(朱紈, 1494–1550) was tasked with eradicating Japanese pirates in China’s southeastern coast. In his raids against the pirate den of Shuangyu Island, or Liampó–as the Portuguese dubbed it–Zhu stumbled upon a crucial piece of information from the captured pirates: Portugal was located not in the neighborhood of Malacca–as conventional wisdom had it at the time–but further across the “outer sea and in the northwest.” 15 With typical brevity, Zhu then found that this information “mutually reinforced” the story of the Turpan-Hami War. 16
There are at least two ways to interpret this. Zhu, as one scholar noted, may have implied that the Portuguese guns spread to Turfan, where they were then employed against the Hami. 17 But in accordance with the outlines of his theory, Zhu probably meant the converse: the Ottoman guns spread to the land of the Portuguese who–being located farther than previously imagined–then took them on a long journey to the east, crossing the “outer sea”
The-Korean-snap-matchlock-a-global-microhistory-v124-Kang.pdf (3.2 MB)