The earliest reformer in Macao was Zheng Guanying, whose native place was in Yongmo Township in Xiangshan County, adjacent to Macao. Zheng Guanyin had been in and out of Macao since he was very young, and was familiar with the local conditions. He exposed the malpractice in Macao in essays such as "On Macao Zhuzai (Piglets)" and "On Macao's Harbouring Bandits", and these essays were collected into his famous books Jiushi Jieyao (The Gist to Save the World of the Time) and Yi Yan (The Words for Changing) written in the 1860s and 1870s to disseminate reform ideas. From 1886 to 1891, Zheng Guanying stayed in Macao for a long time after his setbacks in the interior and wrote his representative work, Shengshi Weiyan (The Writing on the Wall in the Heyday), a magnum opus on the theme of making the country rich and saving the nation. This book, arousing the deaf and awakening the unhearing, was all the rage for a time in the whole country, and had a far-reaching impact upon the reform movement.

In 1895, after China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the ideological trend of reform began to develop into a political movement after long fermenting. As the influence of the diehards against reform in Guangdong was strong, it was difficult for the reform group to develop there. After Liu Zhenlin and other reformers contacted He Tingguang, a merchant prince in Macao with patriotic ideas, the leader of the reforming group, Kang Youwei, went to Macao in November 1896. In Macao, He Tingguang and other merchants supported Kang, so he decided to make Macao a base of reform activities in Southern China and to leave his younger brother Kang Guangren in Macao to work with He Tingguang to publish a newspaper to disseminate reform ideas.

Relying on his prestige, He Tingguang quickly raised ten thousand silver dollars from the local merchant gentry of high social standing. The contributors all wanted Liang Qichao, the editor-in-chief of the nationwide popular paper, Shiwu Bao (The Newspaper of Current Affairs), to hold the post of chief editor of their paper concurrently. Liang Qichao happened to be visiting his native town, which was near Macao, so he was invited to Macao to take part in preparing the newspaper. At first, the sponsors wanted to name the newspaper Guang Shiwu Bao, to associate it with the well-known Shanghai paper. They planned many ways to popularize the newspaper, including using the special environment of Macao to carry contents that the Shanghai Shiwu Bao dared not do so. The manager of Shiwu Bao, Wang Kangnian, worried that the newspaper in Macao would say something shocking to the government and cause trouble for the Shanghai Shiwu Bao. So he opposed sharing a name and chief editor. The reform group decided to name the newspaper Zhixin Bao (Learning New Things Paper). He Tingguang and Kang Guangren became managers of the paper; eight scholars including Liang Qichao, Xu Qin, Wu Hengwei and Liu Zhenlin wrote for it; and later on some foreigners and Chinese, including Kang Youwei's daughter, Kang Tongwei, translated news from foreign sources into Chinese for the paper.

After about three months' preparation, Zhixin Bao, whose office was at No. 4, Lane of Pocos, began publication on February 22, 1897. At the beginning, Zhixin Bao was published every fifth day; from the 20th issue, it was changed to every tenth day. The paper was rich in contents, excellent in comments and discussions, and especially full of current affairs and politics of foreign countries and articles introducing science and technology. Before long, Zhixin Bao became popular nation-wide and reached countries as far as Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, the United States and others. The leading officials of Guangxi, Jiangxi and Guizhou told officials, gentry and scholars of their respective provinces to subscribe to the paper. Shanghai's Shiwu Bao, Tianjin's Guowen Bao (National News Paper) and Macao's Zhixin Bao became the three most important newspapers catching people's attention with reform ideas. Chinese people in Macao were directly influenced by the new ideas, and took part in activities sponsored by the reformers. In the spring of 1897, soon after Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong established "the General Association for No Binding of Females' Feet" in Shanghai, Zhang Shoupo, He Tingguang, Wu Jiewei and others organized "Macao's Association for No Binding of Females' Feet". Their rules were easier to practice, so they won over many who had not fully agreed with the constitution of the general association. The Macao constitution prohibited members of the association to bind the feet of their daughters under eight years old. If a member wanted to marry a woman with bound feet outside of the association, he had to explain it to the association. And the members of the association were forbidden to marry the women whose fathers or brothers had violated the association constitution. With the reformers' advocacy, more than one hundred people from various walks of life joined the association within a few months. In the spring of 1898, immediately after the reformers initiated "Giving up Opium-smoking Association" in the interior, He Tingguang, Zhang Shoupo, Chen Jiyan, Liu Zhenlin and others organized the Macao branch of the Association, calling on people to refrain from opium-smoking, and rapidly recruited more than thirty members. Macao at that time, like Shanghai and Hunan Province, had a pronounced atmosphere of reform.

In the summer of 1898, with the support of the young Guangxu Emperor, the reformers made a series of reform policies. About one hundred days later, the diehards, headed by the Empress Dowager Cixi, staged a coup d'etat. They almost abolished all the new policies, and killed six famous reformers including Kang Guangren, the manager of Zhixin Bao. In these circumstances, the reformers and their dependents had to escape the interior. Macao became the asylum for the reformers and their dependents for a while. Liang Qichao's father, wife and children all fled to Macao, and He Tingguang sent for Kang Youwei's father to let him come to Macao. Macao was left the only base for reform activities within China. At the time when a large number of publications advocating reform were forced to close down, Zhixin Bao alone continued publication. To avoid persecution by the diehards, at the beginning of November, 1898, Mr. Francisco H. Fernandes, a Portuguese who sympathized with China's reform cause, was especially invited to be the manager of the paper, and the authors writing for the paper all began to use pseudonyms. After taking these precautions, the paper launched a counter-attack. On November 14, the paper published "Letters to Friends" criticizing coup d'tat, written by "Tiexiang Study", firing the first shot against diehards by the reformers. Later on, the paper continued to disseminate reformist ideas by publishing a series of memorials to the throne that had been written by Kang Youwei and Chen Baozhen during the brief reform period, and many articles attacking the diehards, such as "On Integrity" and "The Ten Tragedies of the coup d'etat on the 6th Day of the 8th Month (of the Chinese traditional calendar)". At the end of the year, after Liang Qichao and his colleagues had set up Qingyi Bao (Paper of Pure Discussion) in Yokohama, Japan, which vigorously attacked the diehards, He Tingguang and others quickly established a close relationship with the new paper. On a commission basis, the office of Zhixin Bao sold Qingyi Bao and a new book Guangxu Shengde Ji (Records of the Emperor Guangxu's Benevolent Rule) published by the office of Qingyi Bao, which eulogized the Guangxu Emperor's virtues and achievements.

Due to the negligence of the Qing government and the fact that there were "states within a state", the foreign settlements in Tianjin, Shanghai and many other cities, Zhixin Bao still kept its commission agents in more than ten cities including Shanghai, Tianjin and Fuzhou. Therefore, it still had certain influence among the domestic readers for some time. Later on, as the domestic commission agents gradually dropped off, the paper hired more overseas commission agents. Sold in countries like the United States, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, Thailand and Canada, it had a quite considerable influence among overseas Chinese. Macao and Japan's Yokohama became the two main bases for the Chinese reformers' activities, and Zhixin Bao and Qingyi Bao were their two important organs.

On July 20, 1899, Kang Youwei established the "Saving the Great Qing Emperor Association", simplified as "Royalists Association" (SEA), in Canada. He appointed Zhixin Bao and Qingyi Bao as the papers of the "Royalists Association". The people of the reforming school in Macao responded by organizing a branch of the "Royalists Association", with He Tingguang as the branch head. Since the "Royalists Association" was quite influential in Macao and Macao was both a place near China's interior and leading to overseas, Kang Youwei decided to set up the headquarters of the association in Macao, asking overseas Chinese to send their financial contributions for the "Royalists Association" to the offices of Qingyi Bao or Zhixin Bao, especially the latter. The contributions of the overseas Chinese flooded into Macao, and the people of the "Royalists Association" in Macao publicly elected He Tingguang, the "loyal, high-minded and rich" merchant prince to assume the post as the general manager of the association, in charge of the receiving and paying out of funds. Therefore, beginning in the second half of 1899, Macao become the most important base for the reformers.

People intending to save the Guanxu Emperor from being dethroned and even murdered by the Empress Dowager at the time, such as Wang Jingru, Ou Jujia and Han Wenju, hurried to Macao. Before long, they and the local reformers set up the Oriental Language School, invited a Japanese to be the principal and to teach Japanese. They also organized the Macao Populace Society that invited Chinese and foreigners to talk about reform. Following Kang Youwei's view that Confucius was the founder of "reforming with a pretext of things ancient", these reformers organized a ceremony to celebrate the birthday of Confucius on the 27th day of the 8th month of the Chinese traditional calendar. This was the heyday of the "Royalists Association".

In January 1900, the Empress Dowager Cixi made Pujun, the son of Prince Duan, the Crown Prince. She prepared to dethrone the Guangxu Emperor by spreading rumours that he was seriously ill. When the news got around, the members of "Royalists Association" were shocked. They roused public opinion to save the Emperor through papers and journals like Zhixin Bao, and sponsored ceremonies to celebrate the 30th birthday of the Emperor Guangxu in Macao and elsewhere, "wishing His Majesty a long life". According to the Zhixin Bao, on the 30th birthday of the Emperor, "the firecrackers in Macao were set off day in and day out", and "the gentry and merchants in formal dress solemnly paid their respects and sincere wishes to His Majesty at the Macao Hospital 'Kiang Wu'; Macao "thronged with people with cheers resounding like rolls of thunder."

In the meantime, the reformers decided to defend the Guangxu Emperor by force, launching armed struggles. The main force to defend the Emperor was the Independent Army (the Zili Army) established by Tang Caichang in provinces like Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and Anhui. The Guangdong insurrectionary army, raised by members of "Royalists Association" in Macao, was an important part of the army to defend the Emperor. The headquarters of the "Royalists Association" in Macao not only had to shoulder the overall responsibility to defend the Emperor with force, such as "insurrectionary actions to be arranged internally and contacts with other places to be carried out", but also had the task of staging a revolt in Guangdong.

Because He Tingguang and others lacked the experience in directing military actions, Kang Youwei sent a capable person, Xu Qing, to Macao, and Kang himself controlled activities in Macao from Japan. After Xu Qing's arrival, the work of the headquarters of the association improved. The royalists used the generous donations from the overseas Chinese to buy guns, and made arrangements to start revolts at many places in Guangdong. In June of the same year, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who had high hopes, planned the concrete measures to be taken when Canton was captured by the royalists, and even imaging that the headquarters of the association in Macao could play the role of the central government. However, because of poor planning and lack of funds, Xu Qing and others could not start the revolt in time, and they became rather dejected with the news coming through that the uprising of the Independent Army had failed in late August. In addition, the British authorities in Hong Kong flatly refused Xu's plan to capture Guangdong via Hong Kong. The royalists had to cancel their plans to start a revolt in Guangdong.

