-- A Preface for Chinese Version

by Cheng Xulu

This is a section of a poem filled with patriotic emotion written by Mr. Wen Yiduo. The poem Kai Feng (the wind from the south in summer) in Shi Jing (The Book of Songs) narrated that in the Kingdom of Bei there was a mother who had seven sons. The mother did not behave herself properly, so the seven sons lamented for themselves. In 1926, Wen Yiduo used this topic and wrote The Song of Seven Sons by choosing seven important territories occupied by foreign powers, lamenting the fate of these places like children cut off from their mother. Macao is one of them.

The foreign powers' occupation of China's territories on a large scale began after the Opium War, but some of occupations, most prominently Macao, could be traced back to much an earlier period in the historical trend of colonialism. In the 16th century, with the rapid rise of the colonial powers, the gunboats of the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch sailed around the world and forced their way into Africa, Asia and Latin America to seize colonies from the frightened inhabitants. The Ming dynasty of China was already in decline, but China was a civilized big country with huge territory and a large population. The Portuguese could not treat China as they treated indigenous tribes in other parts of the world. They had to lease Macao from China as "subjects" of the Emperor.

In 1513, the Portuguese came to China for the first time. There is no clear data about when the Portuguese began to live in Macao. If we take as a start 1557, when they began to settle down in Macao, it had been over 360 years when Wen Yiduo wrote his poem. Now, it has been more than 400 years.

Since the late 18th century, beginning with the independence of the United States, the colonials' independence has been the historical trend. Portugal began to decline early, and Brazil, its largest colony overseas, proclaimed independence in 1822. But the Chinese Qing government, instead of retrieving Macao, over which it still exercised sovereignty, in effect surrendered Macao after the First Opium War. In 1887, when the Treaty of Peking between China and Portugal was signed, the Portuguese were given "perpetual occupation and government of Macao".

At the beginning, the place leased and inhabited by the Portuguese was limited to a little over one square kilometer in the southern part of the Macao Peninsula. It was only a tiny area, but this tiny bit of land became a base for economic and cultural exchanges between the East and the West and for the spreading of Catholicism in the Far East. The Western powers scrambled fiercely for the possession of Macao. Holland had launched attacks against it, and the British partially occupied it with troops. Although the new comer Hong Kong surpassed Macao in the middle of the 19th century, Macao did not lose its special status. Through a study of Macao history one can see not only the development of the area from a coastal fishing village into a famous international trading port, and its degeneration into a city of gambling like Monte Carlo, but also the economic and cultural exchanges between the East and the West during the Ming and Qing periods, the evolution of the relations between China and foreign countries and the invasion of China by the Western colonialists and imperialists.

Macao is mentioned in many works in the Ming and Qing dynasties both officially and privately written. In the Qianlong period (1737 to 1795), Yin Guangren and Zhang Rulin, who became Vice Prefect for Coastal Defence of Canton Prefecture successively, wrote Aomen Jilue (A Brief Record of Macao), the first monograph about Macao. The books did not elaborate about Macao's history, while Aomen Jilue was only a brief local chronicle. Since the 1930s, The History of Relations between China and Portugal by Zhou Jinglian, The Annotation of Ming History about Franks, the Philippines, Netherlands and Italy by Zhang Weihua, Sino-Portuguese Trade from 1514 to 1644 by Zhang Tianze in English, and articles published in academic journals like T'ien Hsia Monthly, began to collect what had been written about Macao in the Ming and Qing periods and in foreign languages, pushing the study of Macao history a step forward. But they were not monographs of Macao history. Most of them laid particular stress on the study of Macao in the Ming period, so they did not enlighten people much about the development process of Macao in the 400 years. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the study of Macao history focused on Portugal's invasion and occupation. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the foreign trade of Macao. In the collection, examination and correction and sorting out of materials in Chinese, these studies took a further step forward. However, they were not deep, comprehensive, or objective.

Westerners in Macao, Hong Kong and Lisbon also wrote many books about Macao in English or in Portuguese, beginning in the 1830s. These historical books used a lot of documents: the archives of Macao Senate, Goa authorities and the Portuguese government, and the letters and notes of Portuguese and British people. Most of the materials are elaborate and reliable. But due to language difficulties or other reasons, the Western writers used few Chinese materials, which is the shortcoming of their works. Some of them even had a colonialist bias. But on the whole, in regard to the study of Macao history, they did more work than their Chinese counterparts.

Vicissitude is the way of the world. Following the joint communique between China and Britain announcing Hong Kong's returning to China in 1997, on April 13, 1987, a joint communique between China and Portugal was also signed, having consummately solved the historically unsettled question about Macao. China will resume its sovereignty over Macao on December 20, 1999. It is not a coincidence that Mr. Fei Chengkang's book Macao 400 Years was finished at this very moment. Since 1978, when Mr. Fei Chengkang began to study the Chinese modern history, he has always paid attention to the evolution of the relationships between China and foreign countries. In recent years, feeling the need of the time and tide, he worked very hard in studying the history of Macao, extensively consulting the existing books, articles and archives concerning the history of Macao in foreign languages as well as in Chinese, correcting the errors in the past researches and opening up new research fields. After three years' painstaking efforts, he completed this book in time to greet the return of Macao, the "I wanted to return" Macao, expressing the wishes of the Chinese people: to recover the lost lands and unify our motherland.

April 1987, Shanghai