Suma Orientalis is an amalgamation of two words. The first word ‘Suma’ refers to a flower in Sanskrit. The second word, ‘Orientalis’ means ‘Land of the East’ in Latin. Hence, the name Suma Orientalis is taken to mean ‘Flowers from the East’.

The name ‘Suma Orientalis’ was formally adopted from a codex named ‘Suma Oriental’ written by Tome Pires, who was an apothecary to a prince from Lisbon assigned by the King of Portugal to be the scrivener, the accountant of the factory and the comptroller of drugs in Malacca, thence, the cradle of South East Asian trade linking the West to the Far East which the Portuguese fleet captured in the fourteenth century. The word ‘Suma’ in Pires’ account means ‘summary’ in Portuguese while ‘the word ‘oriental’ means ‘the orient’ or ‘lands in the far east’. Interpretively, it was taken to mean ‘a short account of the orient’. This was by far the earliest account of the East and the first European description of the historical identification of Malaysia.

https://www.sumaorientalis.com/