May 10th, 2009 traveler
The Seven Wonders of the World Of Antiquity:
(1) The Pyramids of Egypt.
(2) The Gardens of Semiramis at Babylon.
(3) The statue of Zeus at Olympia, the work of Phidias.
(4) The Temple of Diana at Ephesus.
(5) The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
(6) The Colossus at Rhodes.
(7) The Pharos of Egypt, the Walls of Babylon or the Palace of Cyrus.
The Seven Wonders of the World Of the Middle Ages:
(1) The Coliseum of Rome.
(2) The Catacombs of Alexandria.
(3) The Great Wall of China.
(4) Stonehenge.
(5) The Leaning Tower of Pisa.
(6) The Porcelain Tower of Nankin.
(7) The Mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople.
The palace of the Escurial has sometimes been called the eighth wonder, a name which has also been given to a number of works of great mechanical ingenuity, such as the dome of Chosroes in Madain, St. Peter’s of Rome, the Menai suspension bridge, the Eddystone lighthouse, the Suez Canal, the railway over Mont Cenis, the Atlantic cable, etc.
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May 10th, 2009 traveler
Flying into Macau these days and arriving in its brand-new airport, you see at a glance how small it is: a low, rocky peninsula connected to China by a sandspit three hundred yards wide, and two even smaller islands, Taipa and Coloane, which are linked by a bridge and a causeway.
Macau’s whole area comes to less than seven square miles, one quarter the size of Manhattan. it has no natural resources and no agriculture, apart from some quiet public gardens and lovingly tended flowerpots. Of its half a million people, fifteen thousand are Portuguese, ten thousand are “other,” and the rest, thronging the busy streets, savoring the breezes off the South China Sea, chattering into portable phones, and very occasionally creating small traffic jams, are Chinese.
Collectively, however, they all call themselves Macanese and live together in obvious harmony. The road signs and shop windows are in Portuguese and Chinese, but everyone-or at least everyone employed in gambling, tourism, or religion, Macau’s essential industries-speaks English.
From the air, Macau is a small, slow, inviting place. The approach I like better is from the sea, best of all toward dusk, in foggy weather (the ferries and hydrofoils from Hong Kong all carry radar, and