In war torn Myanmar, thirteen villages are all that remains of the Bayingyi, a proud people who were once known for producing the finest artillerymen in Southeast Asia. They are the descendants of a long line of servants to Kings—and, indeed, of Kings. The Bayingyi are the Portuguese of Myanmar: a forgotten, forsaken people of Portuguese origin and Catholic faith, still soldiering on after five centuries of solitude. Their story is extraordinary in glory, as well as in pain.
This lost tribe of Portugal has suffered bitterly in recent years. A cruel wave of attacks—bloody pogroms that have wreaked havoc among Myanmar’s Luso-Catholics—began shortly after the military coup of 2021. In December of that year, as the community prepared itself for Christmas, the country’s corrupt, oppressive military, the Tatmadaw, invaded the tiny village of Chaung Yoe. The attack was entirely unprovoked; its sole motivation was anti-Christian hatred. Over the course of six months, the Tatmadaw’s men destroyed 280 of Chaung Yoe’s homes. In Chan-tha-ywa, another Bayingyi settlement, regime soldiers reportedly “ransacked homes, killed animals, and imprisoned the elderly and sick who could not escape.” The horror was denounced by former East Timorese President and 1996 Nobel Peace Prize laureate José Ramos-Horta, who decried the arbitrary killings of innocent Christians, the destruction of villages, and the many thousands of Bayingyi who had been forced to become refugees.
The stubborn Portuguese of Myanmar
Nations are often ungrateful towards those who serve them well, and that couldn’t be truer for Myanmar’s Portuguese. We first hear of these pioneering men from the chronicler Duarte Barbosa, who set sail for India in 1501 with a fleet of several dozen naus— big, hardy ships used by Portugal’s sailors in the Age of Discovery. Barbosa would only return to his native country fifteen years later. Describing his journeys through the still mysterious lands of southeast Asia, he gives considerable attention to the Kingdom of Burma, with “its dark-skinned inhabitants who walk about naked from the waist up,” and to the “Moors and pagans” (he included the Chinese among the latter), the skilled, seemingly omnipresent traders who were rivals to the Portuguese. Barbosa is probably the first European to mention the existence of Burma, the name then given to the principality of Tangu, which—along with Ava, Pegu, and Arakan—was among the most important kingdoms in the region that today makes up the state of Myanmar.
In 1511, the Mon (one of the many ethnic groups in the region) established a treaty of commerce and friendship with Afonso de Albuquerque, who sent them a messenger. This ambassador, Rui Nunes, was seeking the support of the gentiles against their common enemy: the Muslims. Pegu, a Buddhist kingdom, was a valuable ally to the newly arrived Christians. Later, impressed by the military prowess of these foreigners, the people of Pegu decided to acclaim three Portuguese sailors as their monarchs. The first was Salvador Ribeiro de Sousa, a military officer and commander of the Order of Christ who was born in Guimarães in the 16th century. He received the regal name of Massinga. Another was Filipe Brito e Nicote, from Lisbon, who was appointed captain-general of the viceroy’s newly-conquered areas. He took the name of Nga Zingar, and replaced Salvador Ribeiro de Sousa, who returned to Portugal. The third Portuguese to become king in Burma was Sebastião Gonçalves Tibau, an adventurer who founded a pirate republic on the island of Sandwip, where some 3,000 descendents of Portuguese sailors still live today.
In his famed Peregrinação, that extraordinary—if admittedly embellished—memoir of adventure and exploration, Fernão Mendes Pinto tells us of the riches of Burma, a magnet for Portuguese merchants who travelled there from Malacca in search of the country’s well-praised timber, lacquer, and precious stones such as rubies and sapphires. In the process, these hardy men of Portugal would visit the Mergui archipelago, the cities of Tavoy, Sirião, Cosmim, and Akyab, and become close and treasured allies of the King of Pegu. As with everywhere they went, Portuguese soldiers and adventurers brought their faith with them. Priests and missionaries, chapels and churches began springing up throughout Burma. Motivated by the phrase that is today the motto of the Jesuits—Ad maiorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God)—Burmese Catholicism was not built by the wishy-washy, hesitating, compromising Westerner of today, but by real soldiers of Christ. Such is the Bayingyi legacy—and such is their mettle.
