129 2007 • 22 • Review of Culture THE HYDROGRAPHY OF CAMBODIA HISTORIOGRAPHY Before the discovery of the Cape route to India, little was known in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe about Southeast Asia. European literary circles had some knowledge of those distant places, of course, based on information collected and spread by medieval travelers who had crossed Asia, such as Marco Polo, or by compilers like John de Mandeville, who had gathered all the material available on the non-European world. However, this literary information, which reached only a small number of people, presented a rather vague and sometimes fantastic image of the real Southeast Asian world. The cartographic representation of Asiatic lands available to the learned European public in 15 th and early 16 th century printed maps was quite imaginative and symbolic, with little or no connection to the real world, as a quick glance at several printed maps of the Ptolomaic tradition will show (Plates 1 & 2). 1 After Vasco da Gama arrived in Western India by sea route in 1498, everything suddenly began to change. Portuguese ships rapidly came into contact with most of Asia’s maritime shores, from the Red Sea, visited as early as 1503, to the remote islands off the south China coast, where they anchored for the first time ten years later. Portuguese navigators, in the course of the 16 th century, became responsible for the establishment of direct and regular relations between East and West, and also for the spreading all over Europe of detailed The Hydrography of Cambodia in Early Modern Portuguese Textual and Cartographic Sources Rui Manuel Loureiro* * Doutorado em História pela Universidade de Lisboa. Director de projecto na Câmara Municipal de Lagos, investigador do Centro de História de Além-Mar (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). Ph.D. in History from the Universidade de Lisboa. Project director at the Lagos city council (Portugal). Researcher at the Centro de História de Além-Mar (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). geographic and ethnographic information about the distant and previously unknown, or little-known, peoples and lands of Asia. Throughout the 16 th century, the Portuguese kept a tight control of the Cape route to India, successfully opposing the arrival of other European ships on the oriental seas. At the same time, they established the grounds of a loosely organized but very efficient political, administrative and military body known as the Estado da Índia, which was composed of a string of forts and factories built along the Asian shoreline, linked together by powerful fleets. The Estado da Índia—whose strategic points were to be Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf (occupied in 1507), Goa, on the west coast of India (conquered in 1510), Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula (conquered in 1511), and Macao, on the south China coast (occupied after 1557)—had as its main purposes the systematic involvement in the most profitable Asian trading networks and the diversion to Lisbon of an important portion of the trade in luxury commodities. For almost a century, the Portuguese were the only European power established in the East. They controlled a large part of the spice and drug trade to Europe and also some of the most important regional trade routes in Eastern waters. Their only direct competitors were the Spaniards, who began to settle in the Philippines around 1570, with a view toward contacting China and Japan. 2 As they mastered the direct sea route between Asia and Europe, the Portuguese also controlled the West’s supply of information on Eastern matters. A significant portion of the news about Asia available in 16 th century Europe came by way of the Portuguese, so we can speak about a © 2002 Cultural Institute. All rights reserved. Under the copyright laws, this article may not be copied, in whole or in part, without the written consent of IC.