In the same year, the members of the "Royalists Association" in Macao also intervened in the case of Jing Yuanshan, which attracted both domestic and overseas attention. When Empress Dowager Cixi was plotting to dethrone the Guangxu Emperor, Jing Yuanshan, the President of Shanghai Telegram Bureau, sent a joint telegram with over 1,000 people opposing the setting up of the Crown Prince. The Qing government tried to arrest him soon afterwards. Because the Royalists Association was strong in Macao, Jing Yuanshan escaped there by a circuitous route in the middle of February, 1900. In order to absolve himself, Sheng Xuanhuai, the Inspector of Telegram Bureau claimed that Jing Yuanshan had absconded because of huge losses of the bureau, and asked Li Hongzhang, the Viceroy of the Two Guangs, to arrest him. Li Hongzhang sent Liu Xuexun, a Circuit Intendant, and others to Macao, asking the Portuguese authorities to transfer Jing Yuanshan. The Portuguese authorities arrested Jing on February 25 and put him into jail. Three days later, they improved his treatment by moving him to the Monte. In spite of the fact that Kang Youwei had a certain ill-feeling towards Jing Yuanshan, the member of "Royalists Association" in Macao tried to protect him because Jing was being persecuted for being a royalist. Meanwhile, Liu Xuexun and others, who had large sums of money as fund, coupling threats with promises, trapped Jing Yuanshan into expressing his willingness to be taken to Canton to be questioned. Luckily, He Tingguang and his colleagues persuaded him not to go by saying: "If you go to Canton and get killed, won't you make His Majesty lose his men ?"

Through the mediation of the "Royalists Association", the Portuguese authorities in Macao wanted to use the opportunity to deny the clause in the 1887 treaty about handing over Chinese criminals "according to past practice", namely, that all the important Chinese criminals the Chinese government wanted were to be handed over to the Chinese authorities. The Portuguese said that Jing Yuanshan was a political offender, and refused to transfer him in accordance with international practice. Sheng Xianhuai and Li Hongzhang sent supporters of the government to Macao to accuse Jing Yuanshan of running away with swindled money, alleging that it was a criminal case, and made the so-called witnesses go to Macao to confront Jing Yuanshan. He Tingguang and his colleagues continued to spend a lot of money, trying all means possible to protect Jing Yuanshan. The people from Shanghai and Hong Kong and overseas Chinese expressed their support through newspapers, journals and telegrams; even the British government, which supported the Guangxu Emperor, showed concern for the case out of its own interests.

Under the supervision of Chinese and Western public opinion, the Portuguese authorities were fairly impartial in handling this lawsuit. On May 12, the Portuguese authorities formally presented a note to Li Hongzhang, pointing out that all his information about Jing Yuanshan's embezzling of public funds was incorrect. If Li had any questions about it, "he could directly send a note to the Portuguese authorities in Macao to ask about it". The supporters of the Qing government would not take their defeat lying down and appealed to the Portuguese high court in Lisbon. At the end of that year, the authorities concerned finally affirmed that Jing Yuanshan was a political offender, released him and gave him the right to seek political asylum.

Although the royalists won Jing Yuanshan's lawsuit, the setback in defending the Emperor with force was a heavy blow. Meanwhile, people despaired of ever improving the Qing government, so revolution became the trend of the time and the desire of the people, and the activities of the "Royalists Association" in Macao gradually slowed down. At the beginning of 1901, Zhixin Bao stopped publication. In early 1903, He Tingguang's business declined; the royalists lost their financial pillar in Macao and relocated the centre of their activities in South China to Hong Kong.

Despite the change, the royalists were still quite influential in Macao. Kang Youwei's student Chen Zibao and his younger brother Chen Zishao set up Zebao School and Zishao School in 1901, and these schools became strongholds of royalism near a decade. The two brothers also compiled and printed a number of elementary textbooks, vigorously advocating royalism. For example, some verses run as follows:

Although supporting monarchy was against the tides of the time already, some of the activities of the royalists were still of positive meaning to the transformation of Chinese society. For instance, Chen Zibao and his brother paid much attention to the education of women and children, claiming to be servants of women and children. They compiled and printed books such as Guide to Women and Children and New Textbook for Women and Children, contributing to co-education and to a new style of women's and children's education in China. With the upsurge of the constitutionalism movement in 1905, the members of "Royalists Association" began to arouse public opinion in favour of a constitutional monarchy. During this period, Zheng Guanyin, who returned home to mourn for the death of his mother, stayed in Macao for a long time. He wrote many essays arguing that only a quick establishment of constitutional monarchy could prevent revolution from taking place. These viewpoints attracted people's attention then. Zheng Guanyin also compiled and sorted out Shengshi Weiyan Houbian (The Second Volume of Writing on the Wall in the Heyday), which was in fact his personal collected works. Macao continued to be an important platform for the reformers until the eve of the 1911 revolution.

Like the reformers, the revolutionary parties calling for overthrowing the monarchy to establish a republic used Macao as a base for political activities. Before Kang Youwei came to Macao, Macao had already seen the beginning of the revolutionary careers of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese democratic revolution. Sun Yat-sen's native place, Cuiheng Village, Xiangshan County, was only 37 kilometers away from Macao. When Sun's father was young, he learned tailoring and shoe-making in Macao. In his early youth, Sun Yat-sen shuttled to and fro between his native place and Macao with his father and elder brother. After 1887, when Sun was enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine of the Queen's College in Hong Kong, Macao was a stopover on his trips between Hong Kong and Cuiheng Village. At that time, Sun's revolutionary idea had preliminarily taken shape. Sun and his good friends Chen Shaobai, Youlie and Yang Heling, who cherished the same idea and followed the same path, always "talked a lot, paying no attention to any taboo"; they were never happy unless they were talking about revolution. They even plotted and planned revolution while travelling, so their relatives and friends in Hong Kong and Macao all jokingly called them "four great rebels".

In the autumn of 1892, when Sun had just graduated from the medical college, he was invited by Hospital 'Kiang Wu' in Macao to become the first Chinese doctor trained in Western medicine in Macao. In December, supported and guaranteed by Yang Heling's brother-in-law, Wu Jiewei, Sun borrowed 3,000 taels of silver from Hospital 'Kiang Wu' to set up a pharmacy selling Chinese and Western medicine, and he opened his own practice. He volunteered at Hospital 'Kiang Wu' as well. In these days, he "used medical skill as a way to know and contact people". On the one hand, he earnestly tried to cure the sick, treating poor people and giving them medicine free of charge; on the other hand, he secretly sowed seeds of revolution in the minds of the people. In the same year, in Macao's newspapers, he published a letter he had written in 1890 to Zheng Zaoru, a retired official in Xiangshan County. This letter, advocating that China should follow the example of the West and carry out reform, is the earliest extant political essay written by Sun. Because Sun was doing revolutionary work in Macao, the revolutionary comrades like Lu Haodong, Yang Heling, Yang Xinru and others often went to Macao to talk with Sun about current politics and their plans for revolution. For some time, Macao became a place for the revolutionaries with lofty ideas to carry out their earliest revolutionary activities.

The general mood in Macao was not fit for revolution at that time. Sun Yat-sen was not able to find any enthusiastic supporters there. Even the merchant prince He Tingguang, who had relatively new ideas and later on became a strong supporter for reform, did not agree with Sun's "radical" ideas. Seeing Sun's excellent medical skill and flourishing business, the Portuguese doctors turned green-eyed and tried every means possible to squeeze him out. They prohibited him from treating the Portuguese patients on the excuse that any doctor practicing medicine in Macao had to have a Portuguese diploma, and prevented pharmacies in Macao from selling Western medicine to people with Sun's prescriptions. Sun was forced to move to Canton in the spring of 1893.

But Sun Yat-sen did not stop his activities in Macao. Cooperating with Francisco H. Fernandes, a Portuguese merchant in the printing business and later the manager of Zhixin Bao, Sun started Ching-Hai Ts’ung-pao (Chinghai Weekly) in Chinese and Portuguese on July 18, 1893. Besides carrying local, domestic and foreign news, the weekly, which ran for two years, reported activities of the revolutionaries, and published essays written by Sun himself, such as "the Preface to the Agricultural Knowledge Society". It was the first paper in modern China to have a close relationship with revolution.

Beginning in 1895, the revolutionary parties made Hong Kong a centre of activities in South China, while Macao became an important base for the reformers. Nonetheless, the revolutionaries still used Macao's special status to carry out certain activities there, especially making it a secret route to and from the interior. For example, in October 1895, when the uprising on the 9th day of the 9th month of Chinese traditional calendar failed, the leaders of the uprising, Sun Yat-sen, Chen Shaobai and others, all retreated to Hong Kong via Macao. In January 1903, when the members of Xingzhonghui (Revitalizing China Society) Xie Zuantai, Li Jitang, Hong Quanfu and others went to Canton to organize an uprising, they also went to Canton via Macao. The Qing officials became aware of this. They sent secret agents to Macao and paid people to keep an eye on Sun Yat-sen and others so as to arrest them. Meanwhile, whenever the revolutionaries had taken major action in Canton, the Qing officials would always blockade the communication between Canton and Macao, strictly searching ships bound for Macao. Martyr Shi Jianru, who had failed to assassinate Deshou, the Viceroy of Two Guangs, in October, 1900, was arrested by Qing soldiers at the dock where he was going to board a ship bound for Macao.

In 1903, when the momentum of the reformers in Macao began to decline, the revolutionaries actively disseminated their ideas in Macao, gaining some local adherents, especially among young students. In August 1905, after "Tongmenghui" (The Chinese Society of Alliance) was established in Tokyo, Japan, the president of the society Sun Yat-sen immediately sent Feng Ziyou and Li Zizhong to Hong Kong, Canton, Macao and elsewhere to "contact comrades" and develop the society. Feng Ziyou assumed the leadership of Hong Kong branch of the Tongmenghui in 1906 and sent Liu Yuehang, Ruan Yizhou, Liu Sifu and others in turn to Macao to recruit members. Liu and Ruan set up a secret organization under the name "Lequn Reading Room", and earnestly carried out revolutionary work. Liu Sifu, who hoped to assassinate important Qing officials, tried to produce bombs there. In the meantime, the members of the Tongmenghui actively spread revolutionary ideas among the masses in Macao. Huang Shizhong, a journalist from Hong Kong, organized a Yue opera troupe. Superficially, the new plays, with costumes in the latest fashions, tried to persuade people to refrain from smoking opium, gambling and feet-binding. In reality, the plays disseminated revolutionary views, so they were very popular among the Chinese inhabitants in Macao. The anti-Qing novel, Hong Xiuquan Yanyi (The Romance of Hong Xiuquan), written by Huang Shizhong, was all the rage for a time after it was published in installments in the Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong. The story was known to almost all Chinese in Macao. However, a debate between the reformers and the revolutionaries was still going on then, and the Chinese inhabitants in Macao had been influenced by the reformers for a long time, so the local people who were determined to join the revolution were far and few between. Liu Yuehang and others only won over several members for the revolutionary party after several months' efforts, and they were forced to end the recruitment drive in Macao in 1907.

