“My ideas are half and half,” said Geraldina Pedruco. “Half European and half Chinese. I try to take the best of both.”
The 28-year-old was describing her own personality, but she could have been talking about her home of Macau, the tiny Portuguese colony that occupies a peninsula and two islands on the southern Chinese coast. For more than four centuries it has maintained a delicate balancing act, with the Portuguese government ruling over a population that is 96 percent Chinese.
The result is a striking mixture unlike anywhere else in Asia: Buddhist temples tucked alongside Renaissance cathedrals, traditional Chinese markets in magnificent Portuguese-style buildings, shop signs with names like Mestre de Medicina Chinesa Leong Kwok Cheong.
Above these unexpected and sometimes fragile unions looms a blunt date — Dec. 20, 1999 — when Macau returns to Chinese rule, as Hong Kong did two and a half years earlier.
Pedruco is one of Macau’s 10,000 Macanese, a population of both Portuguese and Chinese descent. She speaks Cantonese, Portuguese and English. One great-grandfather was from Portugal, and one grandmother was pure Chinese; the rest of her recent ancestors were Macanese. Like more than 90 per cent of the Macanese, who have always served as a bridge between the Portuguese rulers and the Chinese population, she is employed by the government. The office where she worked was in charge of issuing Portuguese passports — an increasingly common request in recent months.
“People are afraid,” she said. “A lot of them have bought homes in Portugal. People are worried; they don’t know what to think. They are — how do you say it in English? — indecisivo.”
Much of Macau struck me as indecisivo. In some ways it is a deeply soulful place, with churches and temples at every turn, and yet an estimated one-fifth of the population is dependent upon the gambling industry that has made Macau a major tourist destination.
The casinos have also given rise to the colony’s notorious triads, organized crime gangs whose leaders are known by shadowy nicknames: Broken Tooth Wan, Big Spender Cheung, Four-Eyed Bull Sein. These are jarring figures when one considers other famous Macau residents of the past, ranging from the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen to the exiled Luis de Camoes, Portugal’s most renowned poet.
This sense of unlikely conjunctions is heightened by the fact that all of Macau — the four centuries of colonial history, the temples and churches, triads and casinos — all of this is packed into less than 14 square miles. In the distance of a mile, a tourist can light incense at a Buddhist shrine of the 16th Century A-Ma Temple, attend mass at St. Augustine’s and gamble at the Casino Lisboa, where flocks of imported Russian prostitutes add to Macau’s dizzying mix.
The colony is even more compact for most visitors, who rarely leave the gambling floors of their hotels. But I found that the casinos, long considered Macau’s raison d’tre as a tourist destination, are in fact the least interesting part of a fascinating place.
The city’s size makes it perfect for walking, which was how I spent much of my three days here, following the narrow cobbled streets as they wound through the tangible reminders of the colony’s past. Always I was struck by the strange harmony of Macau, which, like its Macanese citizens, seems committed to taking the best of Portugal and China.
And in many ways it has been successful. Some of Macau’s old Chinese tea and herb shops are of a classic sort that have mostly disappeared from the mainland, and the range of food is excellent. I shifted between Cantonese and Portuguese cuisine, finding no clear favorite until I ate in a Portuguese restaurant with the unlikely name of Fat Siu Lou, which means “House of the Smiling Buddha.” Before the food arrived I had doubts about its authenticity — the waiters spoke Chinese, and most of the customers were from Hong Kong. But the spicy African chicken seemed to come from half a world away, reminding me vividly of a Christmas spent in southern Portugal many years ago.
Such echoes of colonialism can be found everywhere in Macau, especially in the churches. Most impressive is the ruined St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was built by Jesuits in 1602 and burned to the ground during an 1835 typhoon. All that survives today is the magnificent four-tiered stone facade, decorated with a trio of carvings — a Chinese dragon, a Japanese chrysanthemum, a Portuguese ship — that speaks eloquently of the former mission’s long reach. But today the Jesuits’ college is long gone, and the basilica’s facade is only a hollow shell, a reminder that some of the influences that shaped Macau have slipped silently into history.
Other forces are still very much alive, like the sea itself. I spent an afternoon on the southern tip of the peninsula, where 600 yards of slate-gray water separate Macau from China. Here I visited A-Ma Temple, dedicated to a goddess who protects fishermen. The temple features a model junk in its central building, and a nearby boulder is inscribed with a four-character prayer: Hai bu yang bo. May the ocean not stir up waves.
But this has never been Macau’s fundamental problem; the colony’s residents have always handled the ocean as well as anyone on Earth. I saw this clearly during my visit to the Maritime Museum, an excellent exhibit next to the A-Ma Temple. The museum features detailed histories of both Portuguese and Chinese shipping, focusing on how these two seafaring cultures combined and exchanged technologies in Macau. It is hard to imagine a more promising partnership: the Portugal of Magellan and the China of Zheng He, who in the early 1400s sailed to southern Africa in the greatest fleet the world had ever known.
