João de Pina Cabral

In this extract from an unpublished novella entitled "Uma Perigosa Libertação" (A Dangerous Release), the protagonist, who owns a confectionery in Macao, tells an interlocutor named "Zé" about her meeting with Peter (which happened when her brother Ah Wai bought a blue car). She explains the reasons why she decided to become Peter's lover and the strategy she used to free herself from what had been an unrewarding life, while continuing to respect the customs and traditions of a Macanese woman - someone who, by definition, must be "defenceless".

A-Chan, the "Tancareira"

Henrique de Senna Fernandes

This tale was written in Coimbra in 1950, when the author was experiencing "saudades" (a feeling of longing or homesickness) for Macao. Part of the "Nam Van" series, it is the story of A-Chan, who crews a tancá (a small Macanese boat), and begins as she recalls being sold as a muí-chai by her parents when she was six years old. The buyer was an opulent lady from Seak-ki, who later sold her to an elderly "tancareira" (boatwoman), who in turn took her to the city of the white men from Portugal. There, A-Chan met a blue-eyed Portuguese sailor, whom she calls "Cou-Lou" (tall man) and by whom she had a daughter named Mei-Lai. She believes that it is inevitable that she will be separated from the seafaring Cou-Lou when he returns home, but the prospect makes her think about the future of her baby, who is too fair to blend into the Chinese community she herself belongs to.

The Blue-Eyed Chinawoman

Urbano Tavares Rodrigues

The author personally selected this excerpt from his novel "Supremo interdito", which offers a cruelly western vision of Macao. In contrast to the sweetness and intelligence of the protagonists of the two previous fictional works, the central character in this text, visibly tormented by his inner demons, suffocates in a hotel room before going out to wander around the city's casinos. Returning to his room, this time accompanied by a very beautiful and haughty Chinese with blue eyes and a sculptural body, whom he took to be a prostitute in one of the casinos, his sexual failure and resulting humiliation lead to a brutal epilogue in this city filled with contrasts.

A Look at an Oriental Lusophony: Signs of the Past, Strategies for the Present

Ana Paula Laborinho

With particular emphasis on Macao, Ana Paula Laborinho analyses the current Portuguese presence in the Orient and Portugal's strategic options for the XXI century in terms of the dissemination of the Portuguese language and culture in the region.

Given the transfer of power to China on the 20th of December 1999, it is fair to ask just what will remain of that presence, as well as the reasons why Portuguese is not spoken in Macao. The background to this fact is complex and derives on the one hand from the encounter with a powerful civilisation and culture, and on the other from the trading centre role that Macao played throughout the Portuguese expansion overseas. More recently, massive migrations from China have also contributed to ensuring that few Macanese speak Portuguese.

The Portuguese Oriental Institute (IPOR), of which Ana Paula Laborinho is President, decided to invest in a networking strategy that it has pursued in conjunction with the Cultural Centres, lectureships and other places where Portuguese is taught, as well as in co-operation with other institutions around the region which possess the same objective of disseminating the Portuguese culture.

One of the areas in which IPOR is particularly active in Macao is the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language. Its main tool in this policy is the Portuguese Language Centre, which co-ordinates the lectureships, offers training both at university level and to more specific groups, and produces didactic material.

IPOR also engages in an intense cultural activity which embraces every area of the arts, including the promotion of concerts, exhibitions, conferences and seminars.

The Question of Macao's Cultural Identity

Gary Ngai

The author of this article analyses Macao's cultural identity from an historical point of view and offers some ideas as to its future evolution. That identity possesses two essential origins. On the one hand it has inherited the southern Chinese tradition, albeit in a form which has been modified by its assimilation of western influences over the centuries; on the other, it has embraced Portuguese values, which, unlike the English colonisation of Hong Kong, have always preferred tolerance and allowed space for the Chinese community to develop its own culture and religion.

The impact of the Portuguese authorities' indulgent attitude towards traditional Chinese practises was amplified by an anarchic education system that limited the extent to which the Portuguese language was disseminated amongst the Chinese community. This resulted in a division between the two ethnic groups, which placed bilingual Macanese families in the role of intermediaries and also facilitated the spread of English as a language in which to communicate in a Territory that has always been strongly marked by its vocation as a trading centre.