Two years later, following a quick development of the revolutionary situation, the South China branch of the Tongmenghui was established in Hong Kong, and the original Hong Kong branch oversaw the revolutionary work in Hong Kong and Macao. So the Tongmenghui's activities in Macao increased once more. The members of the Tongmenghui, Liu Zhuofan and others rode on the ferries shuttling between Hong Kong and Macao in disguise of selling medicine and food. They talked to the passengers about national revolution and criticized the ideas of the royalists. Another member, Pan Caihua, established Peiji Primary School in Macao, and invited Xie Yingbo, the head of the Hong Kong Tongmenghui branch, and others to make Saturday afternoon speeches to spread revolutionary ideas. Afterwards, the Tongmenghui kept in contact with students through activities such as suburban tours, and enabled many students of that school to join the revolutionary ranks later on. In October of the same year, the Portuguese in Macao actively supported the revolution that had taken place in Portugal proper to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic. Soon afterwards, they named a newly-built road "Republic Avenue" to display their support for the republic system. In these favourable circumstances, the Macao branch of the Tongmenghui was set up in the winter of the same year at No. 41, Praya Grande Road. Xie Yingbo, the head of the Tongmenghui Hong Kong branch, served concurrently as the head of Macao branch.

Tongmenghui vigorously developed local revolutionary forces as soon as the Macao branch of the Tongmenghui was established. Through the application to the Portuguese authorities in Macao by Lu Yiruo, the son of a rich local merchant, the members of the Tongmenghui set up "Haojing Library". On the one hand, the library collected books from people of all walks of life so as to provide the masses with the opportunities to borrow and read them; on the other hand, they publicly solicited readers for the library, and secretly recruited new Tongmenghui members among the readers. When the library announced its establishment, they held an inaugural meeting attended by more than 200 people. At the meeting, the revolutionaries made speeches one after another. Zhao Liancheng, a student of Peiji School and a female member of the Tongmenghui, made waves as the first woman in Macao history to make speeches advocating the overthrowing of Qing dynasty.

Meanwhile, the Tongmenghui paid great attention to the development of revolutionary armed forces in Xiangshan County. They introduced a famous chief of forest outlaws, Liang Yi, into the Tongmenghui, making the armed forces under his command available for the revolution. They also successfully persuaded the captain and other officers of "Guangfu" warship, which patrolled around Qianshan, to use the warship to cover the Tongmenghui's activities. Such activities were expensive, so they tried to raise money through various means. Mr. Liang Jingqing, a Macao resident, sold three fishing boats of his own and his family in succession, and contributed all the money to the branch. His comrades praised him as "the king (model) of the families living on water". As to the spies who had sneaked into revolutionary organizations and attempted to assassinate revolutionary leaders, they resolutely uprooted them. With long-term painstaking efforts by the branch of the Tongmenghui, on the eve of 1911 revolution, most of the Chinese inhabitants in Macao turned to revolution. Many ardent youth, including quite a few male and female students from the stronghold of the reformers, Zibao School, joined the Tongmenghui.

At that time, members of the revolutionary parties were organizing armed uprising in cities throughout country. The Macao branch took engineering the uprising in Xiangshan County as its prime task. Lin Junfu, the new branch head and others were responsible for winning over the "new army" stationed at Qianshan, which was equipped with Western arms and trained in Western ways. And Zheng Bian and others were to instigate the army and local militia troops stationed in the Xiangshan County seat to rebel. As the "new army" of 2,000 men had taken part in 1910 Canton uprising, many officers had revolutionary ideas. Among them, the battalion commander Wang Henian was especially radical. Through Wang's classmates Zheng Zhongchao and He Zhentong, the Tongmenghui was able to gain control of this crack force. In Xiangshan County seat were stationed a garrison army commanded by a brigade commander Ma Dexin, the local militia troops led by Zheng Yuchu and Huang Longzhang, and the guards of the county government led by Wang Zuobiao. At the instigation of Zheng Bian and others, Zheng Yuchu, Huang Longzhang and Wang Zuobiao successively joined the Tongmenghui, which enabled the Tongmenghui to control the militia and county guards. In addition, they also sent out comrades to contact persons of ideals and integrity in various townships and villages, and forest outlaws, agreeing on the date to start a revolt together.

Lin Jinghun, who remained in Macao and presided over the work of the head office, was to collect funds. As he was familiar with Chinese merchants in Macao, Hong Kong and overseas, he succeeded in raising a large fund from them. Among those who made large contributions for the revolution were Chen Yongan, a member of the Tongmenghui and a son of a rich family in Macao. Those who stayed in Macao, especially the female comrades, shouldered the task of shipping the weapons from Macao to Xiangshan. They loaded the armaments on warships, whose captains were sympathetic to the revolution. With skillful camouflage, the weapons escaped the customs officers' examination, and were safely sent into the hands of the rebel army.

After the 1911 Revolution broke out in Wuchang on the 10th of October, the members of the Tongmenghui in Macao speeded up preparation for the uprising in Xiangshan County. The armed uprising in Xiangshan was launched on November 2 at Xiaolan, and the "new army" at Qianshan and militia troops in the county seat revolted simultaneously on November 5, and captured Xiangshan County seat on the same day. The success of the Xiangshan uprising inspired the revolutionaries in Canton and other cities in Guangdong, who captured Canton, the capital of Guangdong Province, three days later, and hastened the collapse of Qing dynasty rule in the province. Afterwards, the Xiangshan insurrectionary army, with the "new army" at Qianshan as its main force, was reorganized into the "Xiang Army" and stationed at Xiguan, Canton. Before long, the "Xiang Army" joined the Guangdong Northern Expeditionary Army, and moved forward to the front line in Jiangsu Province to fight against the Qing troops. Meanwhile, quite a few women members of the Tongmenghui from Macao, such as Xu Jianhun, Chen Bingqing, Liang Guoti and others, joined the Guangdong Women's Northern Expeditionary Team, which advanced to Xuzhou front line via Nanjing.

After the victory of the 1911 Revolution, there appeared a warm revolutionary atmosphere in Macao. The Macao branch of the Tongmenghui sponsored a pigtail-cutting assembly at a theater, attended by over 1,000 people. And people from all walks of life in Macao donated several ten thousand silver dollars to the Guangdong Revolutionary Government. The Portuguese in Macao sincerely congratulated the Chinese people on shaking off the shackle of despotic monarchy. On January 1, 1912, when the founding of the Republic of China was proclaimed, at the suggestion of Francisco H. Fernandes, an old fiend of Sun Yat-sen, the Senate of Macao hoisted the flag of the Republic of China at the Senate hall and convened a mass meeting, solemnly celebrating the birth of the Republic of China and Sun Yat-sen's inauguration as interim President. Fernandes also wrote to Sun Yat-sen, warmly praising him for his "perseverance, staunchness and boundless courage" "admired by the whole world" and saying that Sun was "a special person who inspired the revolutionary people in the whole world". Fernandes wrote that he was filled with joy since China and Portugal, two friendly countries had both become republics within one year. In May, Sun Yat-sen was transferred to the post of the Inspector of National Railways, and returned via Macao to his native place, from which he had been absent 17 years. He stayed in Macao for three days and was warmly welcomed by Chinese and Portuguese people of all social strata. The Governor and Bishop of Macao also received the veteran Chinese revolutionary.

For a while, Macao was permeated with joy for the success of the revolution in China. But the fruit of the 1911 Revolution was quickly usurped by the Northern Warlords headed by Yuan Shikai, and the revolutionary atmosphere in Macao vanished like mist and smoke. The Tongmenghui branch in Macao soon disintegrated, and the "Haojing Library" came to an end too. The leading members of the branch were depressed and gloomy; some even shaved their heads and became Buddhist monks. The members of the Tongmenghui lost their fighting spirit as well as their leaders. Some members had no means of living, and their life was very miserable. One or two women who had taken part in the Women Northern Expeditionary Team even were forced to be prostitutes. Just as in other places all over China, a tragedy of "revolutionary army thriving, but revolutionary parties withering" was staged in Macao.

When Yuan Shikai attempted to restore the monarchy and become the new emperor in 1915, the Chinese Revolutionary Party again used Macao as a base. The struggle began in March 1913, when the followers of Yuan Shikai assassinated the KMT leader Song Jiaoren in Shanghai. The revolutionaries, headed by Sun Yat-sen, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Yuan Shikai. Sun Yat-sen asked his wife, Lu Muzhen, and other relatives to move to Macao to avoid the persecution of them by Yuan Shikai and his followers. In late June, Sun came to Macao and other places to gather the forces together to fight against Yuan Shikai. In Macao, Sun made an appointment with Chen Jiongming, a member of KMT and the Governor of Guangdong, to meet on a warship, and obtaining his agreement to a plan of "simultaneously announcing the independence of four provinces including Guangdong".

When the punitive expedition against Yuan was defeated, Chen Jiongming was replaced by one of Yuan's supporters, Long Jiguang, as the Governor of Guangdong. Long Jiguang was a cruel butcher and plunged Guangdong into a bloody terror. To escape their lives, the members of the Tongmenghui, the leaders of various secret societies, and others who had opposed Yuan's rule had to move to Macao. Among them were Sun Mei, the brother of Sun Yat-sen, Huang Mingtang, an old member of the Tongmenghui, who had once been a placating censor to Hainan Island, Liu Sifu, who had been the head of the anarchists and published an anti-Yuan publication, "Huiming Lu" (Records of Screaming in the Darkness). Although quite a few members of the Tongmenghui were concentrated in Macao at that time, due to the virtual disintegration of the Tongmenghui, they did not do much. The anarchists, like Liu Sifu, were the only exception. They changed "Huiming Lu" into "Minsheng" (People's Voice) and continued to publish the journal, protesting against Yuan's regime. The journal quite influential domestically and internationally.

