and that Portuguese itself enriched its vocabulary.

The word chá [ʃɐ] is the most famous case: while most of Europe adopted tea-type forms (from Southern Min, through Dutch trade), Portuguese took the Cantonese cha through the gateway of Macau.

Asian Portuguese today

Small in numbers, the Portuguese of Asia keeps a disproportionate symbolic and institutional weight. Macau hosts the teaching of Portuguese and acts as a bridge between China and the Portuguese-speaking world; in Goa, interest in the language endures as a key to the historical archive and to Catholic identity; and the surviving creoles are the object of growing efforts at documentation. It is a legacy made less of demography than of memory, law and words.