F I V E H U N D R E D Y E A R S O F M AC AUAuthor Stuart BragaEditorInternational Institute of MacauProduction MacaulinkEditorial CoordinationCatarina MesquitaCover A-Ma temple (1840), Auguste Borget - courtesy of Macao Museum of ArtDesign Conceição MatosCollection Suma OrientalCirculation 1,000 Printing Welfare Printing MacauISBN978-99937-45-97-6Macau, November 2016With support fromTimelineIntroduction1. Conquest and Conciliation – the Portuguese come to East Asia, 1513-15212. The great days of Macau, 1557-16213. Defending and rebuilding Macau, 1622-16374. The violent end of trade with Japan, 1638-16405. Hard times, 1641-17196. Struggle for survival, 1720-18497. Macau grapples with the outside world, 1850-19378. World War II – Macau’s finest hour, 1938-19459. Recovery and transformation: Macau returns to China, 1946 to the presentAppendix – UNESCO World Heritage Site – Historic Centre of Macau Illustrations – a noteBibliography IndexTA B L E O F C O N T E N T S07111323354955627284101113117119123
7T I M E L I N EImportant events in the history of Macau1488 A-Ma temple built at Macau 1513 Jorge Álvares reached the China Coast1542 Fernão Mendes Pinto reached Japan ca. 1557 Portuguese arrived at Macau1565 St Paul’s College established by Jesuits1573 Barrier wall constructed to regulate trade 1575 Diocese was set up by the Catholic Church, based on Macau. At first the bishop was Bishop of China and Japan1586 Macau Council (Senado) granted charter by Viceroy of Goa1622 Dutch attack of Macau repelled with heavy losses1623 First Governor of Macau appointed1638 End of trade with Japan 1640 Execution of 61 members of delegation from Macau to Japan 1654 Macau Council adopted name Leal Senado1719 The Senado rejected the Kangxi Emperor’s proposal to centre all the foreign trade of China at Macau
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a8 91732 The Yongzheng emperor renewed the trade proposal, but it was rejected by the Viceroy of Goa1762 Jesuits expelled from Macau. St Paul’s and St Joseph’s Colleges closed.1763 onwards Growing number of foreign merchants in Macau, decline of Portuguese trade 1833-1839 Rapid growth of the opium trade1835 Burning of St Paul’s Church1839-1842 First Opium War1841 British occupation of Hong Kong1849 Murder of Governor Ferreira do Amaral1850s to 1874 Coolie trade1865 Guia lighthouse, the first on the China Coast1871 The Association for the Promotion of Macanese Education founded. Two important schools were opened, the Instituto Comercial in 1878 (named the Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco, 1912-1998) and in 1894, the Liceu Nacional de Macau. 1874 The Great Typhoon devastated Macau 1911 Chinese Revolution began1926 Macau port works and reclamation completed1929 Great Depression began1936 Completion of Macau water supply1937 Japanese attack on China1938 Japanese occupation of Guangzhou1941 Japanese occupation of Hong Kong1942-1945 ‘Macau’s finest hour’1945 End of World War II1949 Proclamation of the People’s Republic of China 1950-1953 Korean War1962 Modern forms of gambling introduced. Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM), granted monopoly rights1966 Riots in Macau (‘1-2-3 riots’)1974 Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge (the Old Bridge) between Macau and Taipa completed. 1981 University of Macau founded1987 The Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau (the Luso-Chinese Accord) signed in Beijing 1995 Macau International Airport inaugurated1999 Handover of Macau to the People’s Republic of China2002 Casino operating concessions extended2005 29 sites in Macau added to UNESCO’s World Heritage Register2006 Taipa and Coloane completely joined by the Cotai Strip2009 Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge commenced construction
s t u a r t b r a g a11I N T R O D U C T I O NEvery city has many stories to tell. Macau has more than most, because of its long history that goes back at least to the fifteenth century, when local fishermen built the A-Ma Temple, from which Macau takes its name. In the following century, Europeans arrived, and by 1557 had begun to set up a settlement with temporary structures for shelter. Little remains from the first few years of the Portuguese presence, but within fifty years, strong forts and great churches had been built. These people meant to stay, and claimed the territory as their own.This book tells how the Portuguese settlement became permanent. It had amazing success for the first eighty years by setting up trade routes throughout East Asia, but these The A-Ma templeWatercolour by Vicente Pacia 1939J.M. Braga CollectionNational Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a12 13initial successes did not continue and hard times followed. However, the Portuguese people stayed. They inter-married with local Chinese, and a distinctive population of Macanese people gradually developed with their own strong sense of identity. The Macanese people showed remarkable fortitude throughout more than three centuries of isolation, economic hardship and disputes with the officials of the Chinese Imperial government. They successfully resisted the attempts of other European powers to take control of Macau. The years between 1940 and 1945 were Macau’s finest time. Macau endured the great crisis of World War II, when almost half a million refugees poured into the territory from Guangzhou and Hong Kong to find safety from a deadly enemy. Macau willingly gave them refuge. More than sixty years later, in 1999, the Handover from Portuguese to Chinese administration took place, and since then, Macau has enjoyed rapid progress and great prosperity. This short account of the five hundred years of the Portuguese presence in East Asia and of Macau’s recent history sets out to tell some of the stories of the people whose impact we can still see in the modern city. Their forts, churches, streets and public buildings are their lasting legacy to a city like no other in the world. 1 – CONQUEST AND CONCILIATION – THE PORTUGUESE COME TO EAST ASIA, 1513-1521Seeking a trade route to Asia, Portuguese seamen began to explore the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, at first cautiously, and then as they grew more familiar with ocean currents and remote coastlines, more boldly. By the end of the century, two great navigators had reached India, and commenced an era of Western influence in Asia that would change the world forever. Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; a decade later, Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut on the west coast of India. In the next twenty years, a string of some forty Portuguese forts dotted the coast of Africa and Asia as Portugal, a small country on the edge of Europe, established for half a century a commercial and strategic empire greater by far than any other power in Europe. It was an amazing achievement, and it left its legacy for the next five centuries. The Portuguese occupation of Macau, which began about 1557, finally ended in 1999. Macau marked the furthest extent of the Portuguese empire. It was the first and last European colony in East Asia.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a14 15Colonial expansion is commonly the result of commercial prowess, often accompanied by religious zeal, sustained by overpowering military and naval force. This is broadly true of the astounding Portuguese conquests as they worked their way around the African coast and across the Indian Ocean between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Francisco de Almeida, who in 1506 was appointed the first Portuguese viceroy in the East, and his successor, Afonso de Albuquerque, saw that to secure trade they must destroy any who might stand in their way. This they did in 1509 in the Battle of Diu, a major naval engagement off the Indian coast. At that time, the technological superiority of the Portuguese in shipbuilding and gunnery made it easy for Albuquerque to sweep his opponents from the seas. Arab dhows were no match for the far more manoeuvrable and better gunned Portuguese caravels and carracks.The next year, 1510, Albuquerque established a strong base at Goa on the west coast of India, held by a Muslim sultan. Albuquerque was a brilliant strategist, and with a much smaller force killed 6,000 of the 9,000 defenders. Goa, with two smaller places, Diu and Damão, remained in Portuguese possession until 1961. The conquest was ruthless, bloody and swift. Portuguese religious and cultural superiority was at once Afonso de AlbuquerqueViceroy of Portuguese India 1505-1515He ruthlessly conquered the Indian rulers at Goa and controlled the seas between Africa and India. He captured Malacca in 1511 and sent a Portuguese expedition to China in 1513.Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisboa(from Wikipedia, public domain)The Portuguese fleet destroy Arab dhows at the Bat-tle of Diu, 3 February 1509. This important naval battle assured the Portuguese of control of the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean for the rest of the sixteenth century.Unsigned, but the style is that of Baron Reichenau. a German aristocrat resident in Macau J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a16 17asserted. Muslims were expelled and the practice of the Hindu religion was forbidden. Goa was seen as the springboard for the introduction of Christianity to India in a remarkably forceful way. It began with the building of numerous religious houses in Goa – convents, churches and seminaries. However, while Goa itself remained firmly Catholic, there was little influence beyond its boundaries. The impact of Portugal was in the long term demographic rather than religious. Some two thousand young men left Portugal each year to seek their fortune in India; few ever returned. Therefore Albuquerque encouraged inter-marriage with local women, thus beginning the long practice of racial integration that characterised Portuguese rule, in sharp contrast to that of any other European empire. A year later, 1511, Albuquerque attacked Malacca, a strong position on the west coast of Malaya, defended by a force of 20,000. Conquering it with a force of 900 Portuguese, 200 Hindu mercenaries and about eighteen ships, he set about at once to build a vast and very strong fort, which was intended to be impregnable, and was seen as such for more than a century.This fort, A Famosa (the Famous), was the starting point of Portuguese expeditions to China and Japan in the following half-century. Facing the sea, Albuquerque constructed a huge four-storey stone keep, Torre de Menajem, the Tower of Homage, built in a style which modern artillery had rendered obsolete in Europe by the sixteenth century; in Malacca, it was intended to impress rather than to protect. It certainly impressed local sultans who sought in vain to defeat these foreign intruders. 130 years later, in 1641, it took the next wave of European invaders, the Dutch, nearly three years to drive the Portuguese from Malacca after a long and bitter siege. Further east lay China. The Chinese were known in India, where the voyages of the celebrated Chinese admiral Zheng He some fifty years earlier left a strong memory. The Indians remembered the Chinese as a civilised people with paler skins than themselves, and Albuquerque decided to venture further east. When he arrived at Malacca in 1511, he found a fleet of Chinese junks there. He soon sent one of his captains, Jorge Álvares, to find whether trade could be opened with these mysterious and remote people. The Portuguese engagement with China was about to begin, but this time, it would be by careful conciliation. There are no great naval battles, bloody conquests or extended sieges in the long history of Macau.In May 1513, Álvares sailed eastwards in a junk, and arriving at the China coast, landed at an island he named Tamão at the mouth of the Pearl River.1 Known to early European traders as Lintin, this is now known as Nei Lingding Island. It was 1 J.M. Braga, China landfall, 1513: Jorge Alvares’ voyage to China; J.M. Braga, Tamão dos pioneiros Portugueses.Goa in the 18th century, about 200 years after the Portuguese captured it.‘A Prospect of the City of Goa’, from Herman Moll, A map of the East-Indies, 1719.A Dutch view in the margin of the map. It emphasises the tower of the imposing Senado do Goa.National Library of Australia, RM 285
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a18 19proceed up-river to Guangzhou, but these early impressions were so favourable, and the limited trade he engaged in so profitable, that others soon followed. Duarte Barbosa, writing about 1515, claimed that pepper could be sent from Malacca to China at a profit of 300%.3 In a second voyage in 1517 Álvares accompanied as far as Lintin a Portuguese embassy to the Imperial Court at Peking, led by Tomé Pires, a scholar whose book Suma Oriental was 3 L. Dames (ed.), Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. 2, p. 215.the first known arrival of a ship with Europeans to reach the coast of China. Here Álvares placed a padrão, a stone column bearing the royal insignia of Portugal, and in some sense staking a claim for a continuing Portuguese presence in China.2 This was within striking distance of what was already the great city of Guangzhou and about 40 km from the peninsula of Macau, where the A-Ma Temple had been built some time in the previous century.Álvares remained at Lintin for about a year, and commenced to negotiate with local officials. Álvares was not permitted to 2 J.M. Braga, The Western Pioneers and their Discovery of Macao, p. 23, 61.In 1513 Álvares placed a padrão, a stone column bearing the royal insignia of Portugal. This was at an island he called Tamão, later known as Lintin and now as Nei Lingding.An interpretation drawn about 1940 by Baron Reichenau.J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of AustraliaJan van Linschoten, Map of China and the nearby islands, 1598.This famous map is oriented eastwards, to show navigators the way forward to the little known lands of East AsiaNational Library of Australia RM 4335
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a20 21an important reference work describing the Portuguese eastern discoveries.4 Pires seemed to be the ideal man for what proved to be an impossible task. After lengthy delays, it transpired that the communication to the Emperor which came, not from the King of Portugal, but his subordinate, the Viceroy at Goa, was not in the form of abject submission deemed proper for barbarian rulers.5 Álvares returned to Malacca, but in 1519 again returned to China with another Portuguese fleet commanded by Simão de Andrade, who behaved in a manner offensive to the Chinese, and described by them as an ‘outrageous and high-handed way’. He built a fort at Tamão (Lintin), and ‘ended by arrogating to himself the prerogative of a sovereign; he hazarded to condemn a sailor to death, and had the man executed’.6 In short, Andrade, seen by Chinese authorities as a barbarian, flouted Chinese authority on Chinese territory. This destroyed the position of Pires and his entourage, who were then seen as dangerous spies and thrown into prison in Guangzhou, where some were executed, while the rest died miserably some years later.7 The Portuguese discovered that dealing with the Chinese authorities was difficult, unpredictable, and could be deadly.4 A. Cortesão (trans.), The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, an account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1512-1515.5 A. Coates, A Macao Narrative, p. 9.6 J.E. Wills, ‘Relations with Maritime Europe, 1514–1662’, in Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2, p. 333–375; C.R. Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century, p. xxi. Using Portuguese sources, Anders Ljungstedt, Contribution to an historical sketch of the Portuguese settlements in China, of the Portuguese envoys and ambassadors to China, of the Roman Catholic Mission in China, and of the Papal legates to China, quoted in Chinese Repository, vol. 1, no. 10, February 1833, p. 400.7 C.R. Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century, p. xxi.Following this disaster, Álvares was sent to China a fourth time in an attempt to redeem the situation, but before this experienced and capable man could commence his mission, he died at Lintin on 8 July 1521. During his first visit in 1513, his son had died and was buried at the foot of the padrão his father Jorge had erected, beneath the sign of the cross on the royal insignia of Portugal. Eight years later, the father would be buried here too.8 They were perhaps the first Portuguese to be buried on the China coast. Jorge Álvares is unlikely to have landed in what is now Macau, but his four pioneering voyages to China between 1513 and 1521 made the foundation of Macau possible 36 years after his death. He had qualities that other voyagers appear to have lacked. Macau’s long endurance in the next five centuries would eventually produce others with the perseverance and determination that he had shown.8 L. and M. Ride, The Voices of Macao Stones, p. 24.The unveiling of the statue to Jorge Álvares, Macau, 1954.J.M. Braga Collection, NationalLibrary of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a22 232 – THE GREAT DAYS OF MACAU, 1557-1621The disastrous expedition of Simão de Andrade and the miserable end of Tomé Pires and his entire delegation halted Portuguese trade with China for a generation. Cautiously, others ventured back. It took some time to persuade the mandarins in Guangzhou that the ‘Western barbarians’ (the Portuguese) were not a threat, and that to do business with them was highly profitable for both the merchants and the mandarins. Business in East Asia has often depended on suitable gifts being made, and it is probable that the first Portuguese traders to arrive in the 1540s near Guangzhou made sure that their presents were sufficient to gratify the mandarins. They sheltered and traded at several places before they found a small rocky peninsula at the mouth of the Pearl River with a sheltered harbour. Already well-known to the Chinese, this place was the location of a temple built in the late fifteenth century for the worship of the goddess A-Ma. To the Portuguese the place became Ama-cao, eventually shortened to Macao or Macau. Within a few years a small settlement with Macau about 1640, a reconstruction by Vicente Pacia.Top: looking eastwards with Green Island (Ilha Verde) in the left foreground.Lower, looking westwards, with the Praya Grande in the left foreground. J.M. Braga Pictures Collection, National Library of Australia. Jack Braga wrote this note: “Reconstitution of what Macao might have looked like in 1640. Note the Portuguese ships (out of proportion as regards size).”