Long Jiguang found out that the anti-Yuan persons had escaped to Macao. Besides compelling Liu Sifu and others to leave Macao through diplomatic channels at the beginning of 1914, Long and his associates tried their best to win over the Portuguese authorities in Macao, and sent a large number of spies to Macao to persecute the anti-Yuan people. Before long, the spies discovered the address of Huang Mingtang, falsely accused him of being the chief of bandits, made the Portuguese police arrest him, and attempted to have him transferred to Canton. Luckily, Sun Yat-sen got the information in time. Trying every possible means to rescue him, Sun finally got him released after a year in prison. However, Liang Qichao, the former leader of the royalists, was cooperating with Yuan Shikai in the north, so the former members of the "Royalists Association" in Macao also supported Yuan, and criticized the anti-Yuan movement. Under the royalist influence, the local people had ill feelings towards the revolutionary parties. The activities of the revolutionaries in Macao were at their lowest ebb.

In July 1914, Sun Yat-sen organized a new "Chinese Revolutionary Party" in Japan. Seeing that Long Jiguang was Yuan Shikai's henchman and a formidable enemy of revolution, Sun delegated Li Haiyun, Deng Jian and others to return to Guangdong to launch a punitive campaign against Long Jiguang as an important link in the revolutionary struggle against Yuan. Zhu Zhixin, a famous revolutionary leader, coincidently returned to Guangdong for the same purpose. Through a joint arrangement by Zhu Zhixin, Li Haiyun and Deng Jian, by using Macao as a base, Lin Jingyun and some of his comrades instigated a rebellion among the troops stationed in Xiangshan and the forest bandits. At the end of that year, the revolutionary army in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, took the lead in starting the uprising. The revolutionaries, busy with preparations in Macao and Xiangshan County, were ready to respond at once. Unfortunately, one of the persons in charge of the uprising was arrested in Hong Kong, and Lin Jingyun was also arrested and questioned by the Portuguese officials about a friend who had been killed accidentally while making explosives in Macao. Therefore, the revolutionaries had to postpone the uprising in Xiangshan. After being released, Lin Jingyun required the troops stationed in Xiangshan to aid the revolutionary army which was attacking Fushan. Because Long Jiguang launched a counter-attack and the revolutionary army suffered one defeat after another in various places, the uprising of the troops in Xiangshan aborted.

After experiencing these setbacks, Zhu Zhixin moved to Macao, and decided to use the special conditions there to make long-term preparations for another uprising. The arrival of Zhu Zhixin filled the old members of the Tongmenghui with exultation. Led by Zhu Zhixin, they enthusiastically plunged into the campaign against Long Jiguang. Macao again became a revolutionary base. Because Long Jiguang kept a watchful eye on the activities of the revolutionaries in Macao and succeeded in assassinating the old Tongmenghui member Fang Cishi and others, the conditions in Macao were more dangerous than before the 1911 Revolution. To avoid being assassinated, Zhu Zhixin lived in hiding. The activities of the revolutionaries were kept strictly secret. Their communication and liaison arrangements were changed constantly. A small printing house and the some residences were used for secret communication and contacts. The revolutionaries even used a brothel at Venturas Lane as a place to make secret contacts, for in this brothel there was a prostitute called Jin Zai, who sympathized with the revolution. When the revolutionaries told her that they wanted to use her place to carry out revolutionary activities, she agreed and promised to keep them secret; when they were short of funds, she pawned her own gold ornaments.

In the summer of 1915, Yuan Shikai's ambition to become the new monarch was thoroughly exposed. Even Liang Qichao, who had supported him, deserted him and chose a different path in his famous article "How Strange It Is with the So-called State System Problem" published in August 1915. This article aroused great interest among the Chinese residents of Macao. Afterwards, people of Liang Qichao's camp, like Xu Qin, went to Hong Kong, Macao and elsewhere in Guangdong to organize armed forces to fight Yuan. In this new situation, Zhu Zhixin made a special trip to Tokyo at the beginning of November 1915, to discuss with Sun Yat-sen about how to further carry out the struggle against Yuan in Guangdong. Zhu Zhixin joined the Chinese Revolutionary Party and was appointed by Sun Yat-sen to be the general commander of the Guangdong revolutionary army. With the financial support from Sun, and the help of Zhang Fakui, Xue Yue, Li Yangjing and others, who became famous generals of the KMT troops a few years later, Zhu secretly set up a military command office in Macao to prepare for an armed uprising against Long Jiguang. Meanwhile, they actively expanded the organization of the Chinese Revolutionary Party and recruited a large number of new members from the former members of the Tongmenghui.

On December 25, 1915, Cai E and his comrades declared the independence of Yunnan Province, and the war to protect the newly established republic broke out. In January 1916, one detachment of the Yunnan rebel army attacked Guangxi Province. Long Jiguang had to dispatch his main force to intercept the rebels. Seizing the opportunity, the Chinese Revolutionary Army led by Zhu Zhixin started one uprising after another in Guangdong. After a first failure in Huizhou, he mobilized the militia of the counties around Canton to attack the city along three routes on February 9. The comrades from Macao were ordered to advance along the route of Zengcheng, Lugang and Longyandong, then to attack the small Northern Gate of Canton to control the whole city together with other troops. Unfortunately, the secret leaked out before the uprising started. Long Jiguang hastily suppressed it with crack troops.

Although the insurrectionary army had suffered two setbacks, the rule of Long Jiguang had received heavy blows as well. Yuan Shikai had to order the warship "Zhaohe" stationed in Shanghai to sail to Canton and anchor at Huangpu to strengthen the defence of Canton. After the arrival of the "Zhaohe", Zhu Zhixin plotted to hijack the vessel for the second time. Those who carried out the plan were Yang Hu, Ma Bolin and Sun Xiangfu, who had attempted an aborted hijacking of the ship in Shanghai several months before and had followed it south. A "dare-to-die corps" consisting of more than ten overseas Chinese was organized, with Chen Ce as its leader. On March 7, Chen Ce, Yang Hu and Ma Bolin led the "dare-to-die corps", disguising themselves as passengers, boarded the ferry-boat "Yonggu" sailing from Macao to Canton. While the ferry-boat was approaching Huangpu, they suddenly hijacked it with arms. Because the current was too swift, the ferry-boat was unable to near the "Zhaohe"; instead, they were found by the warship sentries. The warship ordered the ferry-boat to stop for a check, or it would open fire. Yang Hu and his comrades were forced to jump into the water to escape. As a result, most were either killed or arrested.

Despite repeated setbacks, Zhu Zhixin still did not lose heart. During this period, he held talks with Chen Jiongming many times in Macao, discussing the problem of a unified military command. With the support of his comrades, he eventually succeeded in inciting the troops stationed in Qinzhou, Lianjiang, Chaozhou and Shantou to start an uprising at the end of March. Then this revolutionary army, and other forces led by Xu Qin, launched an attack on Canton. On June 6, Yuan Shikai died alone. Soon afterwards, Long Jiguang was forced to escape to Hainan Island with his remnant forces. The punitive campaign against Long Jiguang in Guangdong came to a successful end.

Thereafter, the revolutionaries gradually gained a foothold in the interior of Guangdong and could work overtly. Only during the period when the warlords from Guangxi Province occupied Canton, did Sun Ke set up an office in Macao as a specially-appointed agent under the order of his father Sun Yat-sen, to incite the navy and army in Guangdong to stage an uprising. Some revolutionaries had practiced hydroplane-piloting training in Macao, and in the winter of 1920, they made reconnaissances of the enemy, distributed leaflets and coordinated with the army in driving out the warlords from Guangxi with these aeroplanes. Except for these activities, no other important work was carried out by the revolutionaries in Macao. Especially after Canton became a base of the Great Revolution (1924 - 1927), it was no longer necessary to continue to use Macao as a place of secret activities. The special role played by Macao in the movements changing China in modern times came to an end after 1920.

Starting from the end of the 19th century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, Macao, which had lagged behind economically for a long time, slowly began to modernize.

Macao's industry began to develop at the eve of the 20th century. However, Macao was small and short of natural resources, and the Portuguese had not much capital, so the industrial development of Macao was slow and limited. From the beginning of the 20th century, factories and workshops were set up, mostly handicraft workshops. Larger enterprise, such as the electric lighting company, the waterworks and the cement factory were mainly funded by either British capital or French capital. The factories and workshops invested in by Chinese capital were mostly small. Some factories were simply enlarged handicraft workshops. They included food factories processing special products from the interior, textile mills weaving with foreign cotton yarn, garment workshops making clothes with foreign cloth to be marketed in Guangdong, and factories producing daily necessities for the local people. The factories, whose products had a market both abroad and in the interior of China, developed a little faster, such as cigarette factories and breweries. And the factories and workshops producing fireworks, matches and incense for worship developed the fastest, which were called the "three pillar industries" of Macao. In the early 1930s, the export value of the products from these three industries was about 40% of the total export value of Macao. The fireworks industry, with a large number of factories and workshops, was the only modern industry in Macao at the beginning of the century, and still ranked first among the three pillar industries in the 1930s.

These industries developed mainly because of the influx of refugees from the interior around the 1911 Revolution and again after 1927 when the coalition between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party (KMT) broke down. The population of Macao rose dramatically from 70,000 in 1910 to 150,000 in 1927, creating the basic conditions for the development of handicrafts: plenty of labour and low wages. Low tariffs also reduced production costs and increased the competitiveness of the Macaonese products in the overseas market.

But these industries did not occupy the lion's share of the Macao economy. As late as about 1935, there were only about 120 factories and workshops in Macao. The most important business in Macao was still fishing. There were about 2,000 fishing boats and 40,000 male and female workers. The most important export product was still salted fish, with a total annual value of several million silver dollars, about 30% of the total export value in Macao. Therefore, Macao was still generally thought of as a fishing port.

During this period, the urban construction of Macao made progress as well. As the population increased, the urban area spread northward towards the hilly land in the northern part of the Macao Peninsula, and many western-style buildings built by the Portuguese and Chinese-style houses built by the Chinese appeared in Long Tin, Long Wan, Tap Siac, Sa Kong and Mongha. In order to attract Chinese and foreign tourists, the Portuguese authorities in Macao improved the city's appearance. As early as about 1850, the Portuguese authorities had spared no efforts in greening the area. Banyan trees were planted on both sides of many streets. On Guia Hill, pine trees thickly planted and the hill earned a new name, "Pine Hill". By about 1900, public and private gardens had also been built. One called by the local Chinese "the New Garden" was located at the foot of Guia Hill. With its beautiful scenery, it was the largest construction project in Macao since the building of the highway from the down town to the Barrier Gate.

