"(...) The round casino on the first floor of the Lisboa Hotel here is always packed with gamblers. Chinese grandmothers in silk pajamas shuffle across the floor in low-heeled mules carrying green and red plastic bowls filled with pataca, Macao's currency. Carefully dressed Hong Kong businessmen who arrived by hydrofoil from across the Pearl River estuary mingle with the more successful immigrants who walked to this Portuguese territory through the barrier gate from China.
In novels, Macao is the capital of intrigue where beautiful Eurasian women get mixed up with sinister drug dealers or smugglers who use this territory's ancient trading connections with mainland China, Hong Kong and Europe to move valuable pieces of Chinese art.
''Macao is fiction,'' said Lee Tin Yau, a textile merchant. ''It is a place that exists most vividly in books. Today it is a place to gamble or buy antiques or daydream. Macao was once an important place, a hundred years ago. No more.''
Popular Gambling Area
''People come here to gamble,'' said Chow Ho Lee, a Hong Kong fabric salesman who comes to Macao at least twice a month to play fantan. In this ancient Chinese game, an inverted silver cup is plunged into a pile of porcelain buttons and pulled away. The bets are placed, the cup is lifted and the buttons are counted off in groups of four until four or less remain. ''My number is three,'' said Mr. Chow.
Excerto de artigo da autoria de Pamela G. Hollie publicado na edição de 8.4.1982 do The New York Times
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