The question of Macao's future identity is closely linked to the implementation of the "one country, two systems" principle. The Macao Special Administrative Region now needs some autonomous breathing room in order to enable it to preserve Latin cultural values and the Portuguese language, as well as the western legal tradition.

A Multiple Identity
The arts in Macao

Fernando António Baptista Pereira

Macao's artistic life has always been marked by a dialogue between cultures that has expressed itself in the most diverse ways, ranging from Nambam art, which arrived in Macao following the persecution of the Christians in Japan, via an eastern version of the Baroque, to the development in the second half of the XVIII century of the China Trade Art, an international pre-romantic style which constituted the high-point in the history of Macanese art.

The distinctive element in contemporary Macanese art lies in its constant confrontation between tradition and experimentation and between the local and the global. It possesses a multiple identity, not only in terms of the cultural universes that constitute its reference points, but above all as regards the values of dialogue and miscegenation that are deeply rooted in each artist's individual techniques.

Macao, the Macanese and the Portuguese Language

Ana Cristina Rouillé Correia

In Ana Cristina Correia's opinion, maintaining the Portuguese language in Macao is clearly the most important factor in the preservation of the ethnic group with a Portuguese origin.

However, this will only be possible if concrete measures are taken to promote the continued residence and stability of the Portuguese community, including both those who were born in Macao and those who moved there from elsewhere. Moreover, such measures must also foster the creation of new attitudes towards the Portuguese language, making better use of its role as a vehicle with which to gain access to information.

It will also be necessary to facilitate the acceptance of versions of the language which are less submissive to the rules of standard Portuguese - particularly the local variety, which is the fruit of the de-creolisation process that took place from the beginning of this century onwards.

The existence of a Portuguese school must be consolidated and tools that take the linguistic and cultural context in which the whole process is occurring into consideration must be created in order to help people in Macao learn Portuguese.

Camões and Macao in a Dutch Novel

Patrícia Couto

J. J. Slauerhoff was a great Dutch traveller, poet and novelist who fell in love with Camões and Macao. He worked as a ship's doctor during the 1920's and 30's, visiting Portugal and the Portuguese colonies in Africa and the Orient several times. In 1932 he published The Forbidden Kingdom, which was inspired by the life of Camões and has just been translated into Portuguese.

As Patrícia Couto says, some elements of Camões' life and legend coincide with the fictitious character in Slauerhoff's novel. Both are XVI century Portuguese poets sent to the Far East by the King, experience a shipwreck from which they save their work, live an impossible love and then, having been abandoned, dedicate themselves to writing an epic poem in a cave in Macao. However, at the end of the day our image of Luís de Camões is no more than a transfigured version of the real historical figure, onto which Slauerhoff projects his own obsessions of a damned poet lost in a decadent society.

Macao and the Future Status of the Portuguese Language

Mário Filipe

Mário Filipe discusses the future status of the Portuguese language in Macao in terms of two key roles: that of a mother tongue and that of a foreign language. In the author's opinion, "no language survives artificially. If it ceases to possess a function, if it is no longer useful to people, then it will vanish along with the last person who speaks it - and sometimes before that. We can thus say that language behaves like a living organism ".

Portuguese is the mother tongue of just 1.8% of Macao's inhabitants, but for as long as they feel that it is an integral part of their cultural and social identity, there is nothing to fear.

As far as Portuguese as a foreign language is concerned, it needs to be aimed at a broader universe of potential learners, but a continuous effort will be required in the education and teaching field if this universe is to grow progressively larger. The issue is one of strategic policy. We will have to be capable of presenting Portuguese as a language for international communication - one that facilitates contacts within the extensive area that is home to 200 million Portuguese-speakers on four continents - and based on that fact, promote the use of Portuguese as a business language in the Lusophone area.

Macao, a Multilingual Identity

Maria José Grosso

The object of this study is Macao's multilingual nature and its implications for Macanese society. Maria José Grosso analyses the status of the various languages spoken in the Territory and establishes a close relationship between them and the social and ethnic strata composed by the different groups who speak them.