Many other new buildings were built one after another. The Guia lighthouse, first built in 1865 and rebuilt in 1910, could be called the first lighthouse in the East Asia. The luxurious "President Hotel" with six stories was built in 1928, and was second to none in East Asia at the time. And the church for the bishop at the summit of Penha Hill was rebuilt in 1936. Chinese gentry merchants built a number of Chinese-style gardens, including three famous ones. The Lou Lim Ieoc Garden, in the famous ancient Suzhou garden style, was the best. Many roads were built or widened. Almeida Ribeiso Avenue, running across Macao from east to west and later the busiest and most prosperous road, was built in 1918 by removing a hill. Many other important roads were also constructed in this period. In the 1920s and 1930s, the harbours were dredged, and land was reclaimed from the sea, linking Green Island with the Macao Peninsula, widening the "lotus stalk" south of the Barrier Gate, and giving Praya Grande a new look. The area of the Macao Peninsula was nearly doubled, to 5.4 square kilometers.

The Portuguese authorities also rationalized of the layout of the city. They located the cemetery at Taipa, moved the hospital for lepers to Coloane and opened the two picturesque islands to tourists. The Toi San district was on landfill and of some distance from downtown, so the Portuguese authorities designated it an area to produce dangerous products, and requested all the firecracker factories to move there. But before long, the largest firecracker factory in Macao, the Toi San Firecracker Mill, exploded, leaving about one thousand workers killed or wounded. Then, all the firecracker factories were ordered to move to Taipa. Five years later, a big explosion in the arsenal at Guia destroyed a large number of houses along several streets, killing and wounding several hundred inhabitants. So from then on, ammunition was also stored on islands like Taipa. Overall, the improvements were both advantageous to the hygiene and safety of downtown and somewhat beneficial to the islands. However, the construction of municipal works often harmed the Chinese inhabitants. For instance, that villages and houses north of the city wall were pulled down to open up roads and to build gardens met strong resistance from the Chinese inhabitants.

Communications and transportation in Macao also developed. Since the late 19th century when merchants from Hong Kong and Macao had established a steamship company, the water communications among Macao, Hong Kong and the interior had been quite convenient. There were direct lines between Macao and Canton, Jiangmen, Sanbu and Shiqi with steamships shuttling to and fro every day. The communication between Macao and Hong Kong was especially well-developed, with seven passenger liners in the 1920s. Beginning in 1921, dredging deepened the harbours and created more lanes, so larger ships could anchor. On land three buses running along streets like Almeida Ribeiro Avenue appeared in 1925. The next year, the number of buses increased to thirty, which greatly facilitated the movements within the city. After the Canton-Macao railway project failed, Chinese merchants set up Kee Kuan Motor-Road Company, and began to build a highway linking the town of Shiqi, the seat of Xiangshan (now called Zhongshan County in honor of Sun Yat-sen) and Macao. In March, 1928, part of the highway was opened to traffic, and eight years later, the highway, with a total length of 95.45 kilometers, divided into east and west lanes, was completed and opened to traffic finally. In the same year, Macao began to serve as the terminal of the Far East line of the Pan-America Airliner. Every Wednesday afternoon a seaplane arrived at the airfield on water via Hong Kong. With the efforts of the authorities and private business, water, land and air communications in Macao all began to develop.

The development of the post and telegram business in Macao was also quite impressive. In 1825, when the postal service had just started in Macao, the facilities were rather simple, providing surface mail service only. The establishment of the fist Post Office in 1884 gave an impetus to the post and telegraph business. In 1917, two agreements concerning postal charges and mutual remittance were signed by the relevant authorities of China and Macao. In 1929, the Portuguese authorities established the Macao General Post Office, and its new building was completed two years later. With the new building opened to business, Macao began to use automatic telephones and to receive and send out telegrams. In 1932, the Macao General Post Office on behalf of the Portuguese authorities in Macao signed an agreement concerning telegraph service with the Wireless Communication Administrative Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of Communication. Now the Macao wireless communication station could establish business links with those in Shanghai, Canton and Xiamen. The postal and telegraph service in Macao at that time was as good as that of Hong Kong.

In addition, the financial business in Macao developed too. On August 2, 1902, the National Overseas Bank, with its headquarter in Portugal, set up a branch in Macao, which was the only bank in Macao in decades thereafter. In 1905, the National Overseas Bank reached an agreement with the Portuguese authorities in Macao to issue a local currency, the Pataca, with the total value controlled by the authorities. On January 27, 1906, the first batch of Pataca paper money was formally circulated in the market. The bank issued 175,000 Patacas in the first year and 2.5 million Patacas in the second year, and increased the volume year by year. However, for many reasons, at that time the main currency used in Macao was still the Hong Kong dollar, and the coins used were mainly Guangdong silver coins, so the Pataca was only of secondary importance.

The development of the economy brought along the development of education and culture as well. In the last period of the Qing dynasty, the education in Macao improved greatly. Zibao School, Peiji School and others were influential. When the Boxer Uprising was raging in north China, the Lingnan School, the predecessor of Lingnan University, moved to Macao for some time. In the initial years of the Republic of China, some enthusiastic public figures of education, including people from the church, established kindergartens, primary and middle schools, and polytechnic schools teaching accounting, English, Portuguese and other subjects, while old-style schools were modernized one after another. Preparations were made for the establishment of a university. Charity schools were set up in Patane, Toi San and other places to provide students from poor families with a primary education. All these schools cultivated quite a few talented students. Xiao Youmei, a famous musician and educationalist, was educated in Macao, and had an excellent student named Xian Xinhai, who was born and spent his childhood in Macao and became one of the two most famous composers in modern China.

The cultural life in Macao developed too. At the beginning of the 1920s, several bookstores were set up. By 1930, there were more than a dozen bookstores in Macao, and in the early 1930s, bookstores selling the new-vernacular literature appeared. Starting from 1916, newspapers in Chinese began to increase. They were not like the tabloids such as Haojing Evening, which published only the news and experiences of the gambling houses or the rosy news and stories of the prostitutes. These newspapers published social news and dispatches from other parts of the country, which made it possible for the Portuguese authorities in Macao to subside the Chinese newspapers from then on. Films, too, which had been invented not long before, were all the rage in the 1920s and 1930s in Macao as elsewhere. In 1921, a silent film cinema was built in Macao, and in 1930, a sound film cinema appeared. By 1932, there already were four cinemas in Macao. In 1927, at the demand of the residents, the Portuguese authorities in Macao also established a museum. Through several years, the museum collected quite a number of valuable cultural relics.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, poets and writers like Qiu Fengjia and Yang Zenghui, who came to Macao one after another for sightseeing or giving lectures, and many surviving adherents of the Qing dynasty, who regarded Macao as a good place for seclusion, left behind them many poems and articles about the city. The Freewheeling Travelling Notes of Hong Kong and Macao, written by Liang Qiaohan in the Guangxu Emperor period (1875-1908), details Macao's local conditions, customs and cultural relics. The Poems of Macao written by Wang Zhaoyong in the beginning of the republican period describes the scenery of Macao and records some oft-quoted and widely loved anecdotes.

In wake of the development of industry, commerce and education, various social organizations were established. The more influential ones were the Macao General Association of Chinese Merchants, the Macao Saint House of Mercy and the Macao Charity Society of Hospital "Kiang Wu". Of these three large Chinese mass organizations, the latter two were charity and welfare establishments set up in the late 19th century. They won a unanimous praise for their charity work from both Portuguese and Chinese public figures. The General Association of Chinese Merchants, which played an important role in the local economic life, was established later, and experienced some ups and downs in the course of its formation.

In the late 19th century, the Chinese merchants in Macao had a tradition of meeting at the Hospital "Kiang Wu" whenever something happened. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Qing government encouraged the merchants in various places to organize themselves into chambers of commerce, so as to revitalize commerce. After receiving the approval of the Portuguese authorities in Macao, the merchants in Macao set up a Chinese chamber of commerce to improve the relationship between the merchants and the authorities. The Portuguese government, however, sticking to its colonialist policy of discriminating against Chinese merchants, ordered the disbanding of the Chinese chamber of commerce and the establishment of a chamber of commerce controlled by the Portuguese. The charter of the new chamber stipulated that any shop that was not a member should not be regarded as decent, in an attempt to force the Chinese merchants to join that chamber of commerce. Most Chinese merchants refused. But whenever commercial disputes took place, due to the lack of mediation and arbitration by the chamber of commerce, they had to go to the local Portuguese court. The Portuguese court was often unfair, causing resentment among the Chinese merchants.

In 1909, when Xiangzhou became a trading port, the Portuguese in Macao were afraid that harsh treatment towards the Chinese merchants "would drive them to Xiangzhou". The Portuguese inhabitants demanded that the Portuguese government change its policy towards Chinese merchants. The Portuguese Governor of Macao also favoured the idea that Chinese merchants should request to set up a chamber of commerce again. After a delay, the Portuguese government approved the establishment a general association of Chinese merchants residing in Macao in December 1912. The association was formally established in 1913 and its name was changed to Macao General Association of Chinese Merchants in 1916. Its sponsor, Xiao Yinzhou, was the first president. The association was authorized by the Portuguese government to mediate and deal with commercial disputes. Its written charter clearly stipulated that the arbitration given by the association was to be regarded as the court sentence, and no appeal was allowed under any circumstances". The association became a local social organization of great authority.

From the beginning of 20th century, the workers' organizations also began to have great influence in Macao. As early as 1840, some construction workers set up their own guild. Soon afterwards, the bricklayers, shipyard workers and tea house attendants all established guilds. In the early 1920s, inspired by the national workers' movement, more than ten labour unions of various professions were established. On May 1, 1922, the assembly sponsored by the labour unions to celebrate the "International Labour Day" attended by many people. On May 28, 1922, some Chinese workers beat up a Portuguese soldier of African origin for taking liberties with a Chinese woman in the street. The Portuguese police arrested three Chinese workers. Public anger was aroused among the masses of Chinese workers and citizens. That evening, about ten thousand people, including the representatives of various labour unions and social organizations from all walks of life, encircled the police station nearby, demanding the release of the arrested workers. The Portuguese authorities in Macao assembled troops to confront the masses. After a confrontation for a whole night, the Portuguese army and police opened fire at the masses on the morning of May 29, causing several dozen people to be killed or wounded. Because of the bloody incident, the Chinese workers and other inhabitants held a general strike, attracting the attention of the whole nation. The Portuguese authorities in Macao stepped up their suppression. On June 1, they ordered all the labour unions involved in the incident to disband and all the shops to open, or the shops would no longer be protected by the authorities. On June 2, the workers' representatives Chen Gensheng and Liang Gongxia went to Canton to visit the Extraordinary President of the Southern Government, Sun Yat-sen, asking him to send warships to Macao to support them. Sun Yat-sen expressed his support and stationed soldiers and warships at Qianshan and other places around Macao. With the support of workers of the whole nation, the Chinese inhabitants in Macao persisted in their struggle, giving a heavy blow to the Portuguese colonialists. Nevertheless, the workers were too weak to restore the labour unions.