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a24 25some mat sheds (temporary structures built of bamboo with rattan mats for walls) had grown up. In a few more years, about 1557, this settlement had become far more permanent and costly, elaborate buildings were erected in course of time. The occupation of Macau, whenever it occurred, was a local arrangement between merchants and mandarins that suited both parties. Neither the Imperial government in Peking nor the Portuguese vice-regal government in Goa knew of the existence of Macau for several years. As seen through Portuguese eyes, the Imperial reaction was benign:They [the Portuguese] have travelled on the oceans myriads of miles in a marvellous way and have come, big and small, to place themselves under the regenerating influence of the glorious sun of the Celestial Empire.9Macau and its merchants then became, for about 70 years, the beneficiaries of a number of very favourable circumstances. The first of these was the decision made in the fourteenth century by the Ming emperors in China to forbid trade with the Japanese, who they contemptuously called ‘the dwarf barbarians’. The Japanese for their part made it punishable by death to leave Japan. This meant that these two East Asian empires developed in the next three centuries along divergent paths. In Japan, silver was relatively cheap; in China, whose currency system was based on silver, it became an increasingly precious metal as the population and economy grew under the stable administration of the Ming emperors. The second circumstance was the arrival of the Portuguese in Japan. In 1542, Fernão Mendes Pinto and a companion, who 9 Quoted, unfortunately without citation, by R.E. Jobez in ‘Macao at the end of the XVIIIth century’ an address to the Portuguese Institute of Hong Kong, Bole-tim, Instituto Português de Hongkong, July 1948, p. 233.later claimed to be the first westerners to enter Japan, were trying to reach China, but were driven far north by a storm and landed in Japan, where their arquebuses, early handguns, created a sensation. They were immediately copied by Japanese armourers. In the next thirty years, an amazingly profitable import/export business, referred to as the ‘carriage trade’, was set up, based on Macau at one end and Nagasaki in western Japan at the other. The Portuguese merchants found a ready market in Japan for Chinese silk, which commanded high prices, paid for in silver, by weight. Japan produced silk, but the Japanese greatly preferred Chinese silk, which was of better quality. Chinese silk was purchased in Guangzhou for much less than it sold for in Japan. Seldom in human history can there have been such a profitable trade, and for more than half a century until the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese held a monopoly of it.In this period Macau became a boom town of fine houses, adorned with Chinese and Japanese furniture and art objects.10 They were inhabited by richly dressed people served by numerous black African slaves. People came from Portugal to enjoy the bonanza. According to the historian Manuel Teixeira, a population of about 500 in 1561 grew to about 850 by 1635.11 No-one bothered to count the slaves, but an American estimate made much later, in 1835, estimated the number then at between 800 and 900.12 Some 10,000 Chinese people had come to Macau by 1635, but few if any would have regarded it as their native place, and no-one bothered to count them either.10 According to an amazed English visitor, Peter Mundy, in 1637. P. Mundy, Diary, Vol III, p. 163-164.11 M. Teixeira, Os Macaenses, Macau, Centro de Informação e Turismo, 1965, p. 34-3912 Elijah Bridgman in the Chinese Repository, November 1834, p. 292, 303.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a26 27Travellers to Macau in the early seventeenth century marvelled at what they saw. Father António Cardim, a Jesuit priest who lived there from 1632 to 1636, wrote:Macao is put together of very fair buildings and is rich because of the commerce and traffic that are transacted there by night and day; it has noble and honourable citizens. In fact, it is held in great esteem throughout all the Orient, inasmuch that it is the depository of those goods using gold, silver, silks, pearls and other jewels; of all manner of drugs, spices and perfumes from China, Japan, Tonkin, Cochin China, Cambodia, Macassar, Solor, and above all, as it is the headquarters of Christendom in the East.13There were wealthy families who became patrons of the arts, ardent supporters of the Christian faith and contributors to the life of the community. They supported a charitable brotherhood, the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, the Holy House of Mercy, and religious institutions such as convents and orphanages, and they were usually vereadores, councillors, of the Senado, the Senate, or Council.One of the most important and enduring institutions of Portuguese Macau was its câmara, municipal council, universally known locally as the Senado, the Senate, established in 1586 by the viceroy of India.14 It had a long and illustrious history for more than 400 years until the Handover of 1999. Council members usually came from the leading families in the community, and it was a mark of honour to be one of the vereadores of the câmara or an irmão, brother, of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia. The poderosos or ‘people of influence’ in the community were expected to be active both in municipal 13 Father A. Cardim, I Relazione della Provinzia del Giappone, quoted by the architec-tural historian Michael Hugo-Brunt, ‘The Macao Collegiate Church of “Madre de Deus”, “Mater Dei” or “St Paul’s” ’ in Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, vol. 14, 1979-1980, p. 73.14 This charter was confirmed by the royal court in 1595 and confirmed by King João V in 1712. C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 48, 54, 161-162; C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550-1770, p. 9.Macanese womenA drawing by Peter Mundy, 1637. Cortesy of Bodleian Libraries, U.K.Reproduced in Charles Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550-1770: fact and fancy in the history of Macao, facing p. 123.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a28 29affairs and in charitable work. The role of procurador was highly important. He was the Senate’s representative in all dealings with the Chinese. He was accorded by them the grade of a junior mandarin to enable such dealings to take place. He had to negotiate the amount paid annually to the mandarins and see to its raising in Macau.15 Hence he was the key man in the city, with greater importance than the Governor.16 The first governor was appointed in 1623. Until then, the King of Portugal’s representative in Macau was the Captain-Major of the highly profitable Japan Voyage, made by the annual nao or ‘great ship’ to Japan. The Captain-Major was the merchant who offered the largest sum of money to the royal revenues. The Voyage’s profitability varied from year to year, but it appears that anything less than 100% profit was regarded as disappointingly low.17 This very profitable annual expedition was far more important in the king’s eyes than the little outpost on the coast of the Chinese Empire which existed principally to support the Captain-Major.When a governor was finally appointed, the mandarins refused to deal with him because he claimed to represent a king who was regarded by them as a barbarian, and his authority in consequence was limited to the command of the various forts.18 Here too, the Senado dominated to the extent that it had to meet all the costs of Macau’s defence. It supplied the ordnance and paid a miserable pittance to the soldiers of the garrison.19 These unfortunates, usually from the African colonies, received what was left, if anything, after all other expenses had been met, especially payments to the mandarins. 15 C.R. Boxer, Portuguese society in the tropics, p. 52.16 Ibid., p 45-46.17 C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550-1770, p. 51.18 C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p. 288; The Great Ship from Amacon, p. 11.19 C.R. Boxer, Portuguese society in the tropics, p. 54.The Senate even had to pay the salary of the Bishop of Macau, often years in arrears.20Therefore for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Senado exercised paramount powers, subject only to the Viceroy in Goa. These remained largely unaltered until 1783, when its powers were severely restricted by a royal decree which required that ‘no decision could be taken without the governor being heard’.21 These powers were further reduced in 1833 as part of a general overhaul of municipal arrangements, which then continued until the Handover in 1999, exercising more limited functions.The Roman Catholic Church was important in Macau from the beginning. Soon after the arrival of Portuguese settlers there were three parish churches, St Lazarus (the oldest, built by 1560), St Anthony and St Lawrence.20 Ibid., p. 54.21 M. Teixeira, Toponimia de Macau, vol. 1, p. 59-60. This implies the Governor’s consent.Church of St Lawrence, built in the seventeenth centuryWatercolour by Vicente Pacia, 1940J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a30 31In 1575 a new diocese was set up, based in Macau. Initially, the bishop was Bishop of China and Japan, for this was a missionary diocese. A fine cathedral was built, generally known as Sé. The main Catholic religious orders, the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians soon arrived and set up missions. Each had its own church, dedicated to the appropriate saint, while the Jesuits, first in the field, built and then after a fire in 1602, rebuilt the great church which came to be known as St Paul’s. Besides these were two churches attached to the Santa Casa da Misericórdia and the Santa Clara Convent, and a chapel attached to the Jesuit seminary of Nossa Senhora de Amparo, where Chinese Christians were trained for missionary service in China. Besides all these was a small chapel attached to the Senate House. The presence of all these churches and chapels and the sound of their bells dominated Macau.2222 C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 58, pointed out that the eleven churches in seventeenth century Macau provided for a European population of not more than 1,000.If this great commercial and religious success seems too good to be true, it was. It all depended on two things: the continuing success of the hugely profitable Portuguese monopoly of trade between China and Japan, and the willingness of the Chinese authorities in Guangzhou to tolerate this wealthy place on their doorstep. A warning of what was to come was the construction by the Chinese of a barrier wall between Macau and Chinese territory beyond in 1573, sixteen years after the first permanent Portuguese settlement. Until then, the boundary between the two jurisdictions had not been demarcated, much less agreed upon. This was not meant to be the boundary between the city of Macau and the territories of the Chinese Empire. Its purpose was clear: this wall controlled the food supply, for little food was grown in the small area of flat land south of the wall. However, in the 1620s, another wall was built, the city wall which defended the built up area to the south of Monte Fort, which was built at the same time. To the Chinese authorities, this wall was obviously the boundary of the city. The Portuguese took a different view. To them, the barrier wall was the boundary of Macau. Between the two was an area as large as the city itself.The boundary dispute remained a contentious issue right up to the twentieth century. Portuguese people were not safe outside the city wall, where there was a Chinese village and many Chinese graves. However, they were permitted to venture as far as the barrier wall. Here a single gate was opened periodically to enable the Portuguese to purchase fresh food at a market in a small fenced area beyond the barrier. At first the market was held every five days, then only fortnightly. At its conclusion, the gate was closed and sealed with the seal of the mandarin of the Heangshan (now Zhongshan) district, the local authority. Only official delegations going to the mandarin’s court were allowed to go further. This was an administrative compound in an elevated position not far away in order to supervise Macau. There was no ignoring it; it was conspicuously painted Jesuit missionary in ChinaFrom an unidentified Portuguese book of pictures, nineteenth century. A hand-coloured engraving in the J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u32white, and was therefore termed by the Portuguese the ‘Casa Branca’, the ‘White House’. As the Portuguese went through the gate, they passed door posts with an inscription: ‘Dread our greatness; respect our virtue’.23 Events would prove that these were not idle words.23 L. and M. Ride, The Voices of Macao Stones, p. 63.encarte
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a34 353 – DEFENDING AND REBUILDING MACAU, 1622-1637 There were massive challenges in the early seventeenth century for Macau, which faced both commercial and military threats. It was deeply affected by the establishment in 1600 of the English trading firm, the East India Company, and its counterpart the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) in 1602. Both had a determined and ruthless entrepreneurial drive that the Portuguese lacked. The Dutch were a major threat, and seemed determined to expel the Portuguese from all the strong points they had built in the sixteenth century. With stronger forces, they soon gained control of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Malacca. As Macau was the only gateway to China, it was an obvious place to occupy. They began by raiding Macau in 1601, 1603, and 1607. To meet this threat, forts were built: S Tiago Fort guarded shipping entering the Inner Harbour on the western side of Macau. On the eastern side of the peninsula, S. Francisco Fort and the Fortress of Our Lady of Bom Parto were built at either end of the Praya Grande. In the centre was the smaller redoubt of St Peter. These three fortifications protected its broad semi-circle George Chinnery,The Redoubt of St Peter, Praya Grande, ca. 1830J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia nla.pic-an7096083
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a36 37on the eastern side. Both were wide open to attack before these forts were built over a period of years. Initially, S. Francisco was a coastal battery, later rebuilt as a fort.24 The forts were planned to meet an attack from the sea, but did not protect Macau against a land attack from the north. A large fort on the highest hill in Macau was begun; it re-mained unfinished, but several guns were already in position, facing the sea. There was no city wall, considered at that time to be essential to defend a city. The Chinese authorities would 24 Richard J. Garrett, The Defences of Macau, p. 32.not allow the Jesuits to complete the great fort or build a wall, lest these ‘Western barbarians’ try to assert a greater degree of control than the Chinese were prepared to permit. Curious-ly, this important defensive stronghold was built by a religious order, the Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus. The early Jesuits saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, and on many oc-casions, they were indeed obliged to fight in battle. The Jesuit order was founded in 1540 to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus to the farthest parts of the world. In the mid-sixteenth century, that meant China. Macau had been set up as a trading post, but the Jesuits had a larger vision. Like the apostle Paul 1500 years earlier, they saw themselves as setting out on an epic missionary journey. Macau was to be the springboard of evangelism in this vast heathen empire. As a first step, they established St Paul’s College in 1565 on top of the hill overlooking the small town below. If the Dutch, firmly Protestant and bitterly anti-Catholic, seized Macau for its trade, all would be lost. Macau had therefore to be defended. The small forts along the Praya Grande would not repel a determined attack, so the Jesuits determined to build a much larger fort next to the college. With its military might and with divine aid it would protect the college and the Jesuit Fathers who taught there. So the original name of the fort was Fortaleza de Nossa Senhora do Monte de São Paulo, in English: Fortress of Our Lady of the Mount of St. Paul, but it was incomplete. This partial defence was not likely to be sufficient to repel a determined Dutch attack, and the Dutch knew it. They felt strong enough in 1622 to capture Macau. They arrived off the city on 22 June with a fleet of thirteen ships and 1300 men, including a landing force of 800.25 The next day, having assessed the situation, they decided to land at a beach to the north-east of the city not covered by Portuguese 25 C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770, p. 79.Fortaleza de Nossa Senhora do Monte de São Paulo, the Fortress of Our Lady of the Mount of St. Paul, usually known as Monte Fort. Watercolour by Vicente Pacia, 1938. J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a38 39guns. As a distraction, they bombarded the S. Francisco battery to the south. That night the Dutch celebrated their expected victory in advance by blowing their trumpets and beating their drums all night in order to unnerve their enemy. Expecting a deadly assault in the morning, the Portuguese did the same thing in their forts. Meanwhile, the entire Chinese population of about 10,000 people had fled. Besides the handicap of incomplete fortifications, Macau had far fewer fighting men than the Dutch. Portuguese records estimate that there were only fifty musketeers and 100 residents capable of bearing arms.26 They fully expected to have to fight to the last man when the Dutch landed next day, 24 June, the Feast-day of St. John the Baptist. In the morning, the Dutch landed 600 men and began to advance on the city, expecting only token resistance. They made the worst mistake any military force can make: they underestimated their enemy. Soon they came under the fire of guns from the incomplete Monte Fort. A battery here, under the command of a Jesuit priest, Father Jerónimo Rho, fired a cannon ball which struck a barrel of gunpowder in an ammunition cart in the middle of the Dutch formation. It exploded, causing many casualties and destroying most of the Dutch ammunition. Their confidence shaken, the Dutch commanders halted to consider their next step. They decided to climb Guia Hill, which overlooks the city of Macau, to get a better view of the enemy. However, they met a party of thirty defenders, whose ferocity and effective use of the steep terrain forced the Dutch officers to back down and change their plans again. Not expecting such stiff resistance, the invaders moved back towards a patch of high ground near Guia Hill, with the intention of regrouping. They had lost the initiative. Now they would also lose their nerve as the Portuguese seized the opportunity of their enemies’ confusion. With the traditional 26 C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770, p. 76.Portuguese battle cry ‘Santiago e a eles’ – ‘St James and at them’, the combined forces of the Portuguese defenders, Macanese citizens, Dominican friars, Jesuit priests, and black slaves hurled themselves at the enemy.27 Utterly taken by surprise, the Dutch fled. Their commander tried to urge his countrymen to stand fast, but he was killed. Worse awaited them as they reached the beach where they had landed. Two companies of soldiers had been left there to guard the boats; they panicked and fled in the boats without firing a shot. The panic among the Dutch landing party was so complete that the Dutch ships had to push off into deeper water to avoid being overturned by the fugitives, causing many of them to drown or be shot by the Portuguese in the sea as they struggled to get away.28 It was a tremendous triumph for the Portuguese, and the Feast-day of St. John the Baptist has ever since been celebrated by Macanese communities world-wide. Everywhere else the Dutch defeated them, but in Macau, the Dutch humiliation was so great that they never attacked again. However, the Portuguese made sure that their defences were far stronger in case the Dutch did come back. While the Chinese authorities had been opposed to any defences that could be used against them, they realised that if the Dutch, another group of Western barbarians, defeated the Portuguese in future, they might be far more difficult to deal with. Accordingly, they permitted the construction of much stronger defences. These included a fort on top of Guia hill, a city wall and the completion of what came to be called Monte Fort, which was finished in 1626. No fortifications were permitted between the new city wall and the barrier wall, for this in the Chinese view was their territory, not Portuguese.27 St James, who was killed by a sword, is traditionally represented in Christian art as holding a sword.28 C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770, p. 83.