Tomé Pires

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Tomé Piers was an apothecary from Lisbon who spent 1512 to 1515 in Malacca immediately after the Portuguese conquest at a time when Europeans were only first arriving in South East Asia.

He avidly collected and documented information from the Malay-Indonesia area, and personally visited Java, Sumatra (the two dominant islands of modern-day Indonesia) and Maluku. His resulting book Suma Oriental shows him to be a discriminating observer and far superior to other Portuguese writers of the time.

Suma Oriental is regarded as one of the best resources for the study of the region at this time, including one of the most important resources for the study of Islam in Indonesia at that time. It also includes the first written account of the 'Spice Islands' of Banda in Maluku,^[1] the islands that first drew Europeans to Indonesia. Although it cannot be regarded as completely free of inaccuracies in its detail, it is remarkably consistent other evidence of the time and makes no fundamentally erroneous statements about the area.