In April 1926, the workers in Macao prepared to act again to respond to the vigorous general strike of the workers in Guangdong and Hong Kong. The Portuguese authorities hastily dispatched troops to guard various docks to prevent the Chinese merchants from leaving Macao, and colluded with the British authorities in Hong Kong to threaten the workers in Macao with armed forces from Hong Kong. Therefore, the strike in Macao aborted. Despite the suppression, some workers' guilds were still maintained, continuing to defend the workers' legal rights.

Macao's modernization proceeded very slowly until the late 1920s. The most important reason for this was the influence of the domestic situation in Portugal. Both before and after the establishment of the republic, Portugal was bogged down in political disturbances, and frequent coup d'etats, or was on the brink of financial bankruptcy. Instead of getting any financial help from the Portuguese government, Macao was impeded by the Portuguese bureaucratic and political chaos and by the policy of exploiting the colonies. Some Portuguese officials in Macao knew that Macao urgently needed reform, but without the authorization of the Portuguese government, they had to follow the old ways and shelve any rational construction plans. After the establishment of the republic, Macao was seriously harmed by a policy of using the positions of the officials in Macao, as lucrative rewards for the followers of politicians in Portugal. The trick lay in the rate of exchange. While the Portuguese currency (the Escudo) was devalued dramatically at home, its exchange rate to Pataca in Macao remained at the official 1910 rates, so that officials coming from Lisbon, whose salary was calculated in Escudos, could earn a salary as high as twenty times more than their counterparts at home in Portugal.

The assumption of political power in Macao by such carpet-baggers could only result in a huge deficit and low efficiency in Macao. For instance, the Portuguese authorities in Macao maintained a gunboat to arrest pirates at a cost of one million Patacas a year, surpassing the total annual revenues from port taxes, house taxes and land taxes all together. One million Patacas were spent on the installation of fire-fighting taps in seven streets without solving the water supply before hand, so that theses fire-fighting facilities were useless for a long time. Seeing such mismanagement, not only did foreign businessmen prefer to squeeze into Hong Kong rather than to invest in Macao, but also the Portuguese in Macao became disunited and fought with the Lisbon bureaucratic government. They thought that if things continued this way, Macao would be doomed, and some even wished Macao had fallen into the hand of another Western power.

In the late 1920s, things took a turn for the better. In 1926, a relatively stable government was in power after a coup d'etat in Portugal. The new government was committed to reforms in finance and economy, which helped Macao. In addition, the official exchange rate for Escudos was abolished after 1925, and the source of Portuguese officials in Macao had some changes. Some Portuguese officials did accomplish something in Macao. Arthur Tamagnini de Souca Barbosa, the first Governor in Macao who was not a military officer, scored some successes in his three terms in office. For an example, on October 8, 1928, when a big fire destroyed a large number of straw sheds and wood houses of the poor Chinese residents in Toi San, he mobilized the rich merchants and the charity organizations to build houses for them. The neighbourhood was called by Chinese residents the "Barbosa living quarter".

In December 1928, the KMT government and the Portuguese government signed the Treaty of Friendship and Commerce, so the relationship between Macao and the interior improved. Except for one instance in 1935 of the Portuguese attempting to force their language on Chinese schools and shops, China and Portugal got on reasonably well for a long time, which contributed to a new period of prosperity and quick development for Macao around 1930.

In spite of the partial modernization of the economy and cultural life, the Portuguese authorities in Macao still relied chiefly upon opium and gambling for revenue. The several million Patacas in opium and gambling taxes a year represented about 90% of the city's total revenue. Although banning the traffic in opium and opium-smoking became a common call of the world, and the Chinese government repeatedly promulgated decrees to prohibit the import and smoking of opium, the Portuguese authorities in Macao brushed all these bans aside. In Macao, buying and selling, and processing and smoking opium were still legal, and one could see people smoking opium everywhere in Macao. So Chinese and international public opinion denounced the Portuguese authorities sternly. The number of gambling houses in Macao steadily increased, with gamblers coming from Hong Kong and the interior like fish swimming down a river. After gambling crazily day in and day out, those who lost a family fortune committed suicide by hanging themselves, taking poisonous drugs or jumping into the sea. Brothels of various kinds were on the increase as well. In June 1935, when the British authorities in Hong Kong prohibited brothels, many of them moved to Macao. The blocks of Venturas Lane, Caldeira Lane, Caldeira Road and so on became places with a concentration of brothels and thousands of prostitutes. Felicidade Road, Felicidade Lane and Felicidade Alley housed high-class brothels, so they were called the "three streets" of pornography.

Closely linked with opium-smoking, gambling and prostitution were the criminal gangs. Visitors to Macao had the impression that rogues and local ruffians were especially numerous. The rogues, bandits and smuggling magnates converging in Macao not only idled away their time in pleasure-seeking through eating, drinking, whoring and gambling, and worked at stealing, robbing, looting and plundering, but also engaged in smuggling various kinds of goods, such as opium. In order to cover up the smuggling operations, they set up various kinds of so-called clubs to bribe and buy the customs officials and the captains of anti-smuggling patrol boats and coast guard vessels with money, food, drink and sex. Macao continued to be one of the notorious centres of smuggling in Guangdong. The captains of anti-smuggling boats and coast guard vessels hankered after the trafficking in the smuggled goods, and acted in cahoots with the bandits and whetted their ferocity, posing a serious threat to the inhabitants in and near Macao. On November 19, 1922, the passenger ship "Rui An" sailing between Hong Kong and Macao was seized and plundered by pirates. Because of that, passenger ships did not travel between Hong Kong and Macao in the evening until 1927.

Since the end of the 19th century, through several decades' efforts, the economy in Macao diversified and grew, and the city's appearance changed to a certain degree. The stage was set for Macao's economy to go along a healthy development track several decades later. However, the changes were too slight to be noticed by the outsiders at the time. Macao was still a notorious city, and its image as a den of iniquity had not yet changed.

In the 1930s, when the economy of Macao had been rejuvenated to a certain degree, the Chinese people faced the frenzied aggression of the Japanese imperialists. At this most critical moment of the Chinese nation and after the victory of the Second World War (known in China as the War of Resistance against Japan), many events attracting people's attention took place in Macao, which went through thick and thin together with its motherland.

On September 18, 1931, the Japanese launched a large scale armed invasion with the aim to wipe out China. People all over China responded with a dynamic national salvation movement. The Chinese residents in Macao shared the bitter hatred of the enemy. Since the Portuguese maintained neutrality in the war between China and Japan, the Macao authorities prohibited the inhabitants from carrying out open anti-Japanese activities. The Chinese inhabitants instead participated in the anti-Japanese national salvation movement for their motherland under the name of helping people tide over a national disaster.

Relying on their air superiority, the Japanese invaders again and again bombed China's cities. The Chinese inhabitants of Macao, no matter whether they were well-off merchants, pedlars, working people or children, all tried their best to support the motherland's build up of her air forces. Lin Yao and other youths from Macao entered aviation schools in the interior of China and later shed their blood in air battles. The Chinese inhabitants also joined the nation-wide boycott of Japanese goods, causing sales of Japanese goods in Macao to fall sharply. By the end of 1935, young people in Macao played a vanguard role in the local national salvation movement by organizing reading societies, drama societies, music societies, choruses and other organizations. The Dazhong Chorus performed at a theatre, singing "March of the Volunteers" and other anti-Japanese songs, which encouraged the patriotic enthusiasm of the Chinese inhabitants. Papers with the backing of the patriotic young people, such as The Masses Journal and The Morning Sun Daily, often gave wide coverage of the activities of the young people, and published their literary and artistic works advocating resistance against Japan, becoming a leader of public opinion in the local national salvation movement. In the corner of the southern seaboard, the singing of patriotic songs echoed here and there, setting off new upsurges of resistance to the Japanese aggressors.

On July 7, 1937, the Lugouqiao Incident took place, marking the beginning of the national war of resistance against Japanese aggression. Initially, the Japanese aircrafts wantonly bombed Canton and other Chinese cities, causing huge losses to life and property. As Macao was adjacent to Canton, people from Canton and other places escaped to Macao, bringing along the old and the young, and resulting in a dramatic population increase in Macao. In October, 1938, the Japanese army landed at Daya Bay and captured Canton and other cities of Guangdong Province soon afterwards. More refugees from Canton, Xiangshan and other places poured into Macao again, causing the population of Macao to increase to an unprecedented 250,000.

The trading ports in South China were either destroyed or affected by the war, so the import and export trade of Canton moved to ports like Macao. Goods from America, Europe, South-east Asia and elsewhere, including food and other daily necessities, were shipped to Macao in a steady stream, and sent to the interior from there, while products from the interior and Macao area were shipped from Macao to various countries abroad and other places in China. The total volume of the trade of Macao increased several times. The thriving of trade and the daily needs of 200,000 inhabitants stimulated local manufacturing, fisheries, construction and transportation, and brought along corresponding development in public undertakings like education and public health.

The original medical facilities could not serve the increased population, so quite a few hospitals offering either Chinese traditional medical treatment or Western medical service were quickly set up by people in the medical profession, both refugees and residents. The Chinese Guangdong authorities listed Macao as an area for schools to evacuate to from the very beginning of the war, as Macao was a "neutral area". Within a very short period, about thirty middle and primary schools moved to Macao from the interior, but still more schools were needed, so education professionals who took refugee in Macao and the Macao church authorities set up various kinds of schools. In 1939, there were over 140 primary schools, with about 40,000 pupils, and 30 odd middle schools and polytechnic schools with more than 30,000 students. Not only could most of the teen-ages from the interior attend schools, but also several thousand young people in Macao, most of whom had no chance to go to middle school before.

The refugees escaping to Macao were properly settled down. The Portuguese authorities in Macao set up refugee camps at places like Green Island and Coloane, and laid down regulations prohibiting house-owners from raising rents wilfully or forcing tenants to leave. So the interests of the refugees and ordinary inhabitants in Macao were ensured to a certain degree. The prosperity of various trades and professions provided the refugees with many job opportunities, enabling them to maintain themselves. While the coastal area in Guangdong was groaning under the Japanese invader's iron heels, Macao flourished and the Chinese escaping to Macao could live a relatively peaceful life.