She highlights the fact that although Macao is home to a variety of languages, with the exception of English they are generally only used by the ethnic groups who speak them on an everyday basis. "In other words, the residents of Macao do not use the various different languages they have at their disposal ".

Cantonese is the mother tongue of the majority of the population, which is composed of ethnic Chinese; it is this language which integrates them into society and via which they identify themselves with the huge Chinese community and culture around the world.

English is generally employed in the contacts between the different groups and is also the language in which business and trade - the Territory's dominant economic activity - are conducted.

Portuguese was the language of administration and government, but always found it extremely difficult to spread to other social strata. The Macanese themselves - the "children of the land" - traditionally played the role of intermediaries and interpreters in the relations between the small Portuguese community and the Chinese majority.

Music in Macao on the Transfer of Power to China
The Highways and Byways of a History

Gabriel Baguet Jr.

Gabriel Baguet begins by quoting Mário Vieira de Carvalho and Manuel Carlos Brito, who respectively refer to the musical field as "a particularly heterogeneous" area of "intersections, confrontations and differentiation between socio-communicative, ideological and technical systems", and to African musical instruments as the object of the enormous curiosity that Portuguese travellers exhibit "in relation to the non-European music and musical instruments they come across". The text goes on to describe a past which was influenced by the history and the presence of the Portuguese in the Orient, as well as the effects on Portuguese culture itself as a result of its direct contact with other local cultural identities.

The author argues that to talk about of music is to speak of sounds, styles and feelings, but also to identify itineraries constructed by people.

He recalls the words of Salwa El-Shawan Castelo Branco, who says that "ethno-musicologists have been faced with the task of responding to the challenge of documenting and interpreting the musical processes and products that have resulted from these historical contacts". Baguet refers to a text about Macao written by Carlos Piteira in the discographic album "Falá-Vai Falá-Vem". He particularly notes the aspect of "singularity", which is reflected in the "conquest and influencing of privileged spaces ranging from architectural styles to interference in the habits and customs of the local social fabric (...) and is the product of the miscegenated Luso-Asian mixture that has been perpetuated by successive generations which have never denied their Portuguese identity".

Finally, he touches on the life and work of the composer Xian Xing Hai, who was born in Macao in 1905, and of Áureo Castro, the founder of the Macao Polyphonic Choral Group, and also mentions the enormous contribution which the "Tuna Macaense" (university musical groups) have made to an awareness of the daily life of Macao and its inhabitants.

Macao's Heritage - An Historical Album

Luís Durão

In this article Luís Durão traces the history of the Portuguese presence in Macao by looking at the architectural heritage dating from the second half of the XVI century to the present day.

The first great impulse was provided by the Jesuits, who made Macao the base for their evangelising work throughout the Orient. The Assunção da Nossa Senhora Church (which is better known as the São Paulo ruins because only the magnificent façade remains) and the Fortress on the Hill are two examples of this first wave of construction.

The city grew very quickly during the first few decades after the Portuguese established themselves in Macao, which immediately took on the shape it was to retain for next three hundred years, stretching from the Outer to the Inner Ports.

The first hundred years of expansion were followed by a slow decline, which was only to end with the establishment of the western trading posts in Canton that then became embroiled in the Opium War.

The most recent phase has occupied the years since the signature of the Joint Declaration - a period which witnessed renewed interest on the part of the Portuguese government in the construction of the new airport and the Macao-Taipa bridge, as well as the restoration of the Territory's historic heritage on a massive scale.

A Confused Dream

Roberto Carneiro

Macao's position as a trading, diplomatic and cultural centre has forged a unique personality derived from a culture based on mixtures. This can be seen in Macanese cuisine, in the local creole dialect and in the religious formats that are typical of a mixed-race syncretism. The fact of being Macanese results from the emergence of an autonomous cultural awareness that transcends the mere conjunction of a cosmopolitan Portuguese humanism with the millenary Chinese civilisation.

But the fact of being Macanese also extends to the members of the Territory's diaspora, inasmuch as the preservation of many of the daily rituals of their birthplace generates a strong sense of a common homeland.

