Da Cruz was , however , curious about the Chinese writing system , and gave a brief report of it , which John DeFrancis has described as " the first Western account of the fascinatingly different Chinese writing . " One of the major irritants in the early Sino-Portuguese relations was the Portuguese ' proclivity to enslave Chinese children and take them to various Portuguese colonies , or to Portugal itself . While this traffic was on a much smaller scale than the Atlantic slave trade , supplying millions of African slaves for Portuguese Brazil , it was a contributing factor already to the failure of the Tomé Pires ' 1521 embassy , when , in a words of a later researcher , many residents of Canton discovered that " many of their children , whom they had given in pledge to their creditors , had been kidnapped by " Simão de Andrade " and carried away to become slaves " . Gaspar da Cruz was aware of this trade , and , as his book ( Chapter XV ) implies , he had heard of the Portuguese slavers ' attempts to justify their actions by claiming that they had been merely buying children that already were slaves while in China . Da Cruz described the situation with slavery in China as he saw it . According to him , the laws of China allowed impoverished widows to sell her children ; however , the conditions under which boys or girls sold into servitude could be kept were regulated by law and custom , and upon reaching a certain age they had to be set free . Reselling of such slaves ( or , rather , bond-servants ) was regulated too , there being " great penalties " for selling any of them to the Portuguese . He concludes therefore ( as C.R. Boxer summarizes his argument ) , that " the Portuguese had no legal or moral rights to purchase either '' mui-tsai '' or kidnapped children for use as slaves " : In the first paragraph of the last chapter ( XXIX ) of his book Cruz severely criticized " a filthy abomination , which is that they are so given to the accursed sin of unnatural vice , which is in no way reproved among them . " The rest of the chapter , entitled " Of some punishments from God which the Chinas received in the year of fifty-six " , discusses the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake and certain flooding events of the same year , which da Cruz views as God 's punishment for " this sin "
1556 Shaanxi earthquake
1556 Shaanxi earthquake
Gaspar da Cruz