And yet the result of this technological marriage is today’s Macau: 14 square miles that depend largely on gambling and tourism. In the Maritime Museum I found myself struck by the sense of opportunities lost, and I realized that in this respect Macau, like so many other colonies, had somehow become less than the sum of its parts.
Or perhaps it had been doomed by the fact that post-1600 Portugal and China often suffered from the same weakness: extraordinarily bad government. If it had been strictly a matter of man, sea and boat, these countries might have dominated the world. But it never was so simple, and looking across the harbor to the Chinese mainland I realized that it still isn’t. The boulder should say: May politics not stir up waves.
From any hill in Macau it is possible to see China. Chinese territory surrounds the enclave on all sides, and many of Macau’s essentials come from the mainland: vegetables, rice, electricity. Even Macau’s drinking water is pumped in from China.
With this in mind the handover seems less dramatic. China and Portugal have worked closely together in preparation for the change, and the promise is that Macau will enjoy wide-ranging autonomy for at least 50 years. My conversations indicated that, while the transfer was in the back of everyone’s mind, most residents weren’t overly worried about it. One afternoon I ate in a small Cantonese restaurant in Taipa, one of the two islands that compose the southern reaches of Macau, and the owner told me that a neighboring shop was sponsoring Mandarin classes every week in preparation for the handover. Like many other residents I met, she shrugged when asked what she thought would happen to Macau. “None of us knows what’s in the future,” she said, laughing.
I remembered a conversation from the day before, when I had spent an hour in the Camoes Grotto. In a city of lovely parks it is one of the loveliest, with a row of moss-draped banyan trees bordering a broad walk, and it was formerly a possession of the British East India Company. Next door is the Old Protestant Cemetery, whose tombstones are inscribed with a vivid record of colonial deaths: sailors falling from ships’ rigging; missionaries succumbing to fevers; soldiers dying in the Opium Wars.
In the Camoes Grotto, though, the struggles of the past seemed far away. The park is dedicated to the memory of the great Portuguese poet, whose bronze bust rests beneath a pile of granite boulders. When I visited the grotto, it was full of people, some exercising, others chatting, a few playing chess. Other than me, everyone was Chinese.
I talked with a young woman in her twenties who worked at a local hotel, and I asked her about the handover. “I think it’s good,” she said. “It’s the same as your America — in the past your country was broken apart during the Civil War. Wouldn’t you want a unified country? China is the same way. Many foreign powers came and divided our country in the past, so now I think it should be reunited.”
She acknowledged that others might disagree, especially the Portuguese. But the only Portuguese within earshot was the bust of the poet — who had nothing to say.
IF YOU GO
– FORMALITIES
Like Hong Kong (but unlike the rest of China), no visa is needed for Macau, either now or after the handover.
– TECHNICALITIES
Though “Macao” is listed as the preferred spelling in many dictionaries (including Webster’s New World), its government prefers “Macau.” To avoid confusion (especially in accessing Web sites — see below), we’ve followed their spelling in these stories.
– LODGING
Macau is much more crowded during weekends, when the colony fills up with tourists looking for a short gambling vacation, and hotel rates often go up. In general, though, it is not difficult to find accommodations. If calling from the U.S., preface all Macau phone numbers with 011-853.
The East Asia Hotel (1A Rua da Madeira; 922-433; from $30) and the Grand Hotel (146 Almeida Ribeiro; 921-111; $30) are both well-located in the western part of Macau’s peninsula. The Lisboa (Avenida da Amizade; 577-666; $90) is the classic Macau hotel casino.
There are also plenty of small guest houses for budget travelers. I stayed at the centrally located Pensao Nam In (3 Travessa da Praia Grande; 710-024), where an air-conditioned room is $18. During the week most pensaos will drop their prices if you bargain.
– DINING
Fat Siu Lou is located at 64 Rua de Felicidade, near Macau’s central square. The Rua de Felicidade has a number of good, reasonably priced restaurants, both Portuguese and Cantonese.
Perhaps the best combination of atmosphere and Portuguese food is Fernando’s, located on Coloane Island, one of Macau’s two outlying islands. Public buses and taxis both make the short trip from the peninsula to Coloane.
– INFORMATION
Macau Government Tourist Office, 5757 W. Century Blvd., Suite 660, Los Angeles, CA 90045; 310-568-0009; www.macautourism.gov.mo; e-mail promote@macautourism.gov.mo. In Macau, the tourist office at 9 Largo Do Senado is very helpful, with employees who can speak English and free maps.