Around 1937, the national salvation movement in Macao reached high tide. The Guangdong Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strengthened its work of saving the nation from extinction in Macao and other cities in South China. A group of famous patriots in the interior, including Shi Liang, one of the leading figures of the national salvation movement, and famous painters like Gao Jianfu, Guan Shanyue and others, made patriotic speeches or held patriotic painting exhibitions in Macao. The famous general in the Northern Expedition, Ye Ting, who had lived once in Macao after his return from abroad, went to the interior to assume the post as the commander of the New Fourth Army. Chinese inhabitants from all walks of life in Macao were unwilling to lag behind others in saving their motherland. They all supported the Chinese army with money or services. The upper strata of the industrial and commercial circles in Macao organized "Macao All Circles' Disaster Relief Society", and the numerous patriotic groups and societies of young people set up "Macao Four Circles' Disaster Relief Society". Later on, even the "singing girls" (female entertainers) recognized the shame of a nation subjugated by foreigners and organized the "The Flower Circle's Disaster Relief Society". The broad masses of the people, influenced by these organizations, carried out a series of national salvation activities.

First, the Chinese patriots of Macao collected funds for the army and for the refugees from the interior. The methods of fund-raising included organizing recreational activities, ball games, charity bazaars and entertainment on water, persuading people to buy national flower, national flag and "the Souvenir Badge of July 7", and carrying out a contribution drive and so on. Some of the results were quite impressive. For instance, on November 11, 1937, the organizations, with the support of the patriotic dancing girls of the ballrooms, sponsored "charity dancing" to buy "nation-saving bonds" with all the ticket income of that evening, pioneering a way of donation-collecting through "charity dancing" in Macao and Hong Kong. On July 7, 1938, the first anniversary of the Lugouqiao Incident, these patriots mobilized the catering business, including the bakeries, to sponsor "vegetarian diet donation-collection day", namely, only vegetarian food was served on that day. "Not to forget July 7" was written on the vegetarian pies and other foods. All the sales revenue of that day was donated to the war effort. In September, 1938, the patriots sponsored a "charity sale" lasting for 40 days throughout whole Macao. All the tea houses, wine shops, restaurants, cold drink shops, cafes, barber's shops, news stalls etc. participated in this unprecedented event. On August 13, 1939, the second anniversary of the August 13 Incident, the patriots mobilized the Chinese inhabitants from all walks of life by sponsoring another "gold donation" drive, as they had done the year before. The businessmen and workers in banking, jewelry, foreign goods firms and other businesses all made contributions. Some workers donated all they had, and some "singing girls" in Felicidade Road took their gold necklaces off from their necks and donated them on the spot. The "gold donation" drive collected about 100,000 silver dollars.

Second, the Chinese patriots actively spread the news about the victories of the Chinese army and conveyed greetings to the army and civilians fighting against Japan. They analyzed the situation of the war and spread propaganda about the certain failure of the Japanese invaders through newspapers and journals edited and published by them. They showed battlefield documentary films like "The Bloody Battle at the Taierzhuang" in the cinemas of Macao to keep up civilian morale by displaying the heroism of the Chinese troops. The patriots also sent troupes to the towns and villages of the interior to perform street-corner skits such as "Shedding Blood at Lugouqiao", and sing the songs of resistance like the "March of the Volunteers", the "Eight Hundred Warriors" and the "Song of the Guerrillas" to encourage the army and to mobilize the peasants. The life of the troupe members was hard and quite a few broke down from overwork. A young woman in the "Vanguard Theatrical Society", Zheng Biyun, fell ill in the countryside in October, 1938, and died after her return to Macao. Zheng was the first Macao youth to give her life for the cause of saving the nation.

Third, the Chinese patriots organized service groups, and went to the interior to participate in the struggle directly. "The Macao Chinese Youth Countryside Service Group" was the earliest one, whose first batch of members went to the interior as early as October, 1937. The service group organized by "Four Circles' Disaster Relief Society" and headed by Liao Jintao was the largest and lasted the longest. It was composed of one team of mechanics consisting of workers from Kee Kuan Motor-Road Company, and ten other teams, with 160 to 170 members in all. They took part in battlefield service by turns from 1938 to 1940. They held training classes teaching guerrilla warfare tactics for civilians under very difficult conditions, organizing armed groups, mobilizing the youth in the countryside and persuading them to participate in the guerrilla warfare. Some members joined the army political work teams. In normal times, they gave political lessons to the soldiers, taught them how to read and how to sing, provided medical service, and otherwise improved the life of the soldiers and the relationship between officers and men and between the army and people. In warfare, they helped the masses to strengthen defence works, evacuate noncombatants and hide provisions and livestock, transported grain and ammunition for the troops, evacuated the wounded from the battlefield, and even took up arms. Many were wounded or sacrificed their lives. One martyr, Liang Jie, sacrificed his life, while he was going to explode a bridge in October 1939. The compatriots of Macao made many contributions to the motherland during the war.

In December 1941, the Pacific War broke out. The Japanese army advanced south on a large scale, making a clear sweep of Southeast Asia. The Japanese army invading Guangdong captured, Hong Kong and Zhongshan County, leaving Macao an isolated "island" in the vast "sea" occupied by the Japanese army from southern Guangdong to Southeast Asia. Macao entered a period of agitation lasting three years and eight months.

With sea communications cut off, Macao's domestic as well as foreign trade broke down, and industrial production suffered from the shortage of materials and market blockage. Especially troublesome was the shortage of rice, which, except for a small amount from nearby counties like Zongshan and Xinhui, could not be shipped in from abroad. The Japanese army and Chinese profiteers tried to manipulate the grain market to obtain exorbitant profits, making the local grain prices skyrocketed. Rice was as precious as pearls and firewood as costly as cassia, so the Macao inhabitants' life was very hard, and many poor people were underfed, barely eking out a living.

During the Spring Festival of 1942, Macao suffered a cold spell, and many poor people died of hunger and illness. In some families, not even one person survived. In tiny Macao, on one day, 400 deaths were recorded. The corpses were hastily buried by the municipal authorities at the Chinese cemetery in the northern part of Taipa Island. Every pit was about seven meters wide and more than sixty meters long. Corpses were buried layer upon layer. Within a few months, countless victims were buried there, some still alive. The stench brought hungry eagles, and one could hear sad groaning and shrill crying of the dying. The mass grave was called the "Pit of 10,000 Corpses".

That disaster was only the beginning. Throughout 1942, Macao suffered from a serious famine. Grain prices soared to more than eight patacas per kilogram, while the average salary of the ordinary workers was one pataca a day. People tried to allay their hunger with papaya stalks, edible wild herbs and banyan fruits. Firewood and other daily necessities were also in short supply, and the small amount of goods stealthily shipped in from the interior at great risk commanded astonishing prices. Unemployment increased with each passing day. Many of the unemployed were reduced to begging and died in the streets, or left Macao for occupied areas where they were trodden under the iron heels of the invaders. Some Macaonese resorted to cannabism. Even the families that could scrape along were unable to pay tuition, so the schools shut down one after another, leaving many teachers unemployed and two-thirds of the students stopped their studies.

While most people of Macao were struggling for bare subsistence, collaborators and thieves came to Macao to spend their ill-gotten gains in the thriving gambling houses, opium-smoking houses and brothels just as the verses of Du Fu went: "behind the vermillion gates meat and wine go to waste, while out on the road lie the bones of those frozen to death".

During this period, the only kind of legitimate business to grow in Macao was finance. Some of those who swarmed into Macao from Canton, Hong Kong and other cities brought huge amounts of gold, silver and foreign currency with them, and many banks moved to Macao from Hong Kong and the interior. The financial market in Macao boomed as the number of banks of various kinds, big and small, shot up to about 300. Soaring prices meant that exchange rates were very changeable, and speculation in foreign currencies and gold ran rampant.

The war also changed the currency used in Macao. In the past, Hong Kong dollar and Guangdong silver coin had been more popular than the Macaonese pataca. The Japanese army forced the inhabitants of Hong Kong to exchange their money for Japanese military notes, and only the Japanese purchased goods in Macao with Hong Kong dollars, so that the Hong Kong dollar lost its position in Macao very quickly. The number of the Guangdong silver coins fell below the necessary amount in the market, because silver had been dramatically revalued in the interior. Silver fled Macao quickly, and in 1942, the Portuguese authorities had to print Pataca in a large number, which used to be printed in Britain or Portugal. The pataca replaced Hong Kong dollar and Guangdong silver coin as the main currency in Macao. Despite its speculative nature, the development of finance was helpful to the economic development in Macao later on, and perhaps it was the only compensation for the immense disaster.

After Macao became an isolated island in imminent danger, fearing the abuse of power by the Japanese aggressors, the Portuguese authorities strictly kept its policy of neutrality, prohibiting the Chinese inhabitants in Macao from resisting the Japanese. But the Japanese did not respect Portugal's neutrality. Besides occupying East Timor, a Portuguese colony in the South Pacific, with the excuse of military necessity, the Japanese also repeatedly provoked the Portuguese authorities in Macao, who in order to stay in power, had no choice but to bear it. In reality, Macao was controlled by the Japanese. The Japanese consul and spy chief became the backstage rulers of Macao. The chief of the spy organization of the Japanese army in Macao, who was called "the No. one killer in Macao", murdered many patriots, including Liang Yanming, the person in charge of the KMT's Macao branch and the Director of Macao Chinese Education Society, and Lin Zhuofu, the principal of Zhongshan County School. The Japanese army's secret police also scraped together a handful of shameless Chinese literati to publish the Southwest Daily and the People's Journal as organs of the invaders, brazenly advocating "Common Prosperity Circle of Great East Asia" and Japanese Army's "sacred war". They also forced the Portuguese authorities in Macao to set up a Chinese affairs section to strictly censor all the newspapers in Chinese, deleting anything about the resistance; many newspapers were often forced to leave blank spaces.

Even under such pressure, the Chinese patriots in Macao still resisted the Japanese. In the papers and journals, they wrote historical novels to disparage and criticize the present by using historical stories, and essays to attack the enemy by jeering and cursing. Through the news reports about the European and African fronts, they informed the Chinese inhabitants of Macao about the victories of the world anti-fascist forces. They persisted in patriotic education in the schools run by themselves, teaching the younger generation to love their motherland, and strengthening the will of teen-ages never to yield to the enemy. The actors and actresses of Yue opera and drama from places like Hong Kong established new troupes, writing and performing plays disseminating patriotic ideas and advocating national integrity. Plays with themes like the Manchou's invasion of the interior of China were performed for the Chinese inhabitants of Macao and in the rear areas, turning a theatrical stage into the stage fighting against the national enemy. The Japanese slaughter of patriots, rather than scaring people, made them even more indignant. The patriots held meetings to mourn the victims, and denouncing the outrages of the aggressors. More and more Chinese civilians either returned to the interior to aid in the fighting or provided cover for the armed forces in areas adjacent to Macao.

