A broad boulevard, called the Praya Grande

Its bay is perfect crescent. Around this runs a broad boulevard, called the Praya Grande, shadowed with fine old arching banyan trees. At each horn the Portuguese flag waves over a little fort. Behind the town, green wooded hills rise like an amphitheatre, and among the houses a picturesque old buildings sticks up here and there – the Cathedral, the barracks, the military hospital, the older Fort Monte. 

The whitewashed houses with their green blinds and wide shady porticoes and verandas, from which dark eyes look idly down upon you as you pass, recall many a little Italian and Spanish town. A couple of yacht like Portuguese gunboats lie at anchor in the river beyond the bay. 

On Sundays and Thursdays the band plays in the public gardens and surely nowhere in the world do the buglers linger so long over the reveille and the retreat as they do here every day. To the busy broker or merchant of Hongkong, who runs over here in the summer, from Saturday to Monday, after a week of hard work and perspiration, coining dollars in a Turkish bath, Macao is a tiny haven of rest, where the street is free from the detestable ceaseless chatter of Chinamen, where the air is fresh and the hills green and where a little flutter at fan tan is a miniature and amusing substitute for the daily struggle with exchanges and settlements and short sales. (...)

Finally Macao as I have said is the Monaco of the East, and from its gaming tables its impecunious government reaps 150,000 dollars a year the price said to be paid by the syndi cate of Chinese proprietors for the monopoly. The game is a peculiarly Chinese one well fitted to afford full scope to the multitude of refinements and hypothetical elaborations with which the Chinaman the greatest gambler on earth loves to surround his favourite vice.

Excerto do capítulo 12 - Macao - The Lusitanian Thule - do livro de Henry Norman "The Peoples and Politics of the Far East", publicado em Londres em 1895.