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a40 41Monte Fort had four great bastions built high above the glacis below. This was a steep slope, left bare of vegetation and construction, up which attackers would have to fight against heavy fire from the many guns above. In seventeenth century military terms, this fort was almost impregnable, but its strength was never tested, for the fort saw no military action at all, as the Dutch left Macau alone from then on. Instead, a threat came from within. In 1638, the first Governor of Macau, Francisco de Mascarenhas, expelled the Jesuits and the fort became the headquarters of the Governor of Macau from then on.Soon after the completion of the fort, the Jesuits finished another magnificent building nearby, the chapel of St Paul’s College. Burned down in a disastrous fire in 1835, its spectacular façade remains the best-known relic of the first century of Portuguese occupation. There was a church on the site as early as 1565, but it was twice destroyed by fire. Beginning in 1602 it was reconstructed for a third time. Its splendid site overlooks the town, which seemed to be under its protection. Next to the church was St Paul’s College, which followed an academic programme of high standards and was intended to be the first University of the Far East. As a centre of Christian scholarship, it needed a chapel.Monument inVitória Garden erected in 1871 to commemorate the victory over the Dutch on 24 July 1622.Watercolour by Vicente Pacia, ca. 1938 J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a42 43As St Paul’s College was a key element in the Jesuits’ strategy for the evangelisation of the Chinese Empire, the chapel built next to the college was something extra special. No other church in the Portuguese domains in Africa and the Far East was built on so magnificent a scale. It proclaimed the triumph of the Christian faith, expressed in stone. The city newly built by the Portuguese pioneers on this small piece of land at the edge of heathen China took the Divine Name, Cidade do Nome de Deus – the City of the Name of God. Therefore this grand church towering over it was given the name Madre de Deus – the Collegiate Church of the Mother of God.29 The foundation stone is still in place to the left of the ruined façade. It reads:3029 It is sometimes, because of its size, mistakenly called a cathedral, but it was built as a college chapel.30 The translation is that of Sir Lindsay Ride, Voices of Macao Stones, p. 101.VIRGINI MAGNAE MATRI CIVITAS MACAENSIS LIBENS POSUIT 1602TO THE GREAT VIRGIN MOTHER THE MACANESE COMMUNITY FREELY SET UP [THIS STONE], 1602In 1637 a magnificent facade, twenty metres in height, twice as high as the church behind it, was built by Japanese Christians, refugees from persecution in their homeland. It is adorned with Christian symbols and statues. The principal ones are Mary, the Mother of Jesus and St Paul, after whom the college was named. The same year, an account of the great church was written by Peter Mundy, an Englishman, who spent several days in Macau in June 1637. He was the Commercial Officer in a fleet of four ships, the first English expedition to China and Japan.He saw at once the significance of the college’s name and the church attached to it. He wrote of the missionary zeal of the Jesuits:As the Church is named St Paul’s, so do they style [call] themselves Paulists, as Paul’s disciples in imitating or following him in his function [as an Apostle]. For as he was chief in conversion of the gentiles in those days, so do they attribute that office more peculiar [especially] to themselves in converting the heathen of these times. And to speak truly, they neither spare cost nor labour, diligence nor danger to attain their purpose.3131 P. Mundy, Diary, Vol III, p. 163-164. Mundy’s spelling and punctuation have been modernised. As his English is now nearly 400 years old, some words have changed their meaning slightly and modern meanings are given in brackets.Ruins of the Church of the Mother of God, also known as St Paul’s Church Water colour by James Wong, 1936J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a44 45The English merchants went into the church and were struck by the beauty and grandeur of this wonderful building, an amazing and unique combination of European baroque architecture and Chinese ornamentation. Mundy went on:The roof of the Church appertaining [belonging] to the college is of the fairest arch that yet I ever saw to my remembrance, of excellent workmanship, done by the Chinese, carved in wood, gilt and painted with exquisite colours, such as vermilion, azure, etc. [It is] divided into squares, and at the joining of each square great roses of many folds or leaves one under another, lessening till all end in a knob; nearly a yard in diameter … Above there is a new fair [beautiful] frontispiece [facade] to the church … of hewn stone.Sadly, the English visit almost coincided with the end of the Portuguese trade with Japan and the fall of the Ming dynasty in China. A long shadow slowly descended over the church, the college, the mission and the Portuguese trading presence in the Far East. The victory of the Manchu dynasty in China and a violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian reaction in Japan brought to an end the commercial prosperity that marked Macau’s early years. The Christian mission of the Jesuits, followed later by the Dominicans and Franciscans, became stifled by infighting and commercial opportunism. Over the years, French Jesuits came to staff the college, and in recognition of their work, King Louis XIV of France gave the church a fine clock. However, St Paul’s College, the bright hope of its founding Jesuit fathers, was closed when they were expelled in 1762 after an anti-Jesuit campaign in Portugal. Its buildings were left derelict and empty. Its fine library vanished. However the great church remained. Over time, the name of the college was applied to its adjoining chapel, now known as St Paul’s Church. It was a Marciano Baptista, ‘S. Tiago Fort, Macao’, ca. 1880. Signed at lower right corner. This may be the artist’s preliminary sketch, as the paper is ruled in squares, showing his technique.J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia.This important fort was built soon after the Dutch attack in 1622, and would have prevented any enemy ships from entering the Inner Harbour. All shipping passed this fort for more than three hundred years from the 1620s until the construction after World War II of the ferry terminal in the Outer Harbour.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a46 47standing reminder of the glory days of Macau two centuries earlier, and in 1834 a picture of it was painted by the eminent artist George Chinnery.As years went by, the empty college buildings fell into ruin. A Portuguese artillery officer wrote in the 1820s ‘the Convent now serves as the habitation of the most robust rats’.32 He added, ‘the Church of St. Paul deserves and holds the attention of the not indifferent traveller: it is a Jesuit foundation, and is most remarkable’. A few years later, the building which had amazed the English visitors two hundred years earlier came to a sad end in the most spectacular fire Macau had ever seen. It broke out about 6.30 p.m. on 26 January 1835. There was no water supply and no fire brigade; little could be done. People watched, horrified. They trembled as the church’s great clock struck 8.15 p.m., just as the flames engulfed it. It did not survive to strike the half hour. There is only one account of the fire, published by a magazine printed in Canton, as Guangzhou was then known. The unnamed writer described the old church as ‘one of the most noble and magnificent buildings in the east’. He wrote:The discharge of cannon from the fort above St Paul’s gave the alarm of fire. The signal was quickly answered by guns from the other forts, by ringing of church bells, and the beating of drums.Dense smoke mixed with flames soon burst from the windows on all sides and then rising through the roof presented a sight awfully grand. The flames rose very high, and the whole town and inner harbor were illuminated. Just at that moment the clock, (which was presented to the church by Louis XIV) struck eight and a quarter. Hitherto, efforts had been made to check the progress of the flames; but now, when 32 J. de A. Guimarães e Freitas, Memoria sobre Macáo, p. 12.it was quite evident that they would not extend beyond the buildings of the church, everyone seemed willing to stop and gaze at the scene.On various parts of the front there were inscriptions, some others in Latin, others in Chinese. The interior of the building was every way equal to its exterior. The whole is now a pile of ruins.33The walls of the church were then used for burials, niches being cut into the thick old walls. Later, São Miguel Cemetery was opened, and the graves were transferred there. In the 1930s, the site was eventually cleared of debris, and over the years, as tourism developed, more conservation work was done. Eventually, in 2005, St Paul’s became one of the sites included in Macau’s listing in the World Heritage Register.33 Chinese Repository, vol. 3, no. 10, February 1835, p. 485-486.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a48 494 – THE VIOLENT END OF TRADE WITH JAPAN, 1638-1640A century after the Portuguese navigator Fernão Mendes Pinto discovered Japan in 1542, Portuguese contact with Japan came to a sudden end. Henceforward, Japan was to be a closed kingdom for more than two centuries. Less than two centuries have passed since that long isolation ended in the 1850s. The duration of Japan’s important role in the modern world is not as long as its period of isolation. What caused that long isolation? The first half century of contact between Portugal and Japan had been amazingly successful. An immensely profitable trade developed, to the great satisfaction of both parties. Jesuit missionaries went to Japan together with the merchants and gained what seemed a miraculous success in the western Japanese island of Kyushu, where Nagasaki is situated. By 1580, 150,000 people had become Christians, and the number grew to about half a million by 1615. Several of the daimyo, the feudal lords who wielded immense power in Japan, were converted.Encouraged by this rapid success, Father Alessandro Valignano, perhaps the greatest of the Jesuit leaders in the generation after Francis Xavier, sent a printing press An account, printed by the Jesuit press in Macau in 1590, of the voyage of Japanese Christians to RomeFr Alessandro Valignano, who printed books in Macau and sent them to Japan. A commemorative stamp issued by Macau Post Office
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a50 51to Nagasaki. It was used for some twenty years to produce devotional and evangelistic publications. However, the mission was, strange to say, too successful. The same was true of the trade, hugely lucrative for the merchants who came once a year on the Japan Voyage to sell silk for silver. The monopoly they enjoyed was too good to last, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Dutch merchants had arrived, prepared to go to any lengths to drive out the Portuguese.Apart from a commerce that was far too one-sided, the impact of Christianity was viewed with alarm by Japan’s ruler, the Shogun, from his castle in Yedo, the city that is today Tokyo. For several centuries the Emperor in Kyoto had been merely a figurehead, while the Shogun, the head of Japan’s leading noble family effectively ruled Japan. In 1600 there was a bloody coup, with up to 30,000 men killed in the Battle of Sekigahara. Following this, the Tokugawa clan assumed power in Yedo. Naturally, the new Shogun regarded any other form of allegiance as a threat to his own authority and set out to destroy it. In this way of thinking, the rise of Christianity was seditious. It must be mercilessly crushed, lest there be a reversion to the two centuries of instability preceding the rise to power of the Tokugawa clan. The last shogun before the coup, Hideyoshi, then the first three Tokugawa shoguns, Ieyasu, Hidetada and Iemitsu, cracked down with increasing severity. Hideyoshi forbade the preaching of Christianity, and in 1597 six foreign missionaries and twenty Japanese Christians were punished for defying the edict. Their ears and noses were cut off, and then they were crucified. These ‘Nagasaki Martyrs’, as they became known, were the first of many killed in the next four decades.Between 1614 and 1638 as progressively more severe policies were put into effect, Japanese Christians were wiped out in great numbers in a most cruel persecution concluding with a horrifying massacre in 1638 at Shimabara. This fortress held out for some time against the Shogun’s forces, and was eventually captured with help from Dutch artillery. 37,000 rebels were then killed. Other Japanese Christians renounced their faith and reverted to their former religious practices. Until the Shimabara rebellion, the Portuguese were tolerated for the trade they brought, though when a ship arrived its rudder and armament were removed to ensure that its crew were helpless. It was an impossible situation, and when two Portuguese ships arrived in Nagasaki in 1639, they were forbidden to trade. In vain the merchants begged, tears running down their cheeks, that they were innocent, and that ‘Macau gets nourishment from Japan, and if we are deprived of this Macau in the mid-seventeenth century.From Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Asia Portuguesa, vol. 3, p. 362. J.M. Braga had the map redrawn and coloured, probably by Vicente Pacia. National Library of Australia, map-brsc108.The city walls and several fortifications are shown. These were completed after the Dutch attack in 1622 was defeated. The city’s walls and fortifications are the main feature of this map. In the foreground is the Inner Harbour, with Ilha Verde (Green Island) on the left. Orientation is north to left
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a52 53trade we will all relapse into the utmost destitution.’ Immediately afterwards, the Shogun, Iemitsu, adopted a rigorous policy of excluding all foreigners except the Dutch, who were allowed to send one ship a year to Nagasaki where they were under close and humiliating supervision. Whereas the Japanese government had been curious and welcoming in the 1540s, a century later, in the hands of a new ruling family, it had become fearful and xenophobic. On 22 June 1636, even before the Shimabara revolt, Iemitsu issued what came to be known as the Sakoku, the Closed Country Edict. It is quite lengthy, but the first three clauses set the tone for the other fifteen.1. No Japanese ships may leave for foreign countries,2. No Japanese may go abroad secretly. If anybo-dy tries to do this, he will be killed, and the ship and owner will be placed under arrest.3. Any Japanese now living abroad who tries to return to Japan will be put to death.34 This third clause was directed at Japanese Christian refugees who had gone to Macau and would soon build the wonderful façade of St Paul’s Church. Later clauses laid down what was to be done if any Kirishitan (Christian) was discovered, or, worse, a Baderen (Padre). Limited trade with the Portuguese was still tolerated at this stage, but within two years this ended. The Portuguese were seen as people who were keen to spread the Catholic faith, and the exclusion edict was rigorously applied.In Macau, the Senate decided on a last attempt at reconciliation. In June 1640, four leading citizens were sent to parley with the Japanese, accompanied by fifty-seven others. 34 C.R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon, p. 330.They took no merchandise whatsoever. Knowing what their fate might be, they had all been to confession and received the sacraments of Penance and Communion before they left. They were ready for death. The size of the embassy clearly indicated the importance of the issue as far as the Senado was concerned. The survival of Macau was at stake. Once at Nagasaki, the envoys were treated in the same way as any Japanese Christian. In 1635 Iemitsu had hit upon an infallible way of rooting out Christians. A cross was taken to every household throughout Kyushu, and people were made to spit upon it and trample it under foot. It was a clear choice: renounce Christianity or die a horrible death. It was this that had precipitated the Shimabara revolt. Members of the Portuguese embassy in 1640 were given the same choice; none yielded, and on 3 August 1640, all 61 were beheaded and their heads displayed in the town market place. They had been told that they were being treated with mercy. They deserved nothing but the most painful death, but because they had brought no merchandise, the sentence was being commuted to an easy death. The Portuguese ship was burnt, and twelve crew members who were spared from execution were returned to Macau in a small Chinese junk with an official communication known as a rescript. The aim of Japanese policy and ‘the virtue of the Supreme Commander’, explained its author, Kagazume Tadazumi, was ‘to civilise people and make the people of far distant countries adore him’.35 He told them that all in Japan was harmony until ‘the worm-like barbarians of Macau who had long believed in the doctrine of the Lord of Heaven wished to propagate their evil religion in our country’. After recounting at considerable length how the Japanese Christians had been exterminated, the rescript concluded, ‘The Elders of Macau, when they hear the foregoing facts must acknowledge 35 Ibid., p. 331.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a54 55the righteousness of our country and be impressed by the strength of our military virtue.’36The news was devastating for Macau, but the immediate reaction was to honour ‘the noble army of martyrs’, the phrase used in the ancient hymn, ‘We Praise You, O God’, usually known by its Latin title, ‘Te Deum Laudamus’, sung by Christians since the 4th century A.D. There was a solemn thanksgiving in the cathedral, church bells were rung, and there was rejoicing. Relatives of the martyrs dressed, not in mourning, but in gala clothes. The embassy to Japan had failed, but they believed that now they had ambassadors in Heaven, interceding for them at the Throne of Grace. The pious people of Macau would also have reminded themselves of a famous proverb, ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’. However, spiritual rejoicing was one thing, but temporal realities had also to be faced. The traders expelled in 1639 were right: ‘we will all relapse into the utmost destitution’. At the same time, the Dutch were taking almost all of the trade westwards. The final deadly blow was a violent upheaval in China as the Ming dynasty was overthrown by the Manchu Qing dynasty as it fought its way southwards in the 1640s. On 24 November 1650, Qing forces led by Shang Kexi captured Guangzhou and massacred the city’s population, killing as many as 70,000 people. With all of its trade destroyed, Macau faced certain ruin. Carlos Montalto de Jesus, the first Macanese historian to write in English, concluded, ‘the prosperity of Macau received a deathblow; the Macaenses, plunged in misery and despair, found their sacrifices useless, their dignity outraged, their trade gone’.37 There followed a very bleak, poverty-stricken future in which many people starved to death in the following four decades. 36 Ibid., p. 333. 37 C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 105.5 – HARD TIMES, 1641-1719For most of its first century, from the 1550s until 1637, Macau was prosperous, but most of the next century was a very hard time. The Chinese magistrate at Heangshan, of which Macau is a small part, exercised strict and rigid control, and the King of Portugal had insufficient strength to do anything to help his remotest territory. Over time, the screws kept tightening. The Heangshan magistrate’s control and taxation were inescapable. One of many taxes was the payment of anchorage dues for Portuguese ships in the Porto Interior, the Inner Harbour. To ensure that these were paid, a Chinese Customs House was built within the city of Macau itself. A despatch to the Emperor from the Viceroy at Guangzhou asserted that the Portuguese in Macau were ‘a kingdom with great and many forts and a great and insolent population ... it would be proper to debar them from the commerce at Guangzhou’.38 This was done for a time, and Macau suffered even more. 38 A. Ljungstedt, An historical sketch of the Portuguese settlements in China, p. 67; C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 115.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a56 57There remained Goa, the important Portuguese base in India. Even this link was severed when the Dutch seized Malacca in 1641, and with better ships, dominated the narrow Straits of Malacca, thus cutting Macau off from its parent. The profitable Manila trade was also severed the same year, following Portugal’s successful rebellion against Spain in 1640. In little more than a decade, Macau lost all its trading partners: Japan, China, Manila and Goa. It faced utter disaster. To make matters even worse, a plague broke out, and at Macau 7,000 people are said to have died, mostly Chinese.39 Despite all this, the Portuguese clung to Macau, with a resilience and a capacity for survival never displayed by later European powers in East Asia. For a short time one important local industry remained. This was a gun foundry set up in Macau in 1625 by Manoel Tavares Bocarro, who had moved from Goa. In Macau, he gained fame throughout East Asia. Some of his guns were sent to Canton as gifts to the Ming Emperors of China during their final, ultimately unsuccessful fight against the Manchu invaders in the early 1640s. Besides assisting the Chinese emperor, Bocarro’s first priority was to arm Macau, and he certainly achieved this. Writing in 1635, his name-sake, António Bocarro, apparently not a kinsman, described the defences of Macau in detail, including the guns at each of the forts and batteries that ringed Macau’s coast. Their total armament amounted to 73 guns.40 António Bocarro went on to say that ‘this place has one of the best gun-foundries in the world’, adding: ‘artillery is being cast continually for the whole of this State at a very reasonable price.’ Importantly, the Dutch knew about the fortifications and guns of Macau from a detailed list found on a Portuguese vessel they captured in 1637. The forts, equipped with Manoel 39 F. C. Danvers, The Portuguese in India, vol. II, p. 292. Danvers added ‘this effectually put an end to commerce there for a time’.40 C.R. Boxer, Macau na época da restauração (Macau three hundred years ago), Macau: Imprensa Nacional, 1942, p. 34.