Portuguese explorer who spent many years in Asia: India (from 1537), Malacca, China, Japan, Siam, Java, etc until returning to Portugal in 1558. He landed in Japan in 1543, claiming to be the first European to set foot in Japan. He began to write his memoirs, Peregrinação, in 1569. They were published posthumously in 1614.
In 1544 he was a beggar in Quansy [Budasz gives it as Beijing], when the following incident occurred. Quoting from the Wikipedia article, we learn that:
Pinto entered China from the Yellow Sea and raided a tomb of the Emperor of China. Pinto was shipwrecked, apprehended by the Chinese and sentenced to one year hard labour on the Great Wall of China. Before completing his sentence, Pinto was taken prisoner by invading Tatars. He became an agent of the Tartars and travelled with them to Cochinchina, the southernmost part of modern-day Cambodia and Vietnam. Pinto describes his encounter with a "pope-like" man, possibly the Dalai Lama, who had never heard of Europe. Pinto and two companions jumped ship to a Chinese pirate junk and were shipwrecked onto the Japanese island of Tanegashima, south of Kyūshū.
This gives some context to the episode in his momeoirs where he discusses Gaspar de Meirelez singing and playing his vihuela in China, probably around 1542 or 1543, before his arrival in Japan in 1543.
Information from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernão_Mendes_Pinto (consulted 10 Jun 2023).