"Oldest Permanent China Coast Settlement"

Artigo publicado na edição de 10 de Setembro de 1937 no jornal The Butler County press (Hamilton, Ohio), EUA. Pelo conteúdo parece um pouco inusitado. Julgo que a referência se deve ao facto de em 1937 a Pan Am passar a ter ligações aéreas regulares para Macau, suscitando algum interesse saber mais sobre aquele local tão longínquo.

"Macao, Oldest Permanent China Coast Settlement

Macao is the oldest of all permanent foreign settlements on the China coast. Macao, spelled locally Macau, notes a writer in the New York Times, consists of a peninsula in the delta of the Canton river, and the Islands of Colowan and Taipa. Its total area is  approximately eleven square miles. The peninsula, located forty miles by water from the British Crown colony of Hong kong, and eighty miles from Canton, is about two-and-a-half miles long and half as wide. The occupation by the Portuguese dates from 1557, but some 330 years elapsed before  China formally recognized Portugal's sovereign rights. Without unseemly levity, it may be said that this is not to be considered a long delay in the transaction of Chinese affairs. It is the claim of the Portuguese that they were the pioneers of European intercourse in  Chinese waters. India and what is now the Federated Malay States were their stepping stones to the farther East. As the Portuguese were the first to inaugurate European trade in China, so were they the first among foreigners to earn the hatred, fear and contempt of the Chinese. The methods they employed in settlement and trade brought about massacres and great loss of life on both sides, which for a time virtually ended foreign commerce in the South and directed it to settlements at Ningpo and elsewhere."