[13] A Chinese scholar, apparently enslaved by Portuguese raiders somewhere on the southern China coast, was brought to Portugal around 1549.
[15] Amerindians, Chinese, Malays, and Indians were slaves in Portugal but in far fewer number than Turks, Berbers, and Arabs.
[17] A testament from 23 October 1562 recorded a Chinese man named António who was enslaved and owned by a Portuguese woman, Dona Maria de Vilhena, a wealthy noblewoman in Évora.
[39][40] Diego recalled that he was taken as a slave by Francisco de Casteñeda from Mexico, to Nicaragua, then to Lima in Peru, then to Panama, and eventually to Spain via Lisbon, while he was still a boy.
King Sebastian feared that it was having a negative effect on Catholic proselytization since the slave trade in Japanese was growing to massive proportions, so he commanded that it be banned in 1571[47][48] Some Korean slaves were bought by the Portuguese and brought back to Portugal from Japan, where they had been among the tens of thousands of Korean prisoners of war transported to Japan during the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–98).
Military, religious, and civil service secretarial work and other lenient and light jobs were given to Chinese slaves while hard labor was given to Africans.
[60][61] Cooking was the main profession of Chinese slaves around 1580 in Lisbon according to Fillippo Sassetti from Florence and they were viewed as "hard working", "intelligent", and "loyal" by the Portuguese.
[5] Following World War II, an influx of Macanese people (those of mixed Portuguese and often Chinese heritage from the colony of Macau) began settling in Portugal in significant numbers.
Ethnic Chinese intending to work in the colonial Macau government also arrived in Portugal during this time to study or train for their positions.
[5] As the number of migrants continued to grow, social institutions formed in order to serve the Chinese community.
Black slave men brought the E3a Y Chromosome to the Azores, since both Iberia and the rest of Europe lack the specific Azorean E3a lineage with the sY8a mutation.
[5] Macau Chinese arrived in Portugal primarily as professional workers and students or due to family and career ties with the country.
The political instability and decline of economic activity in Portugal's African colonies created favorable conditions to immigrate to the metropole rather than remaining as a segregated group within a new government.
[85] Ethnic Chinese immigrants to Portugal continued to chiefly originate from Macau and Mozambique until the 1980s, when the number of students and economic migrants from mainland China began to rise.
The vast majority of the new immigrants originated from the province of Zhejiang and consisted of entrepreneurs and laborers (chiefly unskilled) who found work under them.
[86] Due to the different natures of Chinese immigration to Portugal, the community is not strongly unified on its ethnic lines but rather through migrant history.
[6] Four-fifths of the self-employed are drawn from the population of recent migrants from Zhejiang; rates of entrepreneurship in the other groups are much lower.
[76] Chinese migrants from Mozambique and the other ex-Portuguese colonies, due to their fluency in Portuguese and familiarity with local business practices, are able to enter the mainstream economy and find professional employment, especially as bank employees, engineers, and doctors.
[2] In Lisbon from Martim Moniz Station on Rua da Palma, and in the 21st century in the outskirts of Vila do Conde Chinese have settled in Portugal.