Today Macao is essentially a memory which lingers in the symbols, the liturgy, the drama, the affectionate relationships and the game of day-to-day life. In this sense the Macanese culture possesses an inner dynamic that is strong enough to overcome the vagaries of time - especially those of this new political period in which the Territory is returning to China.

Macanese Diplomacy and Trade in Southeast Asia at the Beginning of the XIX Century

Jorge M. dos Santos Alves

The latest research has shown that the existing view of the Portuguese and Luso-Asian trade in the Gulf of Bengal, the East Indies and the China Sea during the first decades of the XIX century should be looked at anew and rethought. This is not just a simple cosmetic question in which a few more or less isolated examples of current theory ought to be reworked; rather it is necessary to carefully assess the level and extent of the participation of Portuguese and Luso-Asian businessmen in the inter-Asian and even the transoceanic trading networks of the period.

This analytical perspective would appear to reveal that at the turn of the XVIII/XIX centuries both Macao's businessmen and the mercantile life of the city itself remained particularly active. In fact Macao actually sought to break into new markets in the China Sea and the Indian, Atlantic and even the Pacific Oceans. As it always had done, the city achieved this by means of concerted action through both diplomatic and commercial channels.

Without this adaptable and effective diplomacy on the part of the Macanese trading centre (which was not limited - as some historians still suppose - to the Chinese Empire), Macao's survival would not have been viable at various points in its history. In fact, this internationalisation elevated to the highest power was one of the most decisive causes of the solidification and survival of the Luso-Chinese creation that is Macao. The skilful weaving of its network of politico-diplomatic and mercantile contacts and relationships lessened the gravity of many of the city's crises and at the end of the day served to guarantee its continued existence as an international port.

"News of the Best Kingdom in the World": Macao and Luso-Chinese Relations in the XVI Century

Rui Manuel Loureiro

Prior to Vasco da Gama's arrival in Calicut in 1498, Asia was a world that was so remote that it was practically unknown by Portuguese culture. Knowledge of Oriental geography was almost entirely lacking and was based mainly on reports by medieval travellers that had been altered to fit the fantasies of successive compilers. Marco Polo's Book of Marvels helped disseminate vague references to Cathay - a vast and powerful empire governed by Mongol khans and located somewhere in the Far East. However, the European image of these exotic regions was vague, nebulous and ill defined, all the more so because the absence of direct contacts contributed to the dissemination of an imaginary geography. The discovery of a maritime route to India was to radically alter this situation, inasmuch as suddenly, thanks to the Portuguese voyages of exploration, the Oriental world took on a new dimension and imposed itself as a powerful pole of attraction in both material and intellectual terms. The direct experience of the seas, lands and peoples of Asia and the broadening of the Europeans' geographic horizons caused significant changes in the latter's lifestyles, but also in the ways in which they got to know the world. The first-hand news collected by our travellers altered traditional wisdom and revolutionised the Portuguese vision of Asia.

Brief Glimpses of China in the Chronicles of the Portuguese Expasion (XVI Century)

Ana Paula Avelar

Ana Paula Avelar's objective in this article is to analyse the way in which the three major chroniclers of the Portuguese Expansion - João de Barros, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda and Gaspar Correia - described the first contacts made by the Portuguese in the Orient. They used both the Roman historians and the first work to be printed about those distant lands - Marco Polo's famous book - as their models. The three authors approach the Orient in a variety of ways, which range from a mere description of the landscape to a more complete ethnographic record that includes clothing, daily life and the various forms of religion practised in the region.

Ferdinand Verbiest
Defender of the Interests of the Portuguese Crown in Macao and Contributor to the History of the Missionary Press

Manuel Cadafaz de Matos

As Manuel Cadafaz de Matos underlines in the introduction to this text, the figure of Ferdinand Verbiest, a Flemish Jesuit priest in the service of the Portuguese Oriental Church at the beginning of the third quarter of the XVII century, has not yet been fully studied by Portuguese researchers.

