~This Issue's Index~

Strange Shores:
442 Years of Anomaly in Macau, and Counting . . .

By John E. Wills, Jr. and Paul Van Dyke

On December 20, 1999, the red-and-green flag of the Republic of Portugal was lowered for the last time over Macau. Raised in its place was the starred red flag of the People's Republic of China, as well as a striking apple-green flag with a white lotus, the flag of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR). Throughout that year, Macau received more scrutiny in China than it ever had during its 442 years as a Portuguese outpost on the Chinese coast. The selection of a new Chief Executive was covered in detail on national Chinese television, and a large electronic clock in the Beijing financial district counted down the seconds to Macau's return to the motherland.

Why the special attention, which may not ever be replicated in the future? Even on a map of the Guangdong province, Macau is prominent only because it is given a separate border and large type. But the anomalous history of Macau offers a great deal of food for thought about China's relations with the world.

Early days of trade and opulence

The Portuguese made their first appearance in the South China Sea before 1520 as warriors and pillagers, and encountered Ming China in one of its phases of particularly dogmatic Confucian politics. During this era, even peaceful foreigners who had not been previously listed as tributaries to the Son of Heaven were refused admittance into the country. The Portuguese were driven off, many of them killed or taken prisoner, and permanently excluded from the Empire.

Over thirty years later, in the 1550s, a different kind of Portuguese, interested in cooperating with Asians for peaceful trade, encountered a different kind of Ming official. A pragmatic local military man named Wang Bo worked out with one Leonel de Souza a tacit agreement, by which the Portuguese would be allowed to settle on a remote coastal peninsula and come to Guangzhou twice a year for the big trade fair. The Imperial Court in Beijing knew little about this arrangement at first. It is unclear as to when they acknowledged that the people living in Macau were the same people who had misbehaved in the 1520s. In this ambiguous and local status, Macau passed eighty years of splendor as a world trade hub. Chinese goods, especially silks, were in great demand in many parts of the world, including Japan, which had not yet achieved the manufacturing sophistication of China. A centuries-old habit in Chinese trade now accelerated, of using silver to supplement the clumsy copper coins in large-scale transactions. This created a demand for silver which China's mines could not meet, and large profits resulted from importing silver and buying Chinese goods or gold. Macau became a key center for the import of silver brought from Europe and, ultimately, from new mines in Spanish America. By this point, the Portuguese had also opened trade with Japan. Because two centuries of Japanese piracy on the Chinese coast had led to the prohibition of most forms of Sino-Japanese trade, Macau became the prime channel for exchanging Japanese silver with Chinese silks.

Macau was thus an opulent and turbulent place from its earliest days. Slaves of the Portuguese and sailors on their ships came from all shores of the Indian Ocean, including Africa. Macau acquired an autonomous city government modeled on the European example, which was very convenient for dealing sensibly with the local officials, but also prone to faction and dissent. The city happened to be a key base for Catholic missions in China and Japan, with a number of striking churches and convents including the Jesuit church of São Paulo. Built between 1600 and 1610, the façade of this famous church still stands at the head of a great flight of steps, a most compelling reminder of Macau's past glory. Most of the fine stonework on the façade was done by Christian Japanese workmen, who had fled the increasing hostility of Japanese authorities to their faith. The Chinese viewed Macau with some alarm, particularly when Japanese seafarers stopped there, but recognized its usefulness as a center of valuable trade. Most of the food was imported from farms outside Macau's control, through a gate that was normally opened every five days. If the Portuguese disobeyed the bidding of Ming officials, ten or fifteen days of leaving the gate closed usually were enough to bring them to their senses.

The End of Decades of Prosperity: Japan's Enmity Towards Christianity

In 1622, when the Dutch attacked Macau unsuccessfully, the Chinese authorities came down to the city to take some sample heads of the dead "red-haired barbarians" who had been so effectively dealt with without cost to the Ming. But the Dutch managed to establish an outpost on the southwest coast of Taiwan, and in the 1630s both they and Chinese seafarers offered increasingly vigorous competition to the Macau-Japan connection. Between 1637 and1640, Macau's decades of splendid prosperity came to a sudden close. The cause was neither maritime competition, nor maritime warfare, nor Chinese policy, but the culmination of the growing hostility of the Japanese state to Christianity. A large number of Japanese had been receptive to the message of the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries, and soon the authorities began to see the dangers both of Christian pollution of Japanese tradition, and of the rise of local Christians as a fifth column for the Portuguese and the Manila-based Spanish. Converts were forced, with great cruelty and thoroughness, to renounce Christianity. The Portuguese, closely connected to the missionary enterprise, were finally expelled. Later in 1640, an embassy sent to China to re-open trade was almost completely executed. Macau was permanently deprived of its most important line of trade.

Further Difficulties: Crisis in China

The crisis that swept over China in the 1640s seemed at first less threatening to Macau than the disaster in Japan. The Ming Dynasty had been sinking into irretrievable disorder since the1620s. In 1644, Beijing was taken by a peasant rebel who was driven out ten weeks later by a border coalition led by the Manchu people, who proclaimed their own new Qing Dynasty and rapidly proceeded to pick up the pieces of the empire and re-establish law and order. By 1650, the new rulers were firmly in control of Guangzhou (also known as Canton to westerners), the capital of Guangdong province, in which Macau is located. Some members of the new multi-ethnic imperial elite were friendly to the Jesuit missionaries already present in many provinces. The young Qing emperor, for instance, had a very cordial personal connection with the German Jesuit Johann Adam Schall von Bell. Some of this imperial favor rubbed off on Macau, which was so supportive of and closely identified with the Jesuits.

Once more, danger appeared unexpectedly. The Qing rulers faced serious Ming Loyalist resistance along the south coast, especially under the leadership of Zheng Chenggong, whom the Europeans called Coxinga. The Qing rulers; masters of cavalry, archery, and steppe warfare; were ill at ease on the coast. They dealt with this threat by forbidding almost all maritime trade, before evacuating and devastating the entire south China coast to a depth of ten miles. Macau, located in the evacuation zone, was in no way exempt from the evacuation order. Trade came to a standstill. The Jesuits wrangled some delays, but soon the politics of the imperial court turned against them and their allies. Macau obtained more delays through bribery and the promise of more, but its people spoke seriously about boarding their ships and abandoning the place for good. Unexpectedly, they were rescued by the sudden rise to power of the brilliant young Kangxi Emperor, who was anxious to demonstrate his political mastery by favoring those whom the previous administrators of the realm had mistreated, including the people of Macau.

A wonderful occasion for the demonstration of such imperial favor was provided by an embassy sent from Goa, the Indian capital of the Portuguese Asian realms, which arrived in Macau in 1667 and finally was received in Beijing in 1670. The ambassador, Manoel de Saldanha, was quite incompetent and experienced ill health for all of his long stay, while the embassy was poorly financed and managed. Still, none of this mattered. The Jesuits, back in favor in Beijing as objects of the young emperor's ostentatious favor and his fascination with their astronomical knowledge, stage-managed the embassy. Kangxi bombarded them with questions and found his curiosity piqued by seeing an African for the first time. Saldanha contributed to the prestige of the embassy by dying on the way back south and receiving a fine funeral by imperial command. There was no formal agreement or new status for Macau, but clearly it was back in favor.

In 1678, an even more ramshackle embassy, organized entirely by the local authorities in Macau, won even greater favor. This was partially because the Jesuits continued their stage management, and partially because it managed to bring a lion all the way from Mozambique and deliver it alive to the emperor. The lion died fifteen days after it reached Beijing, but by then the emperor had brought his small sons to see it and ordered his court literati to write poetry about the lion. Jesuit negotiations after the embassy left seem to have led to limited legalization for Macau's maritime trade, at a time when such trade in Chinese shipping still was technically illegal.

Even that small advantage disappeared as the Qing removed restrictions on maritime trade between 1684 and1685. It seems that the Guangdong officials had asked the Portuguese about the possibility of making Macau an open port for this trade, but the Macau authorities were not interested, as this would have led to the presence of many English, Dutch, and other foreign merchants in the city, not to mention a Qing customs house and other official presences. So Guangzhou and the Huangpu area near it became the center for all trade except that of the Portuguese. From then on through the eighteenth century, Macau was a witness to and, in a number of ways, a participant in the world-historical phenomenon of the "Canton trade," propelled by China's continued hunger for silver and the increasing popularity of tea in northern Europe and North America. Experience in dealing with the Portuguese, and even knowledge of their language, facilitated official and merchant dealings with other foreigners. Inbound ships picked up their river pilots off Macau. Foreign traders, not allowed to stay over the winter in Guangzhou, rented lavish houses in Macau. The merchants of Macau managed some small-scale trading of their own, especially to other Portuguese ports in Asia such as Timor, a major source of sandalwood. As Chinese imports of opium grew late in the eighteenth century, the Portuguese imported some from western India. But Macau was but a shadow of its earlier splendor. When English forces occupied Macau in 1807-1808 to forestall a possible French occupation, the Portuguese could do little to resist, but the Qing authorities forced a withdrawal by stopping English trade at Guangzhou.

Macau was a passive spectator to the great drama of the Opium War, and its unique position as a European outpost was lost with the emergence after the war of the infant English colony on Hong Kong Island. In 1849, Governor João Maria Ferreira do Amaral declared Macau a free port, and he closed the Qing customs house that had been in the city since 1688. Most of the Chinese population of Macau fled. The Governor, out riding near the northern edge of the city, was attacked by a Chinese crowd and hacked to death. The Qing customs house was not reestablished, and a greater degree of de facto autonomy from China was asserted, but the Qing did not recognize Macau's sovereignty over China until 1887.

Macau in the Twentieth Century

Macau remained on the sidelines of the great dramas of twentieth century China. Sun Yat-sen lived there briefly when he was not yet a professional revolutionary, but still trying to start a medical practice. To foreign eyes, the city was best known for its ample facilities for gambling and prostitution, centered on the Rua da Felicidade, the "street of happiness." During World War II, thanks to Portuguese neutrality, it was a haven for thousands of refugees. And even after the Communist victory in China in 1949, Macau remained very much in the shadow of Hong Kong. The Salazar dictatorship was interested neither in developing the city nor in giving it any autonomy. Large-scale disturbances during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s reminded everyone how completely it was dependent on China. After the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, the new regime was much more interested in developing Macau, exploring new forms of autonomy for it, and ultimately in discussing its fate with the People's Republic.

The situation changed much more rapidly with the market-oriented reforms promoted by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980's. Macau, still very much on the margins of the huge economic power of Hong Kong-whose people saw it mainly as a place to go for gambling-now confronted the rapid rise of the Special Economic Zones at Zhuhai, just north of Macau; and Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. The entire Canton Delta became China's most dramatic zone of market-oriented growth linked to the world economy. Macau shared in the prosperity, but it was increasingly unclear what its special role was. In the 1990s the boom continued, as Chinese investors and construction companies launched major land reclamation and construction projects, filling in large areas around the Macau peninsula and the adjoining islands. By 1999, a visitor who remembered Macau in the 1970s and was fascinated by its colorful past was delighted to find two excellent new museums, one devoted to maritime history and the other to local culture and society. At the same time, all the new land, straight streets, and modern high rise buildings could be decidedly disorienting.

Return to the Motherland

Macau returned to Chinese sovereignty on December 20, 1999. It now is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic, roughly comparable in status to Hong Kong, but with about one-eighth of Hong Kong's population. The very important gambling monopoly is up for renewal in 2001; it may be extended, at least for a few years, but it is not clear that it will continue to be the main outlet of the gambling passions of Hong Kong residents. Reports of major commercial initiatives elsewhere around the Delta come and go; Macau has just opened a second set of road connections with the Chinese mainland. Several projects for more land reclamations including a large one in the Nam Van Lakes area, as well as a planned harbor for cruise ships, are on the table. The new Macau International Airport is a modest but real success, drawing a substantial number of flights by regional carriers. A final anomaly is that the flights of Air Macau are especially convenient for travelers between Shanghai or Beijing and Taiwan.

But what will Macau's special place be in the vibrant and shifting kaleidoscope of the Canton Delta? It never has attracted the international tourist traffic it deserved, and its new modern exterior will make it less attractive to lovers of the raffish and picturesque. Some believe it can find a special niche in China's relations with the many parts of the world where Portuguese, Spanish, and French are spoken.

The statue of the martyred Governor Ferreira do Amaral no longer stands in front of the great casino at the Hotel Lisboa. Some have suggested that it would be better to have a statue of the sixteenth-century founders, Leonel de Souza and Wang Bo, sitting at a table and calmly cutting an ambiguous and advantageous deal.