"City of Surprises"

"Macau: City of Surprises" é o título do artigo da autoria de Shann Davies publicado na edição da revista Clipper (da companhia de aviação Pan Am) de Setembro de 1979. Aqui fica um excerto:

Hong Kong’s neighbor blends old world charm with new world pleasures. Far overshadowed by its giant rapidly changing neighbor to the north, Macau might seem no more than the tale of an ancient mariner—a brief canto from the Portuguese. But the city that lies ninety miles downriver from Canton dominated trade between Japan and China, Europe and the Orient at the end of the sixteenth century. Then, in 1640, Japan closed its doors to the world. 

Macau's Portuguese founders (beggared by two centuries of exploration and the struggle for independence from Spain) slipped into Europe's minor leagues, leaving the city to fend for itself half a world away from its mother country. The story could well have ended here. Instead it developed into a serial of corruption, riot, implausible escapes from invasion, assassination plots and bankruptcy. Macau not only survived but emerged with a heritage that can be seen, savored and felt today. 

The elements of rural China, colonial Portugal and Victorian Britain complement each other in this fascinating city. The curling eaves of Buddhist temples and low tiers of shop/houses form an oriental setting for the classic Iberian facades of a dozen churches and the pastel-trimmed mansions of the tea traders from the West. With a quarter of a million people occupying ten square miles, Macau is rarely silent, but the sounds blend in an unlikely concert of Mah-Jong games, church bells, schoolboy soccer crowds, fado and Cantonese opera, hydrofoil sirens and firecrackers, knitting machines and one-armed bandits (which the Chinese call hungry tigers). The integration is so complete that not even graceless new apartment blocks spoil the panorama, and the Lisboa Hotel with its mustard-tiled tower topped with a prickly neon globe seems more an extravagance than an excrescence. 

Macau was founded at the farthest reach of Portugal's empire because of China, and it continues to exist because of China. In 1576 Pope Gregory assigned China's one hundred million souls to the Bishop of Macau together with "Japan and other islands adjacent." The Ming dynasty manda- rins of that day disdained to recognize the small group of barbarians who claimed to have founded Macau in 1557 (recognition was finally granted in 1887), although they welcomed distinguished Jesuit scholars such as Matteo Ricci at the imperial court. China being the center of the world (as far as the Ming were concerned) was not supposed to need foreign trade, but the Portuguese found many Canton merchants willing to exchange silk, porcelain and tea for guns, clocks, telescopes and, later, opium. For more than half a century before the closure of Japan, Macau was home port for the Great Ship—a well-armed caravel that each year sailed to Nagasaki and sold Chinese silk and porcelain for silver. These in turn bought more Chinese goods. Macau also held a monopoly of trade with the Philippines while Portugal was ruled by Spain, and the income from the Great Ship made many fortunes for Portuguese and Macanese traders. (...)

Legenda da foto da autoria de Dan Budnick: A Buddhist monk stands at one of three altars of Macau’s Temple of Kun lam, dating from the Ming dynasty, 400 years ago. In 1844, the temple was the site of the signing of the first trade treaty between China and the United States.

With the Portuguese revolution of 1974, Lisbon began moving towards recognition of the People's Republic, while China, in turn, effectively discouraged a nascent independence party on Macau, leaving that city the only place outside Portugal where the Portuguese flag still flies over a government house. 

It is officially a territory under Portuguese administration, but with a great deal of autonomy. Unofficially it has been a useful back door to the west for the People's Republic, whose local representative, a wealthy entrepreneur named Ho Yin, recently gave a banquet in honor of the outgoing governor—surely an indication of the warmer relations soon to come. Macau's current trade with China consists mostly of US$56 million worth of imported food, raw materials for the flourishing textile industry and unpainted pottery. Exports include salted and dried fish and returns from investment in real estate. 

Until now, Macau has been a tourist gateway to China only for overseas Chinese, but the China International Travel Service recently approved the territory as an entry or exit point for Western visitors, and the road from Macau to Canton has been improved. There is also a possibility of modern ferry service between the two ports, and further gateway possibilities are opening up as the P.R.C.'s relations with the west broaden. 

There are only about 10,000 people in Macau who consider themselves Portuguese, and despite some names of shops, the language is rarely spoken by Macau's Chinese population. Yet the ambience of old Portugal pervades the territory. 

The pace of life is languid, and everyone takes a two-hour lunch break. The hills are crowned with the remains of fortresses, the Bishop's Palace, the Guia (built in 1865) and the oldest lighthouse on the China coast. At street level, there are restaurants serving Portuguese sardines, African chicken, grilled prawns, baked bacalhau (cod) and the best Portuguese wines and ports. 

There are Portuguese schools and hospitals, usually run by the church, and the oldest western theater in the Orient, the beautifully restored Dom Pedro V. 

The third major influence in Macau's history is British. Following in the wake of the Portuguese threatened to capture the town. With a small force of Portuguese, Goans and soldiers from Mozambique, Macau managed to hold out. In 1849 the city was saved only by the speed and daring of Colonel Mesquita, a local man who captured a hostile fortress beyond the border gate. A more recent close call occurred in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution of the People's Republic of China spilled over into Macau. The city was in the difficult position of being an overseas province of a country that still hadn't recognized the communist regime in Peking. Once again the death knell proved premature, although the Portuguese authorities were forced to acknowledge a degree of local communist control. (...)