‘Plan de la ville et du port de Macao’.A French map of Macau by Nicholas Bellin, about 1764, reissued by a Dutch cartographer. The map shows the built-up area, the city walls and fortifications in considerable detail. To the north-west of Macau is the compound of the ‘Casa Branca’ mandarin, shown here in French as ‘La Case Blanche’.J.M. Braga collection. nla.gov.au/nla.map-rm302.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a58 59Bocarro’s ordnance, were thus an effective deterrent against another Dutch attack. Macau’s defences could never be anything other than static, but they were strong enough to be an effective deterrent for several generations. Bocarro himself disappeared from the record in 1645, which seems likely to be the date when his foundry ceased operations. No trace remains in Macao of his guns.41 However, it is possible that he cast the statues on the façade of St Paul’s church. During the next 300 years, his cannon were dispersed, mostly in the nineteenth century, and the last perhaps as recently as World War II, when the guns in Santiago fort were sold for scrap in order to pay for rice during the hard days of World War II. The fact that most of his guns were never fired in anger is a tribute to the fine work of Manoel Bocarro and his foundry.41 The guns now on Monte Fort were brought in from elsewhere when the fort was restored and converted into a museum.The church fared badly too. Portuguese Jesuits in Macau found themselves in conflict, not co-operation, with the Spanish Franciscans and Dominicans from Manila in missionary activity throughout East Asia. It blighted the efforts of all, and with the collapse of trade and wealth, these missions went into a steep decline. The Dominican Order had once had twenty-four monks in Macau. By 1670, there were only three, maintained in poverty with great difficulty.There was only one straw to grasp at: the supremacy of the Portuguese Crown. Overshadowed by the Spanish in nearby Manila, the Portuguese in Macau clung doggedly to their separate identity after Portugal came under Spanish dominion from 1580 until 1640. During this time, Spanish kings left the remote, obstinate Portuguese outpost largely to its own devices. On the restoration of the Portuguese crown in 1640, the Macau Senate is said to have sent the new king, João IV, a gift of two hundred bronze guns, cast locally by Manoel Bocarro.42 King João, told of the tenacity of this tiny place at the remotest end of the earth, is said to have remarked wonderingly, ‘não ha outra mais leal’ – ‘there is no other more loyal’. Shortly before his death in 1654, this piece of royal praise was added to the city’s motto, and the Macau Council proudly bore the title Leal Senado, Loyal Senate, until 1999. It was a gesture that in reality meant little, because Macau was poverty-stricken, with a declining population, and left with little but a magnificent past upon which to dwell.The deterioration was widespread. Braz de Castro, appointed governor and captain-general in 1648, declined the appointment on the grounds that the previous governor had been murdered.43 42 A. Ljungstedt, ‘Portuguese settlements in China: Independent of China’, Canton Miscellany, no. 4, 1831, p. 293, quoting the seventeenth century writer Manuel de Faria e Sousa, Asia Portuguesa [no page number given]. However, Ljungstedt doubted that such a gift, if in fact it was made, was ever received in Lisbon, noting that no reference to it was made there.43 C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, p. 274.This Bocarro gun, now displayed outside Windsor Castle, is likely to be the one seized by the British in Guangzhou during the first Opium War and taken as a trophy to the Tower of London in 1841.Photographer, Stuart Braga, 2014
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a60 61A visiting Spanish Dominican friar, Domingo Navarrete, wrote in 1672 that ‘it would take up much time and paper to write but a small Epitome of the Broils, Uproars, Quarrels and Extravagancies there have been at Macao.’44 This was the sociology of ingrained poverty at work. A pattern developed of lack of insight, parochialism, incessant bickering and failure to grasp opportunities. This pattern became too deep to break. The worst year was 1662, when an uprising in Guangdong province led to an Imperial order that the coastline was to be evacuated. The whole Chinese population of Macau fled, and the border was closed for three months. Many Macanese people starved to death, but Macau just survived because it suited the mandarins to allow it to remain as long as they were suitably bribed. A small amount of trade with Siam just kept Macau from complete economic collapse.Navarrete described with disgust a deputation from the Leal Senado to the Casa Branca: They go in a body with rods in their hands to the Mandarine who resides a League from hence and they petition him on their Knees. The Mandarine in his Answer writes thus: ‘This barbarous and brutal People desires such and such a thing: let it be granted.’ Or ‘refus’d them.’ Thus they return in great state to their City and their Fidalgos or Noblemen with the Badge of the Knighthood of the Order of Christ hanging at their Breasts have gone upon these errands ... if their King knew of these things it is almost incredible that he should allow of them.45 This demeaning behaviour was indeed forbidden by King João V in 1712, but in Macau, far from the royal court, nothing changed. These impoverished and demoralised people were 44 J.S. Cummins, The travels and controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, vol. II, p. 270.45 Ibid.cut off from their distant homeland and royal authority. The mandarin ruled here, not the king. From grim necessity, the councillors developed a practice of cringing obeisance to the Chinese authorities at the Casa Branca and at the Chinese customs house within their very walls. They had to do so in order to survive. Navarrete’s Spanish view, hostile to the Portuguese, was that the people of Manila were free, but that the people of Macau were slaves to the Chinese. They were indeed trapped in a most unenviable situation, wracked by poverty, and with no way out. Even if ships could be found to take them away, where would they go, and how would they evade Dutch control of the Straits of Malacca? Nevertheless, through all of this period of some two centuries, despite the severe restrictions which they endured for so long, the Portuguese community of Macau continued to show an amazing degree of stubborn endurance.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a62 636 – STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL, 1720-1849Things did get better in the eighteenth century, but only very slowly. The improvement could have been much greater but for several poor decisions that deprived Macau of the opportunity to recover. In the late seventeenth century, Jesuit influence grew at the Emperor’s court in Peking, chiefly through the outstanding Jesuit astronomer, Father Verbiest, who won the confidence of the Kangxi Emperor to such an extent that in 1685, he decreed that Chinese ports were to be opened to foreign shipping. This should have been a golden opportunity for Macau to recover much of its former status, but the opportunity to take it up slipped through the fingers of the Macau Senate, which viewed the imperial edict with resentment and suspicion. They saw it as depriving them of the monopoly rights of trade with Guangzhou that Macau had under the Ming dynasty before it fell in the 1640s.The emperor under-estimated the importance that foreign trade would eventually have, but it began in a small way. Some control was needed, so in 1719 the Kangxi emperor, towards the end of his reign, again proposed to centre all the foreign trade of China at Macau. Incredibly, the imperial offer was once more rejected, seen as giving the Chinese a much larger presence in and control of Macau than they already had. The Senate baulked at the cost of having to provide fifty to sixty officials to administer the proposal. Perhaps the rejection was not as blinkered as it might have seemed. The Senate had seen too many instances of local mandarins squeezing all the money they could from any profitable operations undertaken by the Portuguese. Yet gradually they changed their view, but it was too late. In 1732, thirteen years later, the Yongzheng emperor renewed the proposal for the third time. This time the Senate was enthusiastic. However, the Bishop of Macau was not, as it would bring English traders, Protestant heretics, into the City of the Name of God. Although foreigners were not permitted to reside in Macau, several had slipped in as ‘lodgers’. Most were bachelors, and the effect on Macau’s night life was predictable; these men were not monks. Fearful for the morals of his flock, the bishop persuaded the Viceroy of India, Pedro Mascarenhas, to over-ride the Senate’s wishes. In vain the Senate protested.Though some may presume that the residence of foreigners might be the cause of mischief and danger to the city, those who have more experience are of opinion that their establishment in the town can never be prejudicial, on the contrary, greatly advantageous, for it is certain that no place can be rich and opulent but by means of commerce.46For the third time, Macau’s chance of economic recovery was pushed aside, this time by the overriding authority of the Viceroy in Goa. Meanwhile, British merchants were taking a 46 A. Ljungstedt, An historical sketch of the Portuguese settlements in China, p. 104.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a64 65growing interest in trade with China. They dealt chiefly in tea, oriental curios and porcelain, which became known in Britain as ‘china’. Opium came later. British ships were larger, and already it was clear that the shallow water around Macau was hazardous for navigation. Following the Viceroy’s ban, the British went to the nearby island of Lintin in the Pearl River estuary to bargain with Chinese merchants instead of calling at Macau.In the mid-eighteenth century, the steady growth of foreign trade led to a Chinese reconsideration of the basis on which it was conducted. Only in Guangzhou were the administrative arrangements sufficiently well developed to regulate trade and traders on both sides. In 1760, all ports were therefore again closed except Guangzhou, and a set of eight regulations issued governing trade. As usual, the prohibitions these contained were negotiable. However, in one case there was no room for compromise. No foreign women were permitted in Guangzhou, and foreigners were permitted to reside there only during the trading season, confined to a small area outside the walled city. The reason was obvious. The Chinese knew that permanent residency of foreigners of both sexes would create another European colony.This created an immediate problem for nearby Macau, which had not long before banned foreign residents because they were all Protestants. If Macau continued to exclude foreign residents, they were likely to force their way in. If so, the Chinese were unlikely to stop them, because it was convenient to have them close at hand, but not at Guangzhou. For the Senate, a practical solution was vital lest Macau again lose all its trade. So the ban was lifted, despite the objections of the bishop; foreigners might live in Macau, but they were not permitted to own property.The Senate was right in supposing that this step was essential to the survival of Macau. Many years later, an English army officer observed in 1840, ‘the English merchants only rent houses here, but since they have been forced to retire from Canton and to reside in this place, Macao has risen from an almost ruined to a very flourishing condition. The Portuguese as well as the Chinese thrive on British wealth and industry.’47 Poverty that had ground down the Macanese for generations began to ease, chiefly through the vigorous enterprise of the newcomers, especially the British East India Company. This huge mercantile company was the world’s first multi-national corporation. Its business was effectively globalised three centuries before the term existed. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, trade in opium was insignificant, but it was growing in value and the number of addicts in the Guangzhou area was also growing. Recognising opium to be a dangerous drug, the Yongzheng Emperor prohibited its importation in 1729. As usual, this prohibition was seen in Guangzhou as yet another opportunity for extracting bribes from foreign merchants, and the imperial ban was quietly ignored. At that time, no-one could have foreseen that the rapidly growing Chinese demand for opium and the vastly increased supply of it from India would eventually lead to war between Britain and China. From the late eighteenth century, the illegal trade flourished and in the 1830s it boomed as never before. British, Dutch, Swedish and American merchants gradually took over the economy of Macau, stifling the limited commercial opportunities available to local people.47 ‘A Field Officer’, The Last Year in China to the Peace of Nanking, p. 58-59.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a66 67The overall picture was grim:Towards the end of the eighteenth century Portuguese shipping at Macao had dwindled to some eight or ten vessels trading mostly with Siam; and from Portugal one or two vessels annually came with Brazil snuff, then in great demand among the Chinese, and the usual small shipment of home produce, bringing in return but a dwindling cargo of oriental products. In a word, trade at Macao was dying out ... the people of Macao grew none the better, but became poorer; and their poverty was an evil without remedy.48In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the situation grew steadily worse, and in the next few years it got out of control. From 1834 to 1838, the annual volume of opium reaching China doubled from 20,000 chests to over 40,000 chests.49 The consequences were disastrous for China, but in the short term led to the triumph of British commercial and strategic power in East Asia. The attempt by the Emperor’s Commissioner, Lin Zesu to destroy the opium trade failed, and what is usually called the Opium War broke out in 1839. The Chinese Empire was humiliated. Their chief ports were thrown open for trade and in 1841 Hong Kong was occupied by the British, who ruled it until 1997.48 C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 136, 137.49 M. Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-42, p. 113.A jingal. This was a light gun mounted on a swivel. It was used by Chinese forces in the nineteenth century.Illustrated London News,. 9 July 1842‘A View of the Town and Castle of Macao’On the right, a British ship, the Centurion, commanded by Commodore George Anson, visited Macau in 1742. It is seen firing a salute, which is returned from Monte Fort. The ship in the centre, described as ‘The Manilla Ship’ had recently been captured by Anson. On the right, ‘The Castle’ is an exaggerated view of São Francisco Fort. The high tower in the centre of the city is imaginary, as typhoons made it impossible to build tall buildings.National Library of Australia J.M. Braga Collection no. 46
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a68 69Indirectly, the consequences were also disastrous for Macau and its people. Within a few years the British and other foreign merchants left Macau, whose economy all but collapsed. An English journalist in Hong Kong wrote in 1844: ‘We have before us a most melancholy account of the deplorable state of affairs in Macao. The Government are literally bankrupt. Not a stiver to pay a few miserable half-starved troops … We hear that since April the exchequer has been empty, – the troops threaten that they will stand it no longer and a riot is far from improbable.’50 It did not come to this, but the situation was indeed grim.An energetic new governor, João Maria Ferreira do Amaral, appointed in 1846, set about to make Macao great again. In the attempt, he made enemies of almost everyone in his effort to strengthen the Portuguese rule of Macau. When he arrived, Macau had many problems. Following the establishment of Hong Kong in 1841, Macau lost almost all its trade to the new British colony with its deep water harbour. Hong Kong had been declared a free port, with no customs duties levied on imports or exports. Therefore in 1845 the Portuguese government decided to do the same for Macau, hoping to increase trade. Instead, this had the effect of abolishing Macau’s only source of revenue, making a bad situation even worse. So Amaral was sent out as governor to fix things. A war hero who had lost an arm fighting for Portugal, he was brave, determined and even reckless, a man who would stop at nothing. He seemed to be the right man to led Macau to a better future.Amaral cancelled the annual payment of ground rent to the mandarins and expelled the officials who for more than two hundred years had collected customs duties. Carrying out 50 W. Tarrant, Hongkong, 1839 to 1844, p. 144. A stiver was a small coin worth very little.instructions from the government in Lisbon, he tried to assert the independence of Macau from China.51 This he did, in a determined, confrontational way, although he lacked armed forces to back up his policy. A British merchant, John Davis, referred to the soldiers who formed the garrison of Macau as ‘two or three hundred starved blacks’, who could be seen begging for food at the doors of convents,52 because a bankrupt government could not pay their wages. It seemed that the royal government in Lisbon wanted him to do the impossible without giving him any backing at all. They presumed that the Chinese Empire, recently defeated by the British in the Opium War, would not object to whatever this firebrand might do. Amaral went further. He constructed a road from the city wall of Macau to the barrier wall that the Chinese mandarins had built in 1573 to control trade, destroying many graves and claiming this disputed land as Portuguese territory. The reaction was furious, and in Guangzhou posters went up calling 51 Montalto de Jesus, p. 318.52 J.F. Davis, The Chinese, p. 89.João Maria Ferreira do AmaralGovernor of Macau, 1846-1849from J.F. Pereira Marques,Ta-Ssi-Yang-Kuo, Archivos e annaes do Extremo-oriente portuguez, vol. 1, facing p. 19
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a70 71for Amaral’s head. Soon afterwards, that is what happened. Riding his horse in the disputed territory, Amaral was attacked, killed and beheaded. Three days later, Baishaling, a Chinese fort, began to bombard Portuguese troops who had been moved up to the barrier wall. In this tense situation, a young sub-lieutenant of the artillery, Vicente Mesquita, volunteered to lead an attack on the fort.With a small force of 36 men, he charged Baishaling. It was heavily garrisoned, but with untrained and disorganised soldiers who fled at the sight of brandished lances and cold steel. The fort’s guns were spiked and its magazine blown up. In a savage act of reprisal for the mutilation of Amaral, Mesquita seized and killed an unarmed mandarin, a civilian, whose head was severed, stuck on a long pike and carried in triumph to Macau.53 It was probably the first time any Portuguese military force had ever attacked a 53 Hongkong Register, 30 August 1849.Chinese position, and the reaction in Macau was ecstatic. To the Portuguese, Mesquita became an instant hero. Much later, in 1940, a statue was erected in his honour in the Largo do Senado. However, to the Chinese population of Macau, he was always seen as an enemy and a murderer. The statue was pulled down and its head cut off in the riots of 1966. Alarm bells rang in Hong Kong. A Hong Kong paper warned, ‘if the Governor of Macao is assassinated in the open daylight within half a mile of the forts of the town, [this] may be the prelude to the assassination of our own worthy Governor in one of His Excellency’s evening drives.’54 A Governing Council hastily set up in Macau appealed for assistance and the Governor of Hong Kong stepped in at once, sending two British warships. British marines occupied Baishaling and S. Francisco Fort on the Praya Grande in case there was a Chinese attack on either place. This substantial armed British presence amounted to a military occupation. The British position was not so much support for the Portuguese in Macau as a definite warning to the Chinese not to attempt the capture of any Western territory on the China coast. Britain strongly supported the Portuguese presence in Macau, but it meant that Macau was under British protection. That was also evident when some hundreds of people fled in panic to Hong Kong seeking greater security.55 Gradually the situation calmed down, and future governors of Macau avoided confrontation with the Chinese authorities.54 Hongkong Register, 28 August 1849.55 As reported by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir George Bonham, to Earl Grey, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, 26 April 1851, R.L. Jarman, Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941, vol. 1, pp. 95, 121, 148; L. A. de Sá, The boys from Macau, p. 4.Vicente Mesquita, who led an attack on Baishaling three days after the death of Governor Amaral, in what was probably the first time any Portuguese military force had ever attacked a Chinese position.from J.F. Pereira Marques,Ta-Ssi-Yang-Kuo, Archivos e annaes do Extremo-oriente portuguez,vol. 1, facing p. 28
