Vincenzo Sangermano

Vincenzo Sangermano, C.R.S.P., (22 April 175828 July 1819) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest and missionary of the Barnabite Order, who traveled to South-East Asia in the late 1700s and worked in Burma from 1783 to 1806. He served in the former Ava Kingdom and Bago, Burma. After his return to Italy, he was placed in charge of the house of his Order, in Arpino. He planned to return to Burma, but died before he could set sail. He is the author of A Description of the Burmese Empire, translated into English and posthumously published in 1833, which proved a valuable source of information for the later study of Burma and its people.

Biography Sangermano was sent out in 1782 to aid in the mission in what is now Burma; Arriving in Rangoon in July 1783, he went on to reside in Ava. and where he also ministered to the descendants of Portuguese colonists, who had been deported to a remote region after the Portuguese rulers in Thanlyin had been defeated in the early seventeenth century; apparently Sangermano found two thousand of them still maintaining their religion. By all accounts he was successful in his mission, and counted the wife of the Viceroy of Pegu among those who attended his church (though she never converted). and his notes are some of the earliest Western witnesses to the Burmese people. He became president of the Barnabite order in Arpino, all the while preparing a manuscript outlining his experiences in Burma, but his death in 1819 preventing him from seeing the publication of the book. He died in Arpino on 28 July, preparing to sail for Burma again.

Description of the Burmese Empire Sangermao's manuscript was first published in 1833 as A Description of the Burmese Empire, with the help of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and Cardinal Wiseman, who wrote the introduction to the book. It was reprinted in 1884 with a preface and additional notes by John Jardine, under the title The Burmese empire a hundred years ago, and again by Jardine, with an added introduction, in 1893, under the same title—an edition criticized (in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society) for its spelling and lack of notes .

The English 1833 translation proved an important document for the later study of Burma and provided important demographic and other information, though some of its content proved erroneous or exaggerated, or otherwise in need of modification. For instance, he assessed the size of the population of the kingdom of Burma, as he called it, at 2 million, but this refers only to the area called Upper Burma. Sangermano also describes the practice of "heating" women just after childbirth, by placing them naked close to a fire until they were "quite scorched and blackened." While heating methods did play a part in postnatal care, "Sangermano's account appears highly sensationalised." His descriptions of a disease he calls "mordazinno," a Portuguese word, seems to indicate the presence of cholera in Burma before 1817. His description of the Burmese people (as inherently lazy) was severely criticized in 1882 by James George Scott in The Burman: his life and notions.