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turers. In India and at Malacca Portugal was established in force; in Pegu and Tenasserim, in Pětâni and Siam she had important trading colonies; and in writing of the port of Liampoo in China Pinto says of his countrymen:

"They had there built above a thousand houses, that were governed by Sheriffs, Auditors, Consuls, Judges, and six or seven other kind of Officers, where the Notaries underneath the publick Acts, which they made, wrote. thus, I, such publick Notary of this Town of Liampoo for the King our Sovereign Lord. And this they do with as much confidence and assurance, as if the place had been situated between Santarem and Lisbon, so that there were houses there which cost three of four thousand Ducates the building, but both they and all the rest were after- wards demolished for our sins by the Chineses."

The practice of sailing direct to China from the Straits of Malacca, only touching where necessary to take in water, which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was that usually adopted by mariners bound for the Far East, caused a settlement so important as the one here described to have been established in the southern provinces of the Celestial Empire within thirty years of the fall of Malacca, while even the coasts of Indo-China continued to be prac- tically unknown. It fell to the lot of Mendez Pinto to give us an account of the first detailed exploration of these coast-lines, and though much of the matter con- tained in his narrative, such as the long-winded orations attributed to various Orientals, obviously owe more than a little to this author's imagination, the general outline of the events which he records bears every mark of sub-