Paul and Cindy, New Zealand and China 2013: Macao

Last Thursday we went with Paul’s colleague Zhou Mi to Macao, which is just south of Zhuhai. The three of us took a cab from our apartment to the Gongbei Port leading to Macao, and joined the crowds exiting Zhuhai and walking through the passage to Macao. People cross the border both for work and for gambling. Macao has been returned from Portugal to China since the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration of 1999, but is guaranteed 50 years as a primarily autonomous region. Macao has its own currency, police, legal system and customs/immigration control, while China retains control of Macao’s defense and foreign affairs.

Upon exiting immigration control in Macao, we took a free shuttle bus to the Grand Lisboa Casino downtown. This was not to gamble, but 1) to make use of this free transportation service, provided by the casinos to encourage gambling, and 2) to see the magnificent historical treasures in the lobby of the Grand Lisboa. Stanley Ho, the owner of this casino, is very rich, and has collected many fascinating treasures and displayed some of them in the casino/hotel lobby. We saw one of the original twelve zodiac bronze figureheads from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, for which he reportedly paid about $10 million US. There were several carvings from old tusks, pieces of jade, metal sculpture with gold leaf, and other magnificent pieces of art.

Grand Lisboa casino/hotel, central Macao

We exited the casino and stopped at a café for “pasteis de nata”, Portuguese egg-custard pastries that are still made as a local specialty in Macao, even though there are relatively few Portuguese people left here. They’ve made their way onto mainland China, and we’ll be sampling more before we leave – they’re very good! We wandered the small streets for a while – unlike China’s large avenues, the streets in Macao were made quite narrow in the Portuguese days and have remained that way.

We visited two religious sites from the Portuguese years. One is the small St. Dominic’s church, in good shape though built in the late 1500’s. The second is the more famous ruins of the church of St. Paul, left with only its façade standing after a fire in the 1800s. This is near the modern Museum of Macau, where we viewed a number of well-constructed exhibits on the Portuguese/Chinese interaction throughout the past. Perhaps the most interesting exhibit was one showing cockroaches - people used to bet on cockroach fights, and good fighting cockroaches were greatly respected, to the point of having funerals for the cockroaches after they died.

Ruins of St. Paul's

St. Dominic's Church

Cricket casket, preserved fighting crickets, cricket crypt

We visited two small Buddhist temples. There were no monks at these temples; rather, the temples are maintained by volunteers who sell incense, paper money and other items to honor various gods and to bring a good afterlife to deceased relatives.

We took another casino shuttle bus to the newer area of Tapia. Here we walked to a set of old Portuguese houses that are transformed into a museum, saw Portuguese and Chinese workers setting up for a weekend festival, and walked through a small garden on the edge of a wetland, preserved in the midst of a large cluster of casino/hotels.

To end our day, we visited two more casinos – the City of Dreams and the Venetian. We walked through one of the casino floors with all its bright lights and clanging bells, but saved our money for another day. Just seeing the huge buildings and lavish interiors was interesting enough for our visit. There were a few people here dressed in Halloween costumes, which made us feel a little at home. We took a final shuttle bus back to the border, and crossed back into Zhuhai.