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a72 737 – MACAU GRAPPLES WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD, 1850-1937As China came to terms with the outside world, often painfully, so did Macau in the second half of the nineteenth century and until 1937, when both Macau and its larger neighbour were caught up in a catastrophic conflict. Some of Macau’s attempts to modernise were beneficial and creditable, while others were not. The first part of this period of 87 years was marked by a dark episode, followed by several attempts at enlightenment, both physical and social.A measure of prosperity returned to Macau between the 1850s and 1874, but it was not a period the people of Macau can look back upon with any pleasure. This short-lived prosperity was due to what came to be called ‘the coolie trade’. This was the shipment of large numbers of Chinese men, mainly from Guangdong province, through Macau to labour-hungry places such as Cuba and Peru where they worked in sugar plantations and silver mines. Chinese ‘coolies’ worked on the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada in very hard conditions. Many wanted to escape the misery and starvation in their homeland that resulted from the Taiping Rebellion between 1850 and 1864, only to find themselves held in conditions that amounted to slavery. Few ever returned home to China. By the 1870s, international condemnation brought an end to this terrible evil. The Constitution of the State of California declared in 1879 that ‘Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void.’56 During the twenty-five year period from 1850 to 1874, a large number of Chinese coolies were sent, mainly from Macau, and claimed by one researcher to number at least 250,000.57 A relatively small number of unscrupulous people in Macau involved in the coolie trade became wealthy during this relatively short period.56 California Constitution, Article XIX, Section 4.57 Lee Si-eun, ‘History of Indian and Chinese Coolies and their Descendants’, II.2.2 The Exportation of Chinese Coolies, Term Paper, AP European History Class, October 2008, Korean Minjok Leadership Academy. http://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/0910/lse/lse2.html#ii22, accessed 26 June 2016.Guia Lighthouse, built in 1864 next to the chapel built in the 1620s at the same time as the fort. Watercolour by Vicente Pacia, about 1939 J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a74 75Far more creditable to Macau was the construction in 1864 of the first lighthouse on the China coast. Designed by a Macanese citizen, Carlos Vicente de Rocha, it was first lit on 24 September 1865, originally with a kerosene lamp. However, after only nine years of operation, it was badly damaged by the Great Typhoon in September 1874, which devastated Macau, leaving at least 2,000 dead. It was perhaps the worst typhoon it had ever experienced. There was no money to repair the lighthouse, which remained out of service for the next 36 years.58 This lighthouse may have been built in an attempt to win back part of the shipping lost to Hong Kong after the British colony was established in 1841, leaving Macau almost devoid of trade. However, lacking a deep-water port and harbour infrastructure, Macau could not compete with its larger neighbour. In 1891 the Hong Kong government commenced building a more important lighthouse, the Gap lighthouse, perched spectacularly on a rocky islet twenty-six miles south of Hong Kong. Completed in 1897, it was a huge boon to shipping approaching Hong Kong, and a very important step forward for all shipping entering the Pearl River estuary. During this period, Macau’s long decline continued, and many Portuguese youths left Macau for better opportunities in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Japan and other locations throughout East Asia. Perhaps the lowest point was the Great Typhoon. In the next few months several hundred people fled to Hong Kong from Macau. Its historian, Carlos Montalto de Jesus, sadly commented that ‘the disastrous typhoon consummated the ruin of the Macanese’.59 During the 1870s, when things were at their darkest, a small group of determined men set about to improve opportunities for Macanese youth. For many years there had been a tradition 58 Wikipedia article, Farol da Guia (Macau), accessed 26 June 2016.59 C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 429.of excellent education in Macau. As far back as 1565 St Paul’s College was founded by the Jesuits, less than ten years after the territory was occupied. As its name suggests, St Paul’s was intended to be the forerunner of a great intellectual thrust of Christian civilisation into the Far East. The grand vision never eventuated, and during the long period of Macau’s decline after 1640, the college declined too. St Paul’s came to an end in 1762 when the Jesuits were expelled from Macau as a result of a violent anti-Jesuit policy in Portugal. St Paul’s never re-opened. In addition to St Paul’s, St Joseph’s College was established in 1730, also by the Jesuits. However, it too was closed in 1762, when its Jesuit community was swept away along with that of St Paul’s. St Joseph’s remained closed until 1784, when it was reopened, staffed by priests of another religious order, the Congregation of the Mission, also known as Lazarists.St Joseph’s then had a precarious existence during the nineteenth century. It closed in 1845, part of the general collapse of activity in Pedro Nolasco da Silva, whose hard work led to the founding of the Escola Comercial.He also rebuilt the Santa Casa da Misericórdia From Manuel Teixeira, Pedro Nolasco da Silva
77f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u76Macau following the British occupation of Hong Kong in 1841. It reopened in 1862, but was closed again in 1870 when the Jesuits were expelled for a second time. Particularly galling was the fact that elsewhere in the Far East, Catholic education was thriving, with the establishment of St Joseph’s College in Shanghai, another St Joseph’s in Hong Kong, and St Xavier’s College in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Until 1870, there had been four Jesuit teachers at St Joseph’s in Macau, and without them, ‘the Seminary fell into decadence’.60 Vigorous protests to the government in Lisbon were ignored. Effectively, there was no educational opportunity in Macau, and with Macau facing a future of illiteracy, a group of concerned citizens headed by Maximiano António dos Remédios decided to take matters into their own hands.They met in 1871 to found the Associação Promotora da Instrução dos Macaenses, the Association for the Promotion of Macanese Education, of which Pedro Nolasco da Silva became President. Over a period of years, the Association raised $11,000 to establish a new school. It was then a sizeable sum, especially when Macau had been all but wiped out by the Great Typhoon. It took a determined champion, Pedro Nolasco da Silva, one of Macau’s most respected and eminent citizens, to get a new school started, following this major setback. As a result of the Association’s efforts, two institutions were set up, first the Escola Comercial, the Commercial Institute, in 1878, and some years later, in 1893, the Liceu Nacional de Macau, preparing students for Coimbra University in Portugal. The first priority was a Commercial Institute, as it was essential to prepare Macanese boys for the realities of a commercial world dominated by British banks and trading companies. Nolasco da Silva, who was the school’s first director, was well aware that he had to prepare boys both for the limited commercial 60 M. Teixeira, Pedro Nolasco da Silva, p. 67.opportunities that Macau still offered, and in hope of emigration to Hong Kong or Shanghai where the economy was booming and there were plenty of opportunities for clerical employment in the British firms there. He died in 1912, and from then until 1998, the school he had done so much to found was named in his honour the Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco. With the impending inauguration of Macau as a Special Administrative Region of China, it then became the Escola Portuguesa de Macau, by merging with the Liceu.Although education went through troubled times, there was one public benevolent institution that throughout the long history of Macau had an important and highly beneficial role. This was the Santa Casa da Misericórdia. Despite its name, the misericórdia was a secular organisation, not an agency of the Catholic Church, though that scarcely mattered in a community that was profoundly devout and observant of its religious duties. To be an irmão, a brother, of the misericórdia was a pious obligation for a poderoso, a leading member of the community. Its role for several centuries until the rise of the modern Welfare State was to care for the poor, sick and elderly. The misericórdia was for several centuries an important and effective means of giving charity in a community in which other social services were absent. It is not surprising to find that Pedro Nolasco da Silva was one of its greatest leaders. For several years he was the provedor, the president of the board of guardians, and organised a highly successful ‘Santa Casa’ lottery which raised funds in the 1890s for a fine new building that still stands on the Largo do Senado.It was a mark of honour to be an irmão of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia. The poderosos were active both in municipal affairs and in charitable work. Their higher standing gave the brothers something to live up to. They must be ‘men of good conscience and repute, walking in the fear of God, modest, charitable and
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a78 79humble’.61 There was genuine human compassion in the way they carried out their duties. At a much earlier time when hardly any Europeans cared about the welfare of slaves, the regulations for the hospital of the Macau Misericórdia laid down in 1628 that the staff of Timorese and Negro slaves should be given as much rice and fish as they could eat, to keep them ‘well-fed and contented’. In that era it was a remarkably enlightened provision, for nobody in the seventeenth century thought in terms of the emancipation of slaves. That lay well into the future. 61 C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire. p. 289.MacaoNew Port in Portugal’s Ancient ColonyOne of a series of maps issued about 1922 by the Macao Harbour Authority promoting the reclamation about to be commenced.J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia, Map Col./53/7Praya Grande Bay, looking north towards Guia.Twelve years after the reclamation had been finished, nothing had yet been built on the new land. Watercolour by Vicente Pacia 1938J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a80 81The provedor held the most important elected position of the misericórdia, and a high community status. In the early seventeenth century, the role of the provedor had been set out in clear terms. ‘He must always be a fidalgo, a gentleman, ‘of authority, prudence, virtue, reputation and age, in such wise that the other brothers can all recognise him as their head’.62 It was expected that community leaders would give generously to the misericórdia, for the irmãos of the misericórdia were respected community leaders who did their job conscientiously and effectively, even when Macau was no longer wealthy. They were people who loyally stayed in Macau while many left for Hong Kong.In the last years of the nineteenth century, a few of these, still with a nostalgic affection for Macau, would sometimes return at weekends. An account by Amadeu Gomes de Araújo of their impressions gives some understanding of the sleepy backwater that Macau had become by then.In the lobby of the Hing Kee Hotel, the aroma of jasmine tea added pleasantly to the murmur of that Sunday morning. The space was ample and comfortable, devoid of luxury. Around the small rosewood tables where teapots were steaming, portly weekend clients reclined on worn Victorian sofas and armchairs, speaking in English. The majority, who had arrived the night before, came from Hong Kong and Guangzhou to drink and play fan-tan, a Chinese betting game. In their conversation, which was always animated, they invariably contrasted the decline of old Macau, with no port or infrastructure, with the charm and wealth of the young and vibrant Hong Kong.6362 Ibid., p. 291.63 Amadeu Gomes de Araújo, chapter ‘Caminhos Cruzados’ (‘Crossed Paths’) in Diálogos em Bronze: memórias de Macau. Translated by Pureza d’Eça and Henrique d’Assumpção.About twenty years later, a few years after World War I, there seemed to be a good chance that Macau could yet recover. A large reclamation scheme at the northern end of Praya Grande Bay, the construction of an outer harbour and the dredging of a deep-water channel were parts of a major project undertaken in the 1920s. Its promoters hailed it as the beginning of a new golden age for Macau, and the local press seized on their extravagant promises. However, it did not attract the large-scale development that the planners had hoped, and the reclaimed land was not fully utilised until well after World War II.A remarkable incident showed how difficult things had become. In 1902, a Hong Kong Portuguese journalist, Carlos Montalto de Jesus, wrote Historic Macao, the first history of Macau in English by a local writer. He concluded gloomily, seeing no future for Macau, but his book was well received all the same. In 1926, he wrote a second edition, and still saw no good future. However, he cast around for a positive note on which to finish his book. His solution was radical. He wrote, ‘it would be no derogation at all if helpless Portugal wisely placed Macau under the providential tutelage of the League of Nations as a safeguard against further ruinage.’64 The League of Nations, set up after World War I to safeguard the peace of the world, administered two territories in Europe, Danzig and Fiume, that could not survive without outside protection. Montalto de Jesus suggested that Macau should become a third. In 1926, the League appeared to be an effective champion of world peace and international justice. Reviews of the book on 14 June 1926 in two Hong Kong newspapers, the South China Morning Post and the Hongkong Telegraph applauded the idea.65 64 C.A. Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao, p. 514.65 L. A. de Sá, The Boys from Macau, p. 44-45.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a82 83Montalto de Jesus meant well. He thought he had proposed a way out of the deep pit into which Macau had sunk, but he implied that Portugal was incapable of looking after Macau, which could not survive without international aid. Still worse, it was a slap in the face to the Macau government which had invested a great deal of money and effort into the major reclamation scheme which was confidently expected to save Macau from obscurity and perhaps even collapse. But in Macau, there was a furious reaction to the book. All the copies that could be found were seized and burned in a public ceremony in the Largo do Senado. No greater insult to an author can be imagined than the public burning of his book. Montalto de Jesus left Macau, swearing never to return. Hatred followed him. The Jornal de Macau reported on 28 November 1929 that ‘esse inimigo dos Portugueses’, ‘this enemy of the Portuguese people’, was in Shanghai, where he died a few years later. Unfortunately, Montalto de Jesus had told the truth. Macau’s economy remained depressed, and in the Great Depression of the 1930s it would become even worse. Tourism, which became so important by the 1970s, was almost non-existent. ‘Even as many as fifty or a hundred a week would help swell business in the Colony.’ wrote H. Noronha.66 Almost the only local industry was the making of fire-crackers. It seemed that nothing was going right for Macau.However, one important development did take place in these bleak years. In 1929 there was a proposal to supply town water to Macau, which had a completely inadequate water supply, with only a very small catchment area, Guia Hill. Macau therefore relied on water brought in by lighter from China. The Macau Government was not involved in the project, being itself in a difficult financial situation. Accordingly, the Macau Water Works Company (usually known as Watco) commenced the 66 Letter from H. Noronha to J.M. Braga, 25 September 1935. National Library of Australia, J.M. Braga papers, MS 4300, Series 5.2, folder 18. project in 1930. The plan was to build a retaining wall enclosing a bay on the relatively undeveloped north-eastern coastline of Macau, which would then be used as water storage. A filtration plant was to be provided. However, raising sufficient capital during the depression proved impossible. By 1934, the company was in a desperate financial predicament. It was without funds and workers were unpaid. The company went into liquidation, but after much effort and worry, was recapitalised, and the project was brought to completion in 1936. The population of Macau was then fewer than 200,000. Soon afterwards, in 1938, a flood of refugees fled to Macau when Guangzhou fell to the Japanese. A few years later, the population, swollen by refugees, reached 500,000 after the fall of Hong Kong in 1941. Without an adequate water supply, Macau could not have coped with this emergency, and most refugees would have had to be turned away, leading to thousands more deaths. The provision of a good water supply was providential and came just in time for the greatest crisis that Macau had faced since the Dutch attack three centuries earlier. From 1938 to 1945, the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong during World War II reversed the exodus of people from Macau that had gone on for a hundred years. Instead, they now rushed back. Perhaps 200,000 people, mostly Chinese, but including more than 90% of the Portuguese population of Hong Kong, fled to Macau. There followed a period that the English writer, Austin Coates, described as ‘Macau’s finest hour’.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a84 858 – WORLD WAR II – MACAU’S FINEST HOUR, 1938-1945Militarism grew in Japan during the 1920s, and its government became more aggressive, particularly in its policy towards China. Their defeat of China in 1895 encouraged the Japanese to continue to encroach on Chinese territory. War between China and Japan broke out again in Manchuria in 1931, and gradually moved closer to Macau. In 1937, Shanghai was occupied, and a terrible atrocity occurred in Nanjing, where more than 200,000 people were killed when the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the city. In 1938, a flood of refugees began to arrive in Macau when nearby Guangzhou was occupied by the Japanese. According to Beatriz Basto da Silva, Macau had been a small city of about 150,000 people in the mid 1930s, but when Shanghai fell to the Japanese in 1937 and Guangzhou in 1938, it grew rapidly to 245,000 by 1939. According to Ricardo Pinto, 20,000 people crossed the border into Macau on a single day soon after the fall of Guangzhou on 22 October 1938.67 Following the fall of 67 R. Pinto, ‘War in peace’, Macau, No. 96, p. 76.Hong Kong, there was another surge of refugees and by 1945 Macau’s population reached approximately 500,000.68 At the same time, the population of Hong Kong fell from 1,600,000 to about 600,000. Hong Kong was attacked on 8 December 1941. There was fierce fighting for a fortnight, in which the two Portuguese companies of the Hong Kong Volunteers played a distinguished part. Almost 300 Portuguese fought for the defence of their homes and families. By the end of the war in 1945, 26 of them had lost their lives.69 Hong Kong fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941. There was a Japanese victory parade, but few came to watch it. Two who did were Francis Ozorio and his brother Charles, boys of eleven and eight, who cowered at the roadside as the Japanese troops marched past. ‘We were bloody terrified,’ said Francis. Their heads bowed low, they were amazed to see that these soldiers who had defeated the British Army wore not leather boots, but cheap shoes with canvas uppers. Their lack of good equipment had not stood in the way of a victory that brought Hong Kong to its knees and humiliated the British.Francisco Soares, the Acting Portuguese Consul in Hong Kong, had already grasped the situation, and realised that the broadest possible definition would have to be given to nossa gente, our people. In practical terms, this meant the granting of Portuguese citizenship to hundreds of people who had hitherto claimed to be British. This would enable them to obtain Third National [i.e. neutral countries] passes from the Japanese authorities. This later created criticism, it being said that he granted papers to people whose only claim to have anything Portuguese in them lay in that they had eaten Portuguese sardines. They now clamoured for Portuguese Identity Cards, 68 Beatriz Basto da Silva, Cronologia da História de Macau, vol. 4, p. 323; M. Teixeira, ‘Macau Durante a Guerra’, Boletim do Instituto Luis de Camões, No. 1 and 2, p. 33-49.69 António M. Pacheco Jorge da Silva, The Portuguese Community in Hong Kong, A Picto-rial History, vol. 1, p. 18, 24-26, 28, 30-32, 54, 61.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a86 87wore arm-bands bearing the Portuguese colours and sought refuge in Macau.70Soares issued some 600 certificates of Portuguese nationality.71 Without doubt this action saved lives. His grandson, Bosco Correa, explained what occurred. When the Japanese attacked Hong Kong on 8 December 1941 my grandfather, then 74 years of age, was the Acting Consul for Portugal. He decided to move the Consulate … to his home in Homantin [on the Kowloon side]. When Kowloon was abandoned a few days later by the British forces who fell back to Hong Kong Island, looters took over Kowloon and he opened his home and gave refuge to some 400 refugees, mainly Portuguese residents from Homantin and Kowloon Tong.72The Portuguese community was in some ways even worse off than the British civilians, who were at least given scanty rations by their captors in internment camps. Portuguese civilians were not. Those paid weekly would have received their last pay on Saturday 6 December 1941; those paid monthly, at the end of November. Poorly paid clerks living a hand-to-mouth existence were in dire straits, and there was real distress, though not on the scale of the afflicted Chinese working class. Poor Chinese died of starvation by the hundreds every day. William Vallesuk, Chief Radio Engineer of China Electric Co. Ltd, described the harrowing situation.70 Leo d’Almada e Castro, ‘Some notes on the Portuguese in Hong Kong’, Address at Club Lusitano, Hong Kong (Instituto Portugues de Hong Kong, Boletim no. 2, September 1949, p. 274). 