The First Asian Colony - Macao

By: Phillip Donnelly

The First Asian Colony
Macao

Macao, or Ao Men in Chinese, is now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, like Hong Kong. It was the world’s first Asian colony, and for 400 years the Portuguese held sway, but they were always a racial minority, and in the 20^th century they rule was nominal and ghost-like. The old town still looks remarkably Portuguese, except that 98 per cent of its inhabitants are Chinese.

It still has its own currency, the Pataca, and - nominally at least - its own local government, but in reality, Beijing calls all the shots. It’s also got the highest population density of any city on earth. If all the people who live here, about half a million, tried to leave their tower blocks and stand in what little pavement its 25 kilometres squared offers, they’d kill each other in the resulting squash. Thankfully, it’s never occurred to the Macanese to do this. It would be like this in most cities, I suppose. We’ve all got so used to living in boxes that ‘outside’ is merely a medium to get from one box to another. To succeed in life is to live in a bigger box. We’ve all forgotten that ‘outside’ is where we belong.

Macao’s current ‘raison d’etre’ is tourism and gambling. Casinos are illegal in Hong Kong and China, so the weekend sees ferry loads of Hong Kongers and mainlanders descend on the roulette wheels and black jack tables of Macao’s many casinos to place their bets. I went to one of them once, the Lisboa, one of Macao’s largest, replete with garish lighting and well-worn, but once plush carpets. What I remember most was the air of desperation in the place. It was almost palpable. The gamblers look like drug addicts desperately craving their next fix. I’ve never seen a crack den, of course, but I imagine they have the same atmosphere. Of course, there aren’t any flashing lights, expensive suits or cocktail waitresses to distract you in a crack den, but the psychological cues and triggers are fundamentally the same.

I didn’t do any gambling in the Lisboa. In fact, I have never gambled. I could never see the point of it, as the ‘house’ always wins. The gambler is doomed to failure. The facts are irrefutable, so why anyone gambles, and why the Chinese in particular - surely the world’s most logical and calculating race - are so addicted to gambling is a mystery to me. Psychologists, or rather behavioural psychologists, argue that gambling is addictive because of the power of variable return reinforcement schedules. To oversimplify, the possibility of short term reinforcement (winning one game of cards) outweighs the lack of long-term reinforcement (eventually losing your money, your rings, your car and your house). Other mammals, from rats to republicans, demonstrate this same tendency. We are wired to think short-term, it would appear. This might also explain why we are making our planet uninhabitably polluted so we can drive large pieces of metal from one box to another. A depressing thought really.

But again, I digress. The SAR of Macao is divided into three areas; Macao proper, Taipa and Coloane. Actually, recent extensive land reclamation makes the word ‘islands’ somewhat misleading. Macao proper contains the old town and the historic heart of the city, Placa del Leal Senado. It’s a beautiful old Portuguese square with white and black cobblestones inlaid with ships and other patterns, and over the exquisite square 18^th/19^th century Latin European buildings have been carefully preserved. At one end of the square, an old church remains open for business, but most of the business these days is not the devout, but the hapless tourist. Now and then, however, an aging Portuguese resident ambles in, kneels and prays in a pew, temporarily oblivious to the end of the world she had known. The old town only extends for a few blocks and is rapidly swallowed up by massive, and massively ugly, tower blocks. During World War II and the Chinese civil war, refugee numbers massively swelled the city’s previously tiny population, and the government could either let them die on the street or build high rise monstrosities to house them all. I guess if you’re dying on the street, a high rise monstrosity looks pretty good. Land pressures mean the streets are narrow but somehow not too clogged with traffic, as Macao is small enough to make a car completely unnecessary.

Near the end of the old town, an old fort, Monte Fort, still stands on top of a hill and its cannons and watchtowers appear to guard the city. Beside the fort, the front of St Paul’s Cathedral, Macao’s emblem, somehow remains standing, but the rest of the cathedral was destroyed by a massive earthquake. This is taken by some as miraculous, but I fail to see how 90 per cent of a church collapsing, killing those inside, and a piece of it not falling down, can be seen as divine intervention.

In the distance, an old lighthouse stands on a distant hill, and if you look in another direction, China proper builds itself from farmland to city, skipping the intermediary village and town stages, with cranes and sheer determination. The polluted brown grey waters of the Pear River delta discolour the sea, and are further evidence that China, the ’sleeping dragon’, is waking up.
In the afternoon, we headed down to Coloane, Macao’s wooded island park for a small hike. The minibus from central Macao only costs 5 Patacas (50 cent) and if you’re quick, and a little bit childish, you can sit up front next to the driver, in what must be the only bus ride in the world that feels like being in a grand prix. The engine roars, and the minibus swerves to and fro around the narrow streets.

The strange thing is that this park/island is almost always empty. Only about 2000 people live there, and since new construction is prohibited, the rest remains unspoilt, However, on our hike, we only came across a couple of other people there. We finished the trail at Hac Sa beach, but even its black volcanic sand and swimmable beaches couldn’t attract many people. It seemed odd that in the city with the highest population density on earth, the large wooded park remains empty and is left to the birds. People just don’t want to leave their rabbit hutches, I guess. Have humans become a race of agoraphobic bunnies?