Five hundred years of friendly contact without engaging in armed conflict is rare indeed, and they honour the memories of the Portuguese and Vietnamese ancestors.
In Suma Oriental, which was completed in 1515 with the aim of providing King Manuel I with information, Tomé Pires wrote also about some political and economic affairs in the territories of Champa and Cauchy (later on named Cochinchina). The natives of the territory never used the name Cochinchina to refer to the land where they lived. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they presented themselves at the Chinese court as the Dai-Viêt (Illustrious People).
Over the centuries, the vicissitudes of war changed the configuration of the political space: the land that the Portuguese called Cochinchina, since the 17th century, continued to be controlled by the Nguyên princes. Their domain extended from the central area to the north or to the south until the entire territory was unified in 1802, extending to the north as far as the Chinese border. At that time, Viêt Nam (People of the South) was chosen to name the people and the country. The French protectorate of Cochinchine coincided neither in space nor in time with the Cochinchina of the Portuguese.
According to the chronicles, Fernão Peres de Andrade was the Portuguese who made the first approach to the native population when, in 1516 the monsoon forced his vessel to interrupt his voyage to China. Many other distinguished Portuguese, whose names appear in rutters of the sea and the nautical charts, sailed in this area. The rock that sank Mateus de Britto's vessel is still referred to by Britto bank. Duarte Coelho engraved an inscription on the rocks of the Cham Island and later on explored the mouth of the Red River. Fernão Mendes Pinto mentioned Cochinchina and Cham Island in several episodes of the Peregrinação and Luís Vaz de Camões almost lost several cantos of the Lusiadas in a shipwreck near the mouth of the Mekong River.
In 1616, the Jesuit Francisco de Pina was sent to the Cochinchina Mission. He was the first Portuguese to speak the local language and he started the phonetic transcription of the Vietnamese language, following the written Portuguese matrix. This phonetic transcription was used in Jesuit Missions. Later on, this form of writing was improved by the Jesuit Gaspar do Amaral, who composed the first Vietnamese-Portuguese dictionary in 1634 at the Trinh court (in nowadays Hanoi). The use of this system of phonetic writing would later be enforced by the French government during the colonial period. After the independence, phonetic writing began to be called quôc ngû. It proved to be more efficient in reducing illiteracy than the Chinese characters or the local ideographic writing known as nôm.
Trade went on, taking place even during wartimes through the centuries, and several Portuguese words have enriched the Vietnamese language. Mutual respect and strategic alliances made Portugal and Vietnam, partners. Five hundred years later, this commemorative issue is preserving the memory of these encounters and the shared history. The distance between the two countries is once again being overcome.
Isabel Augusta Tavares Mourão (Researcher) CHAM — Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Universidade dos Açores