71 J. Forjaz, Famílias Macaenses, vol. 3, p. 829. This in addition to Portuguese passport holders.72 Bosco Correa’s reminiscences, quoted by A.M. Jorge da Silva, The Portuguese com-munity in Hong Kong, a pictorial history, vol. 1, p. 32.Never, as long as I live, will I forget the scenes of horror, of inhuman suffering, that I have witnessed. People dying by hundreds in the streets; mothers – themselves on the doorsteps of death – wailing over corpses of their infants; a child of six beheaded in the middle of the street – bullets are too precious to waste – for snatching a handful of rice from a military canteen; women and old men slowly tortured – until they begged for death – for forgetting to bow to a sentry. To a man accustomed to a normal, routine mode of living, these things will sound incredible, unbelievable – yet they happened, and what’s more, I’ve seen them happen with my own eyes.73The Macau government quickly came to appreciate the grave situation of Portuguese people in Hong Kong. A trickle of refugees began in the motor trawler Perla as early as 10 December, the third day of fighting. After the British surrender it became a flood. Arrangements were made for a ship-load of refugees to go to Macau on 8 February 1942 in the Japanese ship Shirogane Maru. These were people without work or resources. They arrived in Macau destitute and starving. Armando da Silva was on the ship. He remembered the situation very clearly. About 250 plus Hong Kong Macanese assembled at the Blue Funnel Line Holt Wharf at Tsimshatsui, Kowloon. About mid-morning we boarded the ferry which used to ply in Japan’s Inland Sea and was commandeered to serve in 73 A letter written in the Embassy of the USSR, Chungking, 9 September 1943, held by Stuart Braga.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a88 89the Imperial Japanese Navy. All the officers and crew members wore Japanese naval dark winter uniforms. Canvas awnings shrouded the whole deck but I was able to peer through a viewing space on the starboard side throughout the 4 or 5 hour voyage to Macau. It was a miserable February day of light drizzle. We arrived in the afternoon at Ponte 16, at the end of Avenida Almeida Ribeiro and close to the Kwock Chai Hotel, then one of Macau’s tallest buildings. After an hour or two of paper work and arrangement we (I guess the whole assemblage) proceeded to Colegio de Dom Bosco (opposite Igreja de Sao Lourenço) for a hot meal of well-received fish conjee. Meanwhile, Macau families were waiting outside to greet and embrace their Hong Kong Macanese conterraneos. At this juncture, certain groups were allotted to stay at selected places such as Velho Armazém, Casa Luso-Chinesa (near Igreja de Santo Agostinho), Tung Hoi (an abandoned ferry boat), Fat Chee Kee (a housing project) and so on. I was already tired when my family proceeded to Grémio Militar (now Clube Militar). We bunked there with some others for about three days when Leo d’Almada e Castro and Jack Braga arrived and selected certain families to go to Hotel Bela Vista which was to become the premier refugee center. Bela Vista Refugee Center as it was then called had a spacious kitchen as befitting a hotel geared for large dinners. The Bela Vista Refugee Center Kitchen cooked and provided meals to about two or three other refugee centers daily.74 74 Email from Armando da Silva to Professor Henrique d’Assumpção, 26 February 2009.Jim Silva’s reminiscences add to the impression of desperate overcrowding:Every possible location was used to accommodate the refugees. These were principally the Bela Vista Hotel, Teatro Dom Pedro V, the many classrooms of the Escola Luso Chinesa, another converted Chinese school, renamed the Armazém, Grémio Militar, Armacão (a house owned by the Remedios family on Rua do Barão), Bairro Tamagnini Barbosa and a house at No. 3 Praia Grande. There was even an old hulk, the Tung Hui, moored in the Inner Harbour, a farmhouse, the Chácara Leitão, somewhat distant from the city centre, and several houses near the ruins of St Paul’s and on the Rua Formosa were also filled with refugees.75 Jorge Remédios told how basic the accommodation was in the Bairro Tamagnini Barbosa:The bairro had row upon row of single-storey huts, each with one room and a tiny kitchen. Measuring no more than 20 by 20 feet in total area, each hut had a packed earth floor, a tile roof, a high Chinese-style cement threshold you had to step over, and no plumbing. The hut’s two windows had no glass panes: they were just barred with wood strips, and on the outside were plain wooden shutters.76 75 The list is compiled from various sources, including J.P. Reeves, The Lone Flag, A. Jorge da Silva, The Portuguese community in Hong Kong, Vol. 1, 2007 and J. Silva, Reminiscences of a wartime refugee, p. 20.76 Jorge Remédios, UMA Bulletin, San Francisco, 1999.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a90 91There was another shipload of 616 refugees on 20 April and a steady flow for the next three years. Some stayed in Hong Kong, and faced great hardship. Noel Braga, an early refugee, returned to Hong Kong trying to persuade other members of his family to go to Macau. He stayed there for several months, and his weight fell from 61 kg to 43 kg. He said the food the family was eating would not have been good enough for the dogs before the war.77Leo d’Almada, the outstanding leader of the Hong Kong Portuguese community in the post-war years, called Macau ‘the miracle of the time’.78 Later, borrowing Churchill’s famous phrase, a British writer, Austin Coates, referred to 77 Letter from Paul Braga to his brother James, 22 October 1943, in the possession of Stuart Braga.78 L.A. de Sá, The Boys from Macau, p. 137.the war years as ‘Macau’s finest hour’.79 Both comments were correct. The Governor of Macau, Gabriel Teixeira, did not need to go out of his way to provide a safe haven for so many refugees. In making them publicly welcome, and in making available every possible public building for their accommodation, he established the merciful policy that his administration then pursued until the end of the war. Teixeira could easily have taken the view that Macau had already done enough, and that public services were stretched to breaking point as it was. He could have concluded that the Japanese had created this problem by occupying Hong Kong, planning for it to become the regional centre of their grand design, the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. Let them show what they could do, and harness the capabilities of the people they had inherited.The strongest reason not to accept Portuguese refugees from Hong Kong was that they or their forebears had turned their backs on Macau. If Macau meant so little to them then, why should Macau lift a finger for them now? If any of these considerations crossed Teixeira’s mind, he quickly dismissed them. The disaster in Hong Kong had created a massive humanitarian crisis. In the three and a half years of the Japanese Occupation, thousands of people fled to Macau, most of them taking with them little more than what they could carry. Austin Coates, who had a close knowledge of Macau, wrote of this period in generous terms.The whole of the gambling taxes – $2,000,000 – were made over by the government to the assistance of refugees. Indeed Macao’s entire conduct during the period from Christmas 1941 to August 1945, when Hongkong was under Japanese occupation, was a gesture of unselfish friendship, made in Portugal’s 79 A. Coates, A Macao Narrative, p. 103.The Bairro Tamagnini Barbosa: basic refugee cottages built in the 1930s for Chinese refugees from Guangzhou, but crowded during the war with Portuguese refugees from Hong Kong.J.M. Braga, Hong Kong and Macao: a record of good fellowship, p. 137.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a92 93traditional style, regardless of dangers which others less magnanimous might have thought it more prudent to avoid. The patient endurance of the Macanese during these fateful years, and the sagacity and foresight of their Governor can hardly be overestimated ... no one who experienced Macao’s hospitality during these years would ever forget it. The entire episode ranks as one of the city’s finest moments.80Governor Teixeira led by example. The British Consul, John Reeves wrote of him with admiration. 80 Ibid., p. 103-104.On parades and so on he was a figure of great dignity and of rigidly correct naval bearing. He had also great personal courage; on one occasion troops in barracks refused duty, in fact mutinied; H.E. [His Excellency] walked in alone and unarmed and settled the matter. Another very pleasing ceremony [at the end of the war] … was that of homage to H.E. by the various communities … There was real feeling behind them, deep feeling of gratitude from all of us to the man who had done so much for us.8181 J.P. Reeves, The Lone Flag: Memoir of the British Consulate in Macao during World War II, p. 115-116.Cathedral of the Nativity of Our Lady (Sé Catedral da Natividade de Nossa Senhora). The Sé was the location of many special services during the war, including a Thanksgiving Mass at the end of the war in August 1945. Watercolour by George Smirnoff, 1944. J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of AustraliaGabriel Maurício Teixeira, Governor of Macau, 1940-1946(Anuário de Macau, 1940-41)
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a94 95Almost ten thousand of Hong Kong’s Portuguese population fled to Macau. They claimed British nationality and sought assistance from the British consul, John Reeves.82 Initially appointed as vice-consul in what was for the British Foreign Office a remote and insignificant outpost, this young diplomat became a key man between 1942 and 1945. It was Reeves’ responsibility to assist in the care of the thousands of refugees. He started in 1941 with a staff of one. By the end of the war, this had grown to 150. He certainly had a bigger staff than many British ambassadors. At the British consulate in Macau flew the Union Jack, the only Allied flag north of the equator between India and Alaska, apart from the embassy in Chongqing (then known as Chungking). It was a beacon of hope for desperate people. The British government agreed to pay its citizens a small subsidy. Theresa Yvanovich da Luz wrote that ‘dependants of each Hong Kong Portuguese in prisoner of war camps received 30 patacas a month from the British Consulate and rations from the Macau Government like oil, rice and bread. That did not buy very much as food was scarce and expensive.’83 This matched the Macau government’s subsidy to other Portuguese refugees, but was much lower than the $120 subsidy paid to British subjects. The cost of food steadily increased as the war dragged on. By the end of 1943, it was, according to Paul Braga, 20 to 60 times its pre-war rate. He went on: The effect this malnutrition has on people in Occupied parts is indescribable. With the exception of those who work with or for the Nips [Japanese], practically everyone has a colourless, parchment-like skin. Each has that 82 J.P. Reeves, The Lone Flag, p. 57, 90, 156.83 In A.M. Jorge da Silva, The Portuguese community in Hong Kong, a pictorial history, vol. 2, p. 36.drawn expression of constant strain and worry, and hardly without exception, they are very considerably underweight.84 Every day for three years and eight months was a day of gnawing hunger. Even the fabulously wealthy Sir Robert Ho Tung, who had also fled to Macau, ran short of funds. He wrote to the British consul seeking a remittance from Britain of £10,000 for his use.85 However, while in Macau there was great 84 Paul Braga to Hugh Braga, 1 November 1943. Paul Braga Papers, held by Stuart Braga.85 Sir Robert Ho Tung to J.P. Reeves, British consul in Macau. Undated, but appar-ently early 1945. J.M. Braga Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 4300/4.7/1.Two programmes for war-time charity events. Left: a concert in aid of poor children, 2 December 1944; right: an oratorio sung in the Cathedral on 15 April 1945 in aid of the Portuguese of Shanghai. This community suffered greatly during the Japanese Occupation.J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia, MS4300series 8.1 folder 14
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a96 97hardship and some died, in Hong Kong there was constant fear, mass starvation, much brutality and sudden, violent death.In 1945 the war came dangerously close to Macau. On 16 January 1945, American naval aircraft struck neutral Macau destroying stores of aviation fuel at the Naval Aviation Centre, and causing casualties. This raid was to prevent the fuel from falling into Japanese hands. The raid was a great shock for Macau residents, and anger simmered among residents, especially as the Inner Harbour came under repeat bombing raids.86 However, ‘we as refugees cheered’, commented Jim Silva.87 Another eyewitness was Armando da Silva: ‘I was at a north facing window at Bela Vista Refugee Camp and saw the first of the American planes 86 MAE, Asie Océanie 1944–1955, Goa-Macao-Timor, p 6, quoted by G. Gunn, Wartime Macau under the Japanese shadow87 Jim Silva, Reminiscences of a wartime refugee, p. 31. destroy the sea plane hangar which housed barrels of petroleum, which went up in spectacular smoke. Many of us at Macau can recall that day, the constant buzz of aircraft the whole day.’88 Another air raid on 25 February targeted the northwest corner of Macau, narrowly missed crowded refugee quarters, and damaging a Catholic school for the poor.89 A third raid on 12 April on the Inner Harbour left fifteen crew members of a tug-boat dead. While all these raids were a violation of Portuguese neutrality, they indicated that the war was coming closer to Hong Kong and that Japan was unable to protect the territory it had captured some years earlier. In Macau, newspapers protested strongly. Governor Teixeira’s caution and the pressures bearing upon him are evident when he abruptly closed Reeves’ newspaper the Macao Tribune at the end of January 1945 for not condemning the American air raid in sufficiently strong terms.90 The last months of the war were especially difficult as war quite obviously came closer. On 2 February 1945 the Japanese consul, Fukui Yasumitsu, was shot in mysterious circumstances.91 Two days later, on 4 February, Wong Wai of the Macau secret police was also shot and killed.92 The defeat of Germany in May 1945 was clearly the beginning of the end, but there were another four months of growing tension as people wondered what the Japanese might do as they realised that defeat was inevitable. It did not help that just five days before the surrender the Japanese-88 Armando da Silva, email to Stuart Braga, 26 December 2011.89 J.P. Reeves, The Lone Flag, p. 105–106.90 Ibid., p. 100-101, 118–119.91 A story circulating more than fifty years later in Macau was: ‘many believe that it was a more belligerent faction of the Japanese military which disagreed with the Consul’s moderate views on diplomacy with the British.’ Melina Dawn Cannon, ‘Experience, Memory, and the Construction of the Past: Remembering Macau 1941-1945’, Master’s Thesis, University of British Columbia, August 2001, p. 27. However, this is mere conjecture.92 As reported by Jack Braga. J.M. Braga papers, National Library of Australia, MS4300/7.4/3.The Hongkong News, a newspaper controlled by the Japanese, condemns the American air raids on Macau, 18 January 1945. J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a98 99controlled newspaper Hongkong News told its readers that Japan was the only trustworthy nation left in the world.93 People in both Macau and Hong Kong were fearful that all the internees and prisoners of war in Hong Kong would be killed as a final act of vengeance before the end of the war.94The surrender of the Japanese in August 1945 took everyone by surprise, though they knew it must be close. In Macau there were special services at churches and at the mosque. The papers ran special peace editions. In Hong Kong, as news broke at Shamshuipo POW Camp where the Portuguese boys who had 93 Hongkong News, 10 August 1945.94 Maude Franks told her mother in Macau, ‘they intended to machine-gun all internees and prisoners-of-war’. Letter from Maude Franks to Olive Braga, 31 August 1945, in the possession of Stuart Braga.served with the Hong Kong Volunteers were imprisoned, ‘the joy of the men knew no bounds. There were scenes of near hysteria.’95 They put on a dance on 19 August, just four days after the surrender. José Álvares celebrated the event with a triumphant drawing.96 Macau soon returned to its peaceful pre-war condition. All of the British and most of the Portuguese refugees returned to Hong Kong as soon as it was in a fit state to have them back. Jack Braga wrote in March 1946 that ‘things get quieter and quieter in Macao, with so many less people living here’.97 It would take another generation, and the dawn of prosperity in China to bring back to Macau the abundant wealth she had known in her earliest days.95 Luigi Ribeiro, ‘Personal account of war experiences’, p. 22. Unpublished type-script in the possession of Stuart Braga.96 A.M. Jorge da Silva, The Portuguese community in Hong Kong, a pictorial history, p. 183.97 Jack Braga to Olive Braga, 29 March 1946. James Braga Papers, held by Stuart Braga.Renascimento, 11 August 1945, looks forward to Peace n the East.J.M. Braga Collection, National Library of Australia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a100 1019 – RECOVERY AND TRANSFORMATION: MACAU RETURNS TO CHINA 1946 TO THE PRESENTMacau, which had been an important place of refuge for almost half a million people until the end of the war, quickly returned in 1946 to its former condition as an almost forgotten relic of the old Portuguese Empire. People returned to Hong Kong as soon as housing and jobs could be found. Hong Kong’s recovery was amazingly swift; Macau would have to wait longer before the changing economic and political circumstances of the late twentieth century gave it a prominence and prosperity even greater than it had known in the prosperous days of the early sixteenth century. In the early twenty-first century, no longer under Portuguese rule, but a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, Macau became fabulously wealthy as a result of the establishment of large numbers of casinos, many of them built on the Cotai Strip, an area of reclaimed land between Taipa and Coloane.‘Things get quieter and quieter in Macao with so many less people living here,’ wrote Jack Braga in March 1946.98 Jack had 98 Letter from Jack Braga to Olive Braga, 29 March 1946, in the possession of Stuart Braga.José Álvares commemorated the dance at Shamshuipo Prisoner of War camp in Hong Kong which celebrated the Japanese surrenderon 15 August 1945. There were more than two hundred Portuguese prisoners of war. Courtesy of António M. Pacheco Jorge da Silva, The Portuguese Community in Hong Kong, a Pictorial History, vol. 1, 2007.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a102 103lived in Macau since 1924, but he too moved to Hong Kong later in 1946. A steady exodus of younger people also left Macau, seeking employment in the stronger commercial environment of Hong Kong and later other parts of the world, especially the Pacific Rim countries of the USA, Canada and Australia. For several years, political turmoil in China was unsettling to people whose lives had already been disrupted by war. The proclamation on 1 October 1949 in Beijing of the People’s Republic of China did not at first bring a greater sense of stability.The new Chinese government declared the Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking, signed in 1887, to be invalid as it was an unequal treaty imposed by foreign imperialists on China at the time of the Chinese Empire’s weakness. However, Beijing was not yet ready to settle this issue, leaving the situation unchanged until a more appropriate time. Beijing took a similar position on treaties relating to Hong Kong. The right-wing regime in Portugal headed by Dr Salazar attempted in 1952 to reaffirm the Portuguese claim by declaring Macau, as well as other territories in Africa and India occupied by Portugal, to be an Overseas Province of the Portuguese Republic. This in no way altered the Chinese position.The Korean War from 1950 to 1953 was of some benefit to the economy of Macau as trade between Hong Kong and China ceased. The limited trade between China and the outside world passed partly through Macau in consequence. However, the border crossing, the Portas do Cerco, was heavily guarded on both sides, and in July 1952, tension developed into armed conflict. Portuguese African troops exchanged fire with Chinese border guards. The exchange lasted for nearly two hours leaving one dead and twenty injured on the Macau side and two dead and nine wounded on the Chinese side.99 To calm this situation, a written 99 Moisés S. Fernandes ‘Os Incidentes das Portas do Cerco de 1952’, Instituto da Cincias Socias Universidade de Lisboa, Working Paper WP205, October 2005, Portuguese apology followed, with compensation paid for the Chinese dead and wounded. Locally, this had the desired result, but in September 1952, Josef Stalin, meeting the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Moscow, objected to the continued Portuguese presence in Macau, arguing that ‘this scum that has situated itself on the very entrance of China must be driven out.’100An armistice brought fighting in Korea to an end in July 1953, and tension began to ease in Macau and Hong Kong. As trade returned, prosperity also grew. In 1954, the Macau Grand Prix was established, soon becoming an important international annual car racing event. Macau again became a place known throughout the world.In 1962, the gambling industry of Macau saw a major breakthrough when the government granted the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM), a syndicate jointly formed by Hong Kong and Macau businessmen, the monopoly rights to all forms of gambling. The STDM introduced western-style games and modernised the marine transport between Macau and Hong Kong, bringing millions of gamblers from Hong Kong every year. It was a far cry from the almost complete isolation of Macau thirty years earlier, when few visitors went there.The recovery of Macau received a serious but temporary setback when riots broke out on 3 December 1966 (known as the ‘1-2-3 riots’ as they occurred on the 12th month and the 3rd day of the month) during the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, when local Chinese people and the Macau authorities clashed. It was sparked by the poor handling by p. 11-13, quoted by Moisés S. Fernandes, ‘Macao in Sino-Portuguese Relations, 1949-1955’, in Portuguese Studies Review, Vol. 16 No. 1, 2008, p. 166-7.100 ‘Record of Meeting between Comrades I.V. Stalin and Zhou Enlai on 3 Septem-ber 1952’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 6, 1995, p. 16, quoted by M. S. Fernandes, ‘Macao in Sino-Portuguese Relations, 1949-1955’, in Portuguese Studies Review, Vol. 16 No. 1, 2008, p. 167.