Manuel de Matos seeks to analyse two specific aspects of Verbiest's activities. On the one hand the important role he played in the bilateral relations between Portugal and China in the mid XVII century - his appointment as interpreter in the negotiations about the reopening of the port of Macao between the Embassy sent by the King of Portugal and the Chinese authorities made a decisive contribution to the successful outcome for the Portuguese; on the other, his outstanding scientific contribution to the history of the missionary press during the same period.

Everything is Different

Liberto Cruz

Macao has occupied a place in the world of Liberto Cruz's imagination since his childhood. "A land that was located on the estuary of a pearl river could not fail to exert a magnetic attraction and be capable of inspiring even the quietest and most ordinary of adventurers." Literature and the cinema continued to feed this imaginary vision until, when he finally visited Macao in 1987, it seemed as though Liberto Cruz knew it already. "A mixture of madness and greatness, serenity and aggression, passion and negligence, religiosity and indifference, envy and detachment, greed and generosity, seems to form the diaphanous, enveloping veil that swirls around the fantasy of Macao."

Hotel Lisboa

Clara Ferreira Alves

In this text Clara Ferreira Alves recalls her experiences of the Hotel Lisboa - Macao's casino of casinos. At the door, "the bustle of the rich and the indifferent serenity of the coolies say more about China than a thousand philosophy books. First and foremost they tell us that no one can understand gamblers and their compulsive obsession until they have watched a Chinese person gambling."

Associated with the gambling is the business of prostitution. "The little Chinese girls, almost all of whom have children's faces - and whose ages can probably be counted on one's fingers and toes - settle like flocks of birds when night embraces the city - and when the lights come on in the Lisboa, which then looks like a candlelit cake just waiting for someone to sing Happy Birthday."

The Challenge of Translating Camilo

Wang Suoying

According to the great Chinese thinker, scholar and translator Yan Fu (1853-1921), translations should be guided by three principles: xin (faithfulness), da (fluency) and Ya (beauty). In seeking to abide by these three principles in her work, Wang Suoying came up against a huge challenge: the translation of Camilo's "A Queda de um Anjo" (The Fall of an Angel) into Chinese.

The main difficulty was to overcome the distance which separates two such different languages and cultural universes. The translator had to be faithful to the original text while simultaneously seeking linguistic and cultural equivalents that would be understood by a modern Chinese reader. In recalling this task, she analyses the doubts and hesitations with which she wrestled from start to finish. Citing specific examples, she describes the path she took and justifies some of the solutions she found.

Macao seen Through a Brazilian Window

Hermano Vianna

This article tells us about the way the members of the Macanese diaspora have transposed the uses and customs of their homeland to the Brazilian social context into which they have become integrated. Although they have retained some traditional practises, they have sought their new identity among the broader group of Chinese émigrés, taking part in activities like the lion dance and the Chinese New Year ceremonies. The "children of the land" - in other words, the true Macanese as opposed to the immigrant Chinese community living in Macao - have rediscovered the nostalgic bonds which link them to China, but at the same time have found their own way of making the best possible use of them. We are not in the presence of a moribund old culture, but rather a new identity that is in the process of being invented.

"A Doci Papiaçam Di Macao"

Helder Fernando

Few Macanese families speak Patuá these days. Some philologists argue that Patuá is not really the outcome of the mixing of languages, but rather represents the somewhat hasty and imperfect assimilation of a strange language by an indigenous people who simply needed to fulfil the most elementary requirements involved in communicating with their colonisers. Graciete Batalha feels that this particular version of the colonial creole dialect possesses a very unusual history, inasmuch as the half dozen Chinese families who inhabited the peninsula before the arrival of the Portuguese played a minimal role in its creation (albeit the people of Macao have gradually added some special characteristics over the years). In fact it was already a developing language when it was first brought to the Territory, partly by the pioneer settlers, who mostly came from the South of Portugal and contributed some regional terms from that area, and partly by the heterogeneous population who accompanied them.

The language is now spoken among the old Macanese families, who use it to recall the past. For a long time the dialect was frowned on by the authorities and looked down on by the social classes that formed the Portuguese administration, something which almost led to its disappearance. Paradoxically the younger generations are the ones who are now using it again and are revealing a great deal of interest in the preservation of this small piece of Macao's history and cultural heritage.