Perched on a volcano at night, I’m watching helicopters crisscross the Pearl River Delta and reflecting on a day which involved haggling in Chinese street markets, studying the work of Jesuit priests, entering a hotel room to find a mechanical bull and walking through the streets of Venice, from the Ponte di Rialto to St Mark’s Square via the food court. There’s no doubt about it, Macau offers a fresh twist on the mysterious East.
The closer you get, the more Macau unravels. It’s part of China, yet not, with Portuguese signage, two currencies and multiple faiths. It’s a city with a couple of islands attached and a World Heritage site. It’s old-fashioned yet futuristic, overcrowded and empty, urban and green, enormously wealthy yet quite run down. If there’s a real Macau, I can’t find it.
An early incarnation was as a trading post, a port of call on the Southeast Asian trade route, and for storm-tossed explorers, most notably the Portuguese, who arrived in the 1550s and stayed, eventually governing Macau until 1999, when it was returned to the Chinese government. All this is succinctly explained in the Maritime Museum and Museu de Macau.
The first underscores Macau’s nautical heritage, while the second focuses on the Chinese and Portuguese ways of doing things, with a small scale street illustrating the latticework, lanterns and shrines of the former and the balustrades, green shutters and verandahs of the latter. It illustrates this unique fusion by re-creating a typical Macanese spread — a table groaning under the weight of a cross-cultural high tea comprising fried rice, dim sum, egg tarts and cream cakes.
Outside Macau is raucous, its narrow streets packed. A coping strategy adopted by Japanese tour groups is to stick to the map and follow a trail along the narrow cobbled streets that links the 25 sites of the Historical Centre. The Ruins of St Paul’s at the heart of Macau is a good place to begin (look out for the bas-relief of the Holy Mother slaying a seven-headed hydra), but it takes a disciplined tourist to stay on course.
The Chinese of Macau are firm believers in availing themselves of all divine power, from Buddhism and Christianity to Taoism with its gods for all occasions, and every directionless amble leads to churches, temples and shrines. There’s interesting stuff at every turn: vendors banging tins, shops selling live fish, tinctures and fig oil rolls, the linguistic fusion of signs (Sapateria Tai Fong, Merceraria Fong Seng) and the balconies of Portuguese apartment blocks hung with washing. There’s shouting, car horns and, occasionally, a burst of firecrackers — a tribute to A-Ma the Goddess of Seafarers or Kwan Tai, God of Riches, Literature, War and Pawnshops.