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a104 105some Portuguese officials of what was a relatively minor dispute concerning a building permit on Taipa. Rioting spread throughout the Territory. Government House (the Portuguese governor’s office) and the Leal Senado were occupied and damaged. Macau was out of control for several days, with mobs roaming the streets and pasting slogans on public buildings. Some ancient monuments were defaced and in the Largo do Senado the statue of Colonel Mesquita was pulled down and smashed. The Chinese people finally took their revenge more than a century after he had attacked the fort of Baishaling. The riots caused eight deaths and there followed several weeks of tension during which a ‘Three No’ boycott commenced against the Portuguese authorities: no payment of taxes, no supply of anything to Portuguese officials and government employees, no service to be rendered to the Portuguese.The Portuguese government was forced to accept all the demands of a local Chinese ‘Committee of Thirteen’ and the unrest concluded with the total humiliation of the Portuguese colonial authorities. The Portuguese government was also forced to retreat from its assertion of sovereignty over Macau. On 29 January 1967, the Governor of Macau, José Manuel de Sousa e Faro Nobre de Carvalho, met the Committee of Thirteen and signed a statement of apology termed ‘admission of guilt’ at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, under a portrait of Mao Zedong, with Ho Yin, the Chamber’s President, presiding. This location symbolised who would hold real authority in the future.Two agreements were signed, one with Macau’s Chinese community, and the other with mainland China. The latter committed the Government to compensate local Chinese community leaders with as much as two million patacas and to prohibit all Kuomintang activities in Macau. This move ended the unrest, and order was restored, but it was clear that the status of Macau would need to be determined. However, a Portuguese proposal to return the territory to China was declined by China as being premature. Events in Portugal moved in this direction in the next few years. The long period of authoritarian control first by Salazar and then by Caetano came to an end on 25 April 1974 with what was called the Carnation Revolution. The new Portuguese administration relinquished its claims to what had previously been proclaimed as Portugal’s ‘overseas provinces’, including Macau. Meanwhile, the economy of Macau grew steadily. The Hotel Lisboa, built in 1970, marked the beginning of what was to become a massive expansion of casinos. For twenty years its 12-storey round tower on the Praya Grande reclamation was Macau’s most prominent building. Macau’s original area in the sixteenth century was only 2.78 km2 but this began to increase as a result of Portuguese settlement. In the 1920s, a major reclamation took place at the northern end of the Praya Grande. This placed the old S. Francisco Fort well inland. Land growth has accelerated since the last quarter of the twentieth century, taking Macau’s land area from 15 km2 in 1972 to 16.1 km2 in 1983 and then to 21.3 km2 kilometres in 1994. Since then, Macau’s land area has rapidly increased as result of continued land reclamation, especially on Taipa and Coloane, which were completely joined by the Cotai Strip in 2006. By 2014, the total land area of the Macau SAR was approximately 30.3 km², more than ten times the original area of the Macau peninsula.101Transport infrastructure steadily developed. In 1968, the causeway linking Taipa and Coloane was completed. The first bridge between Macau and Taipa was built between 1970 and 1974. It was named the Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge, but is now usually known as the Old Bridge. For the first time rapid 101 Wikipedia article: Geography of Macau. Accessed 6 June 2016. The first figure of 2.78 km2 does not include Taipa and Coloane, which were not then under Por-tuguese control. Taipa was occupied by Portugal in 1851 and Coloane in 1864.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a106 107communication existed between all three parts of the territory of Macau. Within twenty years there was need for a second, then a third bridge. In 1994, the Bridge of Friendship was completed, and in 2004, a third bridge, the Sai Van Bridge was completed. In 1995, the Macau International Airport was inaugurated. As the population grew and the number of visitors steadily increased, bus routes were developed, and new means of moving around this small territory developed, in particular scooters, which became almost universal from the late 1990s onwards. Recreational facilities were also developed. In 1997, the Macau Stadium was completed in Taipa. It was renamed Macau Olympic Complex following its reconstruction in 2005, indicating the high standard of its facilities. Similar high standards have been set for cultural institutions such as the Museum of Macau in Monte Fort, the Macau Maritime Museum, the Macao Science Center, the Macao Museum of Art, the Macau Cultural Centre, the Handover Gifts Museum of Macao and the Grand Prix Museum, several of which were grouped together in an arts precinct near the Avenida Dr Sun Yat-Sen.The University of Macau was founded in 1981 and quickly achieved recognition as an important public comprehensive university, with more than 9,400 students by 2016. Aiming at high international standing, the university made English the main medium of instruction, with some programmes being taught in Chinese, Portuguese or Japanese.Handover to the People’s Republic of ChinaThe most important event in Macau since World War II was the Handover to the People’s Republic of China on 20 December 1999, following several years of slow, careful negotiation. Portugal and the People’s Republic of China established diplomatic relations in 1979, and a formula was then arrived at which described Macau as ‘Chinese territory under Portuguese administration’. Discussions continued for several years. A joint communiqué signed in May 1986 called for negotiations on the Macau question, and four rounds of talks followed between 30 June 1986 and 26 March 1987. The Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau was signed in Beijing on 13 April 1987, setting in motion the return of Macau on 20 December 1999 to full Chinese sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region. Meanwhile, the Portuguese government continued to be responsible for the administration of Macau. An important step towards the establishment of the Macau SAR was the drawing up of the Basic Law as the constitutional law for Macau, to take effect with the Handover. This was adopted by the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China on 31 March 1993. The Basic Law provided that under the ‘one country, two systems’ formula, China’s socialist system will not be applied to Macau while it remains a Special Administrative Region and that Macau would enjoy a high degree of autonomy in all matters except foreign relations and defence until 2049, fifty years after the Handover. Thus on 20 December 1999, European colonialism in East Asia ended in the place where it began in 1557, 442 years earlier. That initial occupation was the result of an informal arrangement that was convenient to both parties. It was not officially confirmed until 1887 when the Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking was imposed by force on an unwilling Chinese government. The return of Macau to China was very different. It was the result of careful negotiations conducted over a period of several years with mutual respect and goodwill.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a108 109Macau as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.The rise of Macau as the gambling capital of AsiaIn 2002, the Macau government ended the gambling monopoly system and three casino operating concessions, later six, were granted to the Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM, a subsidiary of the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau), Wynn Resorts, Las Vegas Sands, Galaxy Entertainment Group, the partnership of MGM Mirage and Pansy Ho Chiu-king, and the partnership of Melco and PBL (Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, an Australian media company), a decision which led to the rise of Macau as the new gambling hub in Asia.As one of the measures to develop the gambling industry, the Cotai Strip completely joining Taipa and Coloane was commenced in 2004. In 2007, the Venetian Macao opened, the first of many colossal resorts. Many other resorts followed, both in Cotai and in Macau, providing for a major tax income stream to the Macau government and almost full employment. Major community facilities continued to be developed. In 2005, the Macau East Asian Games Dome, a three-story multi-purpose sporting complex covering a total area of 45,000 m2 with two separate indoor facilities was completed. Planned to accommodate different types of indoor sports and activities, it contained a large exhibition hall to accommodate up to 2,000 people. The two stadiums provided ample seating, one for more than 7,000 people, and the other for up to 2,000. The first was designed for indoor track and field events, while the second had a central stage that gave audiences a perfect view of the stage, and was especially suitable for events such as dance sport. The Dome was the principal venue for the 4th East Asian Games in 2005. Also in 2005, the Macau government began a program of social housing construction, building over 8,000 apartment units.A major recognition of Macau’s unique historical heritage took place in 2005 with the listing of 29 sites in Macau on the UNESCO World Heritage register. This placed an important responsibility on the government to care for these historically important places. The plan was to restore and reuse properties with heritage value in accordance with the historic character of each site. This has been pursued in partnership with the community in order to safeguard Macau’s world heritage, so that the Historic Centre of Macau will continue to be protected well into the future. Less than a decade after the Handover, the Global Financial Crisis in 2007-2008 hit Macau hard, leading to a temporary halt in major construction works, especially on the Cotai Strip, and to a rise in unemployment, but by 2011 several mega-resorts on the Cotai Strip had commenced construction. The greatest building project undertaken in the history of Macau also began. This was the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, a series of bridges and tunnels crossing the Lingdingyang channel at the entrance to the Pearl River. It dwarfed all previous engineering and communication projects in South China. It connected the two Special Administrative Regions, Hong Kong and Macau, with Zhuhai in Mainland China. The entire link is 50 km in length, and the longest bridge section is almost 30 km long. Construction began in 2009 and the vast project was scheduled to take eight years to complete.This great project symbolises what Macau has always sought to achieve: a link between the outside world and the mighty Chinese nation. For a long time, this link was simply one of trade, and was disrupted by frequent misunderstandings and sometimes hostility. The completion of the great bridge signals the end of that long period of tentative contact and the limited
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u110understanding that accompanied it. A major and permanent bridge means that all future links must also be permanent and substantial. While Macau has a unique history, quite unlike that of any other city in the world, its future is one of connection, not only with its vast neighbour, the People’s Republic of China, but with the outside world as well. That has always been the intention of people who have dwelt in Macau, firstly Chinese fishermen for thousands of years, then Portuguese merchants and settlers for another four centuries, and finally its own people. They are the heirs of the long history of Macau. View across Macau and Taipa(Macau Festivals and Festivities, IIM, 2015)encarte
s t u a r t b r a g a113APPENDIX UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE – HISTORIC CENTRE OF MACAUThe Historic Centre of Macau (Centro Histórico de Macau) is a collection of twenty-nine locations that bear witness to the unique co-existence of Chinese and Portuguese cultures in Macau. It encompasses much of the city’s cultural heritage, including monuments such as urban squares, streetscapes, churches and temples.In 2005 the Historic Centre of Macau was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Register, making it the 31st designated World Heritage site in China. It was described thus by UNESCO: ‘with its historic street, residential, religious and public Portuguese and Chinese buildings, the historic centre of Macau provides a unique testimony to the meeting of aesthetic, cultural, architectural and technological influences from East and West …It bears witness to the earliest and longest-lasting encounter between China and the West.’The Historic Centre of Macau is made up of two separate core zones.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a114 115Squares Barra Square (Largo do Pagode da Barra)Lilau Square (Largo do Lilau)St. Augustine’s Square (Largo de Santo Agostinho) Senado Square (Largo do Senado)St. Dominic’s Square (Largo do São Domingos)Cathedral Square (Largo da Sé)Society of Jesus Square (Largo da Companhia de Jesus), the square in front of the Ruins of St. Paul’s. Camoes Square (Praça de Luís de Camões)Zone 2 – Guia HillGuia Fortress (Fortaleza da Guia) incorporating Guia Chapel and Guia Lighthouse (Capela de Nossa Senhora da Guia e Farol da Guia)In 2016 most of the buildings were owned by the Macau Special Administrative Region and managed by various departments or authorities. The Cultural Affairs Bureau (formerly the Cultural Institute of Macao) managed the Mandarin’s House, the Ruins of St. Paul’s, the section of the Old City Walls, Monte Fortress and Guia Fortress (including the Lighthouse and Chapel).The Leal Senado Building was managed by the Civil and Municipal Affairs Bureau of Macao while the two government-owned temples, A-Ma Temple and Na Tcha Temple were managed by the Board of A-Ma Temple Charity Association and Management Board of Na Tcha Temple respectively. The Moorish Barracks was managed by the Marine and Water Bureau (Direcção dos Serviços de Assuntos Marítimos e de Água).The rest of the buildings were owned and managed by the respective Associations. St. Joseph’s Seminary and Church were owned by St. Joseph’s Seminary and managed by the Catholic Diocese of Macao. The Holy House of Mercy (Santa Casa da Zone 1 – the city centreBuildingsA-Ma Temple, (Templo de A-Má), Barra SquareMoorish Barracks (Quartel Mouro), Calçada da BarraMandarin’s House (Casa do Mandarim), the residence of Zheng Guanying (1842-1921), Travessa de António da Silva St Lawrence’s Church (Igreja de São Lourenço), Rua de São Lourenço St. Joseph’s Seminary and Church (Igreja e Seminário de São José), Largo de Santo Agostinho Dom Pedro V Theatre (Teatro Dom Pedro V), Largo de Santo Agostinho Sir Robert Ho Tung Library, Largo de Santo Agostinho St. Augustine’s Church (Igreja de Santo Agostinho), Largo de Santo Agostinho Leal Senado (Municipal Council) Building, Senado Square Sam Kai Vui Kun (Kuan Tai Temple), Rua Sul do Mercado Holy House of Mercy (Santa Casa da Misericórdia), Senado Square Cathedral of the Nativity of Our Lady (Sé Catedral da Natividade de Nossa Senhora), Largo da SéLou Kau Mansion (Casa Lou Kao), the home of Lou Kau, a prominent Chinese merchant, Travessa da SéSt. Dominic’s Church (Igreja de São Domingos), Largo de São Domingos Ruins of St. Paul’s (Ruinas de São Paulo)Na Tcha Temple (Templo Na Tcha), located next to the Ruins of St. Paul’sSection of the Old City Walls, located next to the Ruins of St. Paul’s Monte Fort (Fortaleza do Monte)St. Anthony’s Church (Igreja de Santo António), Rua de Santo António Old Protestant Cemetery and Casa Garden, the residence of the President of the Select Committee of the British East India Company
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a116 117Misericórdia) was owned and managed by Holy House of Mercy Charitable Foundation. Dom Pedro V Theatre was owned by the Association of Owners of Dom Pedro V Theatre, but managed by the Cultural Affairs Bureau under an agreement. ILLUSTRATIONS – A NOTEAs many of the illustrations as possible are pictures painted in Macau. All the paintings are part of the J.M. Braga Collection, acquired by the National Library of Australia in 1966. Very few of them have previously been published. In the late 1930s Jack Braga commissioned four artists to paint pictures of Macau as it then was, and also reconstructions of earlier times. He presciently saw that Macau was soon going to change beyond all recognition. The four artists were the well-known Russian refugee George Smirnoff, Vicente Pacia, a Filipino resident in Macau, James Wong, a local artist, and Baron Reichenau, a German aristocrat who had left Germany because of his strong opposition to the Nazis. He was the brother of Walther Reichenau, an important German general. He wisely kept a very low profile in Macau, well away from the brutal war raging in Europe, and nothing is known about him. Each of the four had a particular skill. Smirnoff ’s paintings owe much to the Impressionist School of painting which would have been familiar to him as he grew up in the Russian refugee community in Harbin, northern China. Vicente Pacia
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a118 119BIBLIOGRAPHYBooksBarbosa, Duarte, and Dames, L. (ed.), Book of Duarte Barbosa, Hakluyt Society, London, 1918Basto da Silva, B., Cronologia da História de Macau , Direcção dos Serviços de Educação e Juventude, Macau Boxer, C.R., Macau na época da restauração (Macau three hundred years ago), Macau: Imprensa Nacional, 1942Boxer, C.R., Portuguese society in the tropics, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1965Boxer, C.R., South China in the Sixteenth Century, Hakluyt Society, London, 1953Boxer, C.R., The Great Ship from Amacon, Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, Lisbon, 1959Boxer, C.R., The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825, Hutchinson, London, 1969Braga, J.M., Hong Kong and Macao: a record of good fellowship, Hong Kong, 1960.Braga, J.M., China landfall, 1513: Jorge Alvares’ voyage to China Imprensa Nacional, Macau, 1955was a skilled painter of scenes and buildings, but his paintings reveal a warmth of feeling towards his subjects. He and Jack Braga appear to have been of one mind. Braga recorded the history of Macau in books, papers, in his writings and his public lectures, all of which reveal his respect for this remarkable place and for its people. Pacia does the same with his artist’s palette and easel. Therefore most of the paintings in the J.M. Braga collection are by this able artist. James Wong was a skilled architectural draftsman, exact in his representations, but his work is livelier than a photograph. Reichenau’s forte lay in pen and ink. While other artists painted contemporary scenes, Reichenau drew very dramatic and quite large black and white representations of early Portuguese voyages to East Asia. His work appears to have been commissioned to accompany public talks Jack Braga gave on the Portuguese navigators and on the early history of Macau. Reichenau’s bold and flamboyant drawings gave valuable assistance to the word pictures that Jack was sharing with his audiences and with school students.In addition to these, there is a fine sketch of the Redoubt of St Peter by the famous George Chinnery who lived and worked in Macau from 1825 until his death in 1852. One of the gems of the Braga Collection, this drawing is hitherto unknown.Marciano Baptista, perhaps Chinnery’s most notable pupil, is represented by another military subject, the Redoubt of St Peter on Praya Grande Bay.
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a120 121Marques Pereira, Joao Feliciano. Ta-ssi-yang-kuo : archivos e annaes do extremo-oriente Portuguez, Redacção e Administração Lisboa 1899.Montalto de Jesus, C.A., Historic Macao 2nd edition, 1926, reprinted, Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1984Reeves, J.P., The Lone Flag, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2014Ride, L. and M., The Voices of Macao Stones, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 1999Sá, L.A. de, The boys from Macau , Fundação Oriente: Instituto Cultural de Macau, Macau, 1999Silva, J., Reminiscences of a wartime refugee, International Institute of Macau, Macau, 2013Teixeira, M., Os Macaenses, Macau, Centro de Informação e Turismo, 1965Teixeira, M., Pedro Nolasco da Silva, Imprensa Nacional, Macau, 1942.Teixeira, M., Toponimia de Macau, vol. 1Journals and newspapersBoletim do Instituto Português de Hong KongBoletim do Instituto Luis de CamoesCanton MiscellanyChinese RepositoryCold War International History Project BulletinHongkong NewsHongkong RegisterJournal of the Oriental Society of AustraliaPortuguese Studies Review RenascimentoUMA Bulletin, San FranciscoBraga, J.M., Tamão dos pioneiros Portugueses Tipográfica Escola Salesiana, Macau, 1939Braga, J.M., The Western Pioneers and their Discovery of Macao, Imprensa Nacional, Macao, 1949Coates, A., A Macao Narrative, Heinemann, Hong Kong, 1978Cortesão, A. (trans.), The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, an account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, written in Malacca and India in 1512-1515, Hakluyt Society, London, 1944 Cummins, J.S., The travels and controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, Hakluyt Society at the University Press, Cambridge, 1962Danvers, F.C., The Portuguese in India, Allen, London, 1894Davis, J.F., The Chinese, Charles Knight & Co., London, 1836Faria e Sousa, M. de, Asia Portuguesa, vol. 3, B. da Costa Carvalho, Lisbon, 1675‘Field Officer, A’, The Last Year in China to the Peace of Nanking, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, London, 1843Forjaz, J., Famílias Macaenses, Fundação Oriente: Instituto Cultural de Macau; Instituto Portugues do Oriente, Macau, 1996Garrett, R.J., The Defences of Macau, Hong Kong University Press, 2010Greenberg, M., British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-42. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969Guimarães e Freitas, J. de A., Memoria sobre Macáo, Real Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, 1828Gunn, G., Wartime Macau under the Japanese shadow. Hong Kong University Press, 2016Jarman, R.L., Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941, Archive Editions, London, 1996Jorge da Silva, A. M., The Portuguese Community in Hong Kong, a Pictorial History, vol. 1, Conselho das Comunidades Macaenses, Instituto Internaçional de Macau, Macau, 2007Ljungstedt, A., An historical sketch of the Portuguese settlements in China, James Munroe & Co., Boston, 1836
s t u a r t b r a g a123INDEX1-2-3 riots, 9, 103Albuquerque, Afonso de, 14, 16Almada e Castro, Leonardo d’, 88, 90Almeida, Francisco de, 14Álvares, Jorge, 7, 17-21, 99A-Ma Temple, 7, 11, 18Amaral, João Maria, 8, 68, 69, 70Andrade, Simão de, 20, 23Araujo, Amadeu Gomes de, 79Associação Promotora da Instrução dos Macaenses, 8, 76Association for the Promotion of Macanese Education, 8, 76Augustinians, 30Bairro Tamagnini Barbo, 89Baishaling, 70, 71, 104Barbosa, Duarte, 19Barrier Wall, 7, 31, 39, 69, 70Bela Vista Refugee Centre, 88, 96Bocarro, António, 57Bocarro, Manoel Tavares, 57, 59Bom Parto Fort, 35Braga, Jack, 88, 100, 101, 118Braga, Noel, 90Braga, Paul, 94Bridge of Friendship, 106British trade, 63, 65
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a124 125Captain-Major, commander of the Japan trade, 28Cardim, António, 27Casa Branca-White House, 32, 60, 61China. See People’s Republic of ChinaChinese Chamber of Commerce, 104Chinese Empire, 28, 31, 42, 67, 69, 102Chinnery, George, 118Cidade do Nome de Deus, 42, 63City of the Name of God, 42, 63Coates, Austin, 83, 90, 91Coimbra University, 76Coloane, 9, 101, 105, 108Commercial Institute, 76Committee of Thirteen, 1967, 104Congregation of the Mission, 75Coolie trade, 8, 72, 73Correa, Bosco, 86Cotai Strip, 9, 101, 105, 108, 109Damão, 15Davis, John, 69Diaz, Bartholomew, 13Diu, Battle of, 14Dominicans, 30, 44, 59Dutchdefeated Portuguese, 17, 39, 57deterred from renewing attack on Macau, 58greater strength than Portuguese, 50, 54, 61, 65in Japan, 51, 52Dutch attack on Macau, 1622, 7, 37, 38, 39, 82Dutch East India Company, 35East India Company, 35, 65Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco, 8, 77Escola Luso Chinesa, 89Ferreira do Amaral, João Maria, 8, 68, 69, 70Fortaleza de Nossa Senhora do Monte de São Paulo, 37Franciscans, 30, 44, 59Gama, Vasco da, 13Garrison of Macau, 28, 69Goa, 15, 57Governor of Macau, 7, 8, 28, 41, 59, 68, 71, 91, 92Grand Prix Museum, 106Great Typhoon, 8, 74, 76Grémio Militar, 88, 89Guangdong province, 60, 72Guangzhou, 8, 12, 18, 19, 20, 46, 54, 65, 69, 80, 82, 84trade with Macau, 23, 25, 31, 55, 62, 64Guia, 38Gun foundry, 57, 58Handover Gifts Museum of Macao, 106Handover of Macau, 9, 12, 27, 29, 106, 107, 109Heangshan, 31, 55Ho Tung, Sir Robert, 95Ho Yin, 104Holy House of Mercy. See Santa Casa da MisericórdiaHong Kong, 71, 86, 89, 99, 102, 103economic opportunities, 71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 100, 101fall of Hong Kong, December 1941, 82, 85, 86Japanese Occupation, 8, 12, 90, 96, 97, 99occupied by British, 8, 67, 68, 76Hong Kong Portuguese community, 83, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, 9, 109Instituto Comercial, 8Japanarrival of the Portuguese, 1542, 24attack on China, 8, 84Closed Country Edict, 52occupation of Hong Kong, 82, 85, 87persecution of Christians, 44, 50, 53Portuguese embassy killed, 53surrender, 1945, 99trade between Macau and Japan, 25, 28, 49, 50, 51, 52Jesuits, 27, 30, 37, 39, 41, 44, 49, 59at Peking, 62built Monte Fort, 37, 38built St Paul’s Church, 41, 43, 46established St Paul’s College, 7, 30, 42, 75expelled from Macau, 8, 46, 76Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau, 1987, 9, 107Kangxi Emperor, 7, 62Korean War, 9, 102Largo do Senado, 71, 77, 81, 104Lazarists, 75League of Nations, 80Leal Senado, 7, 59, 60, 104Liceu Nacional de Macau, 8, 76LighthouseGuia lighthouse, 8, 74Lin Zesu, 67Lintin, 17, 18, 19, 21, 64Lisboa Hotel, 105Louis XIV, King of France, 46Luso-Chinese Accord, 9
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u s t u a r t b r a g a126 127Macao Museum of Art, 106Macao Science Center, 106Macauair raid, 1945, 96Chinese sovereignty, 104, 105, 107economic decline, 54, 59, 60, 67, 68, 74, 79, 81economic recovery, 65, 72emigration from, 71, 74, 79, 100, 101, 102endurance, 61ingrained poverty, 60population, 82, 83, 85reclamation of new land, 8, 80, 81, 105refugees come to, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94riots, 1966, 103slavery, 25, 79water supply, 82Macau Cultural Centre, 106Macau East Asian Games Dome, 108Macau Grand Prix, 103Macau International Airport, 9, 106Macau Maritime Museum, 106Macau Olympic Complex, 106Macau port works, 8Macau Stadium, 106Macau Water Works Company, 82Madre de DeusSt Paul’s Church, 42Malacca, 17, 57Manchu dynasty, 44, 54, 57Manchuria, 84Manila, 57, 59, 61Mao Zedong, 104Mascarenhas, PedroViceroy of Goa, 63Mendes Pinto, Fernão, 7, 24, 49Mesquita, Vicente, 70, 104Ming dynasty, 20, 24, 44, 54, 57, 62Montalto de Jesus, Carlos, 27, 30, 54, 69, 74, 80, 81Monte Fort, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 58, 106Mundy, Peter, 43, 44Museum of Macau, 106Nagasaki, 25, 49, 50, 51, 53Nagasaki Martyrs, 50Nanjing, 84Não ha outra mais leal, 59Navarrete, Domingo, 60, 61Nei Lingding Island. See LintinNobre de Carvalho, José Manuel de Sousa e Faro, 9, 104, 105Nolasco da Silva, Pedro, 76, 77Nossa Senhora de Amparo-Jesuit seminary, 30Opium, 8, 65, 67Opium War, 8, 67, 69Ozorio, Charles, 85Ozorio, Francis, 85Pacia, Vicente, 117Padrão, 18, 21People’s Republic of China, 9, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 110Perla motor trawler, 87Pinto, Fernão Mendes, 24Pires, Tomé, 19, 23Portas do Cerco, 102Portugal, 16, 25, 49, 66, 68, 75, 80, 81, 86, 91King’s representative in Macau, 28relations with China, 18, 20, 55, 102, 105, 106under Spanish rule, 57, 59Portuguese companies of Hong Kong Volunteers, 85, 99Portuguese Empire, 13Praya Grande, 35, 37, 71, 80, 105Procurador, 28Qing dynasty. See Manchu dynastyReclamation scheme, 81, 105Reeves, John, British consul, 92, 94, 97Reichenau, Baron, 117Remédios, Jorge, 89Remédios, Maximiano António dos, 76Rho, Jerónimo, 38Ribeiro, Luigi, 99Riots in Macau, 9, 103, 104Rocha, Carlos Vicente de, 74Roman Catholic Church, 29, 77Sai Van Bridge, 106Salazar, António, 102, 105Santa Casa da Misericórdia, 27, 30, 77São Francisco Fort, 35, 38, 71, 105São Miguel Cemetery, 47São Pedro Redoubt, 35São Tiago Fort, 35, 58Senado, 7, 27, 28, 29, 53, 62, 63, 64, 115Senate. See SenadoShimabara, 50, 51, 53Shirogane Maru ship, 87Siam, 60, 66
f i v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f m a c a u128Silva, Armando da, 87, 96Silva, Jim, 89, 96Sino-Portuguese Treaty of Peking, 1887, 102, 107SJM. See: Sociedade de Jogos de MacauSmirnoff, George, 117Soares, Francisco, 85Sociedade de Jogos de Macau, 108Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau, 9, 103, 108Special Administrative Region, 77, 101, 107, 108, 115St Anthony’s Church, 29St Joseph’s College, Macau, 8, 75, 76St Lawrence’s Church, 29St Lazarus’ Church, 29St Paul’s Church, 8, 30, 41, 43, 46, 47, 52, 58, 89destroyed by fire, 1835, 8, 46, 47St Paul’s College, 7, 37, 41, 42, 46, 75Stalin, Josef, 103STDM. See Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau Taipa, 9, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108Tamão, 17Teatro Dom Pedro V, 89Teixeira, Gabriel, Governor of Macau, 91, 92, 93, 97Teixeira, Manuel, 25Three No boycott, 104Tourism, 47, 81UNESCO World Heritage Register, 9, 109, 113University of Macau, 9, 106Valignano, Alessandro, 49Vallesuk, William, 86Velho Armazem, 88, 89Verbiest, Ferdinand, 62Viceroy of Goa, 7, 8, 20, 24, 27, 29, 63Water supply, 8, 46, 82Wong WaiMacau secret police, 98Yasumitsu, Fukui, Japanese consul, 98Yongzheng Emperor, 8, 63, 65Yvanovich da Luz, Theresa, 94Zheng He, Chinese admiral, 17Zhou Enlai, 103