By 1519, following a new peace and trade treaty signed between the Portuguese and the sovereign of Pegu, trade intensified even further. Portuguese soldiers, then the terror of the East—fierce, magnificently equipped, and well-led—were also much solicited. According to Faria de Sousa’s great 17th century classic, Portuguese Asia, trade relations between Portugal and the kingdoms of Ava and Pegu expanded to such an extent that, by 1556, “More than a thousand Portuguese soldiers and sailors were already in the service of King Bayinnaung under the orders of António Ferreira de Braganza.” In some of the chapters of Peregrinação, Mendes Pinto recalls various episodes involving these brutal, bloodthirsty mercenaries who were the pride of their employer and the terror of their enemies. He himself, of course, had been a soldier of fortune at the time when he arrived at the port of Cosmim. After a troubled journey across the country, he came across a small colony of Catholics, the early product of the many interracial marriages between Portuguese soldiers, merchants, and local Buddhist women. The anecdote among the Bayingyis is that all can trace their lineage to a tall, corpulent, light-eyed, and long-bearded Portuguese.
That might seem somewhat fantastical. But, as so often is with legend, there is more than a grain of truth to it. Today’s Bayingyis live in thirteen villages in northern Myanmar, humble farmers distinguished from the rest of the Burmese by a set of conspicuously Caucasian features. Their prominent noses and clear, deep-set eyes, proclaim the truth that Portuguese blood runs through their veins.
What Brazil’s great Olavo Bilac once called “the last flower of Latium” has long since died in Myanmar: few Bayingyis speak Portuguese today. So, too, have Portuguese names. Portugalidade (Portuguese-ness) nevertheless endures in that unlikely land through the serene, profound beauty of Christian prayer. Like an Edelweiss surrounded by Alpine harshness, Roman Catholicism has implausibly resisted the forces of time and isolation to remain, even to this day, the essence of Bayingyi identity. These stubborn sons of Portugal follow the liturgical calendar and still practise centuries-old Portuguese traditions. They still cook chouriço, the quintessentially Portuguese pork sausage, and that most enjoyed of Indo-Portuguese delicacies, Vindaloo. As historian James Swe put it in a 2017 interview, “We may not look Portuguese, but we feel Portuguese.”
A suffering people
Today, the Bayingyi are distinguished from their countrymen by being the oldest Catholic community in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Until 1970, the Luso-Catholic Bayingyis were not recognised as an indigenous Burmese population. The end of this damning injustice—how can a population be foreign after five centuries of permanence?—did not put an end to the discrimination to which they have long been subjected. Tormented by an absurd sense of post-colonial guilt, Portugal has unceremoniously ignored these lost children of hers. Even as the 2021 coup by the powerful Tatmadaw, the country’s Army, relaunched a cycle of brutal sectarian violence against the country’s minorities, Lisbon shamefully refused to labour for the well-being of these Luso-Burmese. The appalling, disgraceful silence remained even as Bayingyi villages were burned to the ground, churches were ransacked, property and livelihoods were ruined, and members of the community were murdered.
Encouraged by the deafening silence of the global powers—among them, unforgivably, Portugal—the persecutions have continued unabated and undiscussed. Since the 2021 Burmese coup, thousands of Bayingyis have been slain or unlawfully, unjustifiably detained by the regime and its accomplices. Terrified, many in the community fled their villages and took refuge in the offices of the Catholic diocese in Mandalay, the country’s second city. Their plight will continue until the Bayingyi’s ancestral home—Portugal—and the Christian world find the courage to speak out and come to their aid. The time for action is now.