In the beginning of 1943, because the front was far away in the South Pacific, the communications among Macao, Hong Kong and Canton were restored for a while, and the famine was briefly alleviated. In the summer of 1943, the allied forces began to counterattack, and continuously bombed the Japanese army's strongholds in places like Hong Kong and Canton. The steam ships shuttling among Macao, Hong Kong and Canton were sunk by bombs one after another, and communications between Macao and Hong Kong were maintained by small battery-propelled boats. A ticket could cost as much as forty patacas. In order to avoid friendly fire, Chinese and Western figures sought asylum in Macao, still "neutral", and Macao was once again regarded as the "the air-raid dugout of the East Asia". But this "air-raid dugout" was no longer safe. At the end of 1943, some internal conflicts took place among the Japanese spy agencies in Macao: the spies from the navy killed a spy from the army. So the Japanese army spy agency accused the Portuguese authorities in Macao of not providing adequate protection for them and blocked Macao for some time, causing a serious grain shortage, soaring of price and public panic in Macao. In the autumn of 1944, the Japanese invaders thought that a British merchant ship the "Xi-an", which had been anchored in Macao ever since Hong Kong's fall, might have stockpiled military materials. They sent a group of spies who dashed into the dock, shot the guards, and hijacked the ship. At the beginning of 1945, the American troops feared that the naval hangar near the Outer Harbour might have stockpiled Japanese gasoline. On January 16, three American aircrafts carried out air-raids against the target three times. They bombed and strafed the hangar over and over again, and attacked the ships and facilities in the harbour, causing big flames and injuring ten-odd Portuguese soldiers and over 200 Chinese and Western inhabitants.

Because of financial difficulties, the Portuguese authorities had to levy new taxes, increase tax rates and raise fees over and over again. For instance, in September 1944, the Portuguese authorities raised the stamp duty, consumption tax, and the industrial and commercial business licence fee, had additional charity stamp duty attached to telegram, and charged an extra licencing fee for radio. In October of that year, with the excuse of providing relief to the people in the disaster areas, the Portuguese authorities in Macao again added a 5% surtax to larger business, including wine shops, bars, hotels, tea houses, restaurants, ballrooms, grocery stores and cake shops. Towards the end of the "storm" period, the Chinese, Portuguese and other inhabitants in Macao continued to suffer from the invasion of Japan.

In September 1945, the Second World War came to a triumphant end with Japan's unconditional surrender. As a victorious nation, and one of the five world big powers, China recovered Taiwan and the Penghus, which had been ceded to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Guangzhou Bay forcibly leased by France, and all the foreign settlements and concessions. China also had the right to send troops to accept the surrender of the Japanese army stationed in Hong Kong, in accordance with the arrangement of the allied forces in the Far East. Feeling their new muscle, the Chinese people demanded the immediate return of Hong Kong and Macao. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Government telegraphed the Chinese Minister in Portugal, asking him to convey to the Portuguese government China's intention of taking back Macao. At that time, there were fewer than 1,000 Portuguese soldiers and policemen in Macao, and on the sea there were only two small gunboats, so some Chinese army officers believed that Hong Kong could be captured with one division and Macao with one battalion.

In October, 1945, some Chinese in Macao held meetings and parades organized by the Guangdong authorities, opposing Portugal's rule of Macao. People from all walks of life in Zhongshan County sent delegations to Macao to express their support. The Portuguese authorities blockaded the Barrier Gate in the name of maintaining social order, kept people from entering Macao, and severely suppressed the opposition movement. The Guangdong authorities then took further action. First, acting on the information that some Japanese were hiding in Macao, the Guangdong authorities demanded that the Portuguese authorities hand over the Japanese war criminals immediately, and declared that the Chinese army reserved the right to enter Macao to arrest them. In November, the Guangdong authorities announced again that they intended to "take back Macao" and sent troops to strictly blockade it. The Chinese army and Navy carried out practice with live ammunition at night in Wanzai and Qianshan area and even fired over Macao.

The inhabitants of Macao were on tenterhooks. The market in Macao depressed; the prices of rice, pork and daily necessities skyrocketed, while the prices of industrial products like cloth slumped. Quite a few Chinese inhabitants hastily moved back to Zhongshan, and the Chinese traitors who had escaped to Macao after the war fled in haste to Hong Kong, Europe and Southeast Asia. The panic-stricken Portuguese authorities in Macao had to ask the British troops that had reoccupied Hong Kong to help them defend Macao. They also requested the British government to make representations to the Chinese government, and told the Guangdong authorities that they would hand over all the Japanese in Macao, transfer traitors, seal up and confiscate traitors' properties, allow the Chinese inhabitants to go freely in and out of Macao, allow the Macao branch of the KMT to operate openly, and allow the Chinese inhabitants in Macao to have freedom of assembly.

Because the Chinese government thought that the problems of Hong Kong and Macao should be solved as a whole, and that there were still some difficulties to regain Hong Kong then, the Chinese government ordered the Guangdong authorities to remove the blockade against Macao in late December. However, the call to "take back Macao" still resounded. And it became louder especially after the detention of a Chinese finishing boat in May 1947 and the murder by Portuguese police of a Chinese worker in August. The Chinese Political Participation Conference resolved to "regain Macao at the earliest possible date"; the Senatorial Conferences of quite a few provinces and cities passed similar resolutions, and the Chinese Legislative Assembly also suggested to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Macao be regained through negotiations. The Guangdong Senatorial Conference and other organizations set up the "Society of Guangdong People for the Regaining of Macao" to "study the concrete formula and take practical actions". In June of the same year, the society carried out a public-opinion poll. 1,265,545 people took part in the poll, and over 70% thought Macao should be taken by force.

But after the Portuguese Governor of Macao, Gabriel Mauricio Teixeira, visited Canton on the behalf of President of Portugal, expressing Portuguese friendship for China, the tense situation in the Macao area began to relax. Macao gradually entered a period of rejuvenation. Many Chinese who had stayed in Macao for several years returned to the interior, so the local population quickly fell to about 150,000. The various trades and professions gradually returned to normal and began to develop again. Beginning in 1947, when Albano Rodrigues de Oliveira assumed the governorship of Macao, the authorities tried to revive local industry, commerce, communication, transportation and tourism. They repaired ports, increased the number of ferry boats, restored airline, built high-grade hotels, and encouraged both Chinese and Western merchants to invest and set up factories in Macao. The economy recovered quickly. By 1947, the total number of factories in Macao had reached 166, 1.4 times as many as before the war. In 1948, although the number of factories did not increase, the output volume did. For instance, matches were increased from 19.6 tons in 1946 to 2,850 tons in 1948; firecrackers went up from 190 tons to 1,026 tons; incense rose from 162 tons to 488 tons; Chinese wine from 200,000 litres to 887,000 litres; towels from 21,000 dozen to 52,000 dozen.

The Portuguese authorities tried to renovate politics as well. They made some reforms in politics and in the society, and improved the relationship between the Chinese inhabitants and the Portuguese inhabitants in Macao. They also tried hard to ban opium. At the end of 1945, they laid down regulations to ban opium-smoking. After half a year's grace period, the regulations came into force on July 1, 1946, and some opium and smoking paraphernalia were confiscated and destroyed in public. From then on, the business of the opium-smoking house, which was called "Tea and Talking House", gradually subsided until its extinction. The Portuguese authorities heeded protests by the Chinese inhabitants, and revised some outdated government decrees. For example, responding to the demand of Macao Chinese Women Association that the Chinese inhabitants in Macao should abide by the present civil law in China, the Macao authorities asked the Portuguese government to cancel the regulation about Chinese special customs promulgated in 1909, and banned concubines. The labour unions in Macao were legalized, and because more than ten labour unions were gradually restored or established, the workers' movement in Macao picked up.

The relationship between Macao and the interior was much closer than before. The KMT government stationed a diplomatic attache in Macao, and the KMT Macao branch and the grassroots organizations of the Chinese democratic parties all busied themselves with political activities in Macao. The celebrated public figures such as writer Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi came to Macao to treat their illness or recuperate. The athletes of Macao took part in sports meetings in Guangdong, and the boy scouts participated in the general review of the boy scouts of the whole province. The Macao General Association of Chinese Merchants did even more useful work. From 1947 on, the association popularized the national standard language, advocating that "learning mandarin was everyone's duty". The association held five "Mandarin Seminars", and sponsored many mandarin-speaking competition, setting off an upsurge of learning mandarin in Macao. In the summer of 1947, when serious flooding took place in Guangdong and Guangxi, under the sponsorship of the association the Chinese inhabitants of Macao raised relief funds for the flood victims in many ways. The Portuguese people also helped. The Acting Macao Governor took the lead by donating 30,000 patacas, and the President of the Municipal Council of the islands encouraged donations by going to factories and shops himself in spite of the scorching sun. The large sum of relief funds raised this time showed the close feelings between the people in Macao and the people in the interior.

Although Macao had taken on a new look, many age-old malpractice still were not cleared away. The ban on opium-smoking was not very effective, since the number of people taking other kinds of drugs increased. The planned ban on prostitution and gambling turned out to be only empty talk. Speculation in gold ran even wilder once it had been banned in Hong Kong at that time. The thriving gambling business outdid itself, and fees from gambling still provided most of the authorities' revenue. Under these conditions, it was difficult to improve social order. In the Macao area there were frequent bandits' operations, and cases of armed robbery with guns occurred from time to time. In the sea near Macao, pirates ran amuck. They hijacked ferry-boats and shot passengers so often that the ferries sailed in flotillas, and the owners of the boats had to ask the Portuguese authorities to escort them with troops. On July 16, 1948, the hydroplane "Miss Macao" was hijacked, and fell into the Jiuzhouyang Sea, killing 27 passengers and crew members. Smuggling around Macao was still common. To increase tax income, the desperate Chinese Nationalist government, ordered the representatives of the Central Bank and the General Tax Bureau of the Customs to sign a "Financial Agreement" and a "Customs Affairs Agreement" with the Portuguese authorities, to reduce smuggling.

The fourth year after the victory of the War Resisting Japan saw the establishment of the People's Republic of China, which turned a new page of the Chinese history. Macao, as part of China's territory, also entered a new era from then on.