Macau

Portuguese traders were using the peninsula by the 1550s, tolerated by Ming officials and paying an annual ground rent, and Macau became the pivot of Portugal's trade between Goa, Nagasaki and Guangzhou. Silk and silver moved through it, and with them the Jesuits: the Church of St Paul and the college beside it, founded in 1594, trained the missionaries who went on to Japan and China, and Matteo Ricci passed through on his way north. The settlement built forts against the Dutch, who attacked and were beaten off in 1622.

Its fortunes turned in the nineteenth century, when Guangzhou opened to other Europeans and Hong Kong's deep harbour took the shipping that Macau's silting inner harbour could not. The administration licensed gambling in 1849 to raise revenue, and the city settled into a long quiet decline as a place of trade, refuge and vice. The 1887 treaty with the Qing formalised Portugal's position. After Portugal's revolution of 1974 it offered to hand the territory back; China preferred to wait, and the 1987 Joint Declaration set the terms for the handover on 20 December 1999, when Macau became a Special Administrative Region with its own Basic Law.

The city was remade after 2002, when the government ended the decades-old gaming monopoly and licensed new operators, including American companies. Gaming revenue passed that of the Las Vegas Strip in 2007, land was reclaimed between Taipa and Coloane to build the Cotai Strip, and residents began receiving an annual cash share of the windfall. The pandemic closed the borders and collapsed tourism in 2020–22; visitors have since returned, and Beijing is pressing the territory to depend less on gambling.

Macau's character comes from two traditions kept side by side rather than merged. The population is overwhelmingly Cantonese and Han Chinese, and temple life, Cantonese opera, tea houses and the lunar calendar set the everyday rhythm; on the same streets stand baroque churches, Portuguese street names on blue tiles, calçada paving laid in waves, and a legal system with Portuguese roots. The small Macanese community, of mixed Portuguese and Asian descent, has its own cuisine and its own creole, Patuá, now spoken by very few.

Festivals follow both calendars, so the year runs from Chinese New Year and the A-Ma Festival to the Procession of the Passion at Lent and the Feast of the Drunken Dragon, when fish traders dance through the old streets with carved dragon heads. The Grand Prix in November, run on public roads since 1954, is the great secular event, and the noise of it reaches every part of the peninsula.

Manners are Cantonese and businesslike: queueing, quiet in temples, no fuss over tipping. Gambling is treated as an industry rather than a spectacle, and the entry age for the tables that pay for the city is 21. Macau keeps its own border, currency and identity documents under 'one country, two systems', and locals distinguish carefully between Macau, Hong Kong and the mainland.

About 720,000 people live on roughly 33 square kilometres, which makes Macau the most densely populated region in the world. Most live in high-rise blocks in the northern peninsula and on Taipa, a long way in feel from the casino strips, and much of the ground the city stands on is reclaimed.

Gaming and the tourism around it account for the bulk of the economy and, directly or indirectly, most jobs, from dealers and hotel staff to the shops and restaurants that serve the visitors. Residents receive an annual cash handout from the gaming surplus, and public services and pensions are funded the same way. Property is expensive, imported labour from the mainland, the Philippines and elsewhere fills many service posts, and the population is ageing.

The city is tied ever more closely to Zhuhai across the border and to the wider Greater Bay Area: tens of thousands cross daily for work, school, cheaper shopping and family, and the bridge to Hong Kong has added another artery. Life in the old quarters is compact and walkable, with morning markets, tea and noodles for breakfast, exercise on Guia Hill at dawn, and weekends shaped by the tourist calendar rather than by the working week.

Macanese cooking is often called one of the world's earliest fusion cuisines: Portuguese technique carried along the trade routes and picking up chillies, turmeric, coconut, shrimp paste and tamarind from Africa, India, Malacca and Goa. Minchi — minced beef or pork with diced fried potato, soy and a fried egg — is the household dish; African chicken is grilled under a coconut and chilli sauce; Portuguese chicken comes in a mild turmeric and coconut gratin; and curry crab, chilli shrimps and salt cod turn up on the same menus.

Alongside it runs excellent Cantonese cooking — roast meats, dim sum, congee and noodles — and the Portuguese food of the mainland tradition, bacalhau in several forms, grilled sardines and caldo verde. The snacks are what most visitors remember: the Macau-style egg tart with its blistered top, the pork chop bun, almond cookies pressed in wooden moulds, and sheets of bak kwa jerky grilled at shop doors in Taipa Village and near the Ruins of St Paul's.

Drinks follow the same double history. Milk tea and lemon tea in the cha chaan teng cafés, Chinese tea with dim sum, and Portuguese wine, vinho verde and port imported since colonial times and still widely sold. Coffee is drunk as an espresso in the Portuguese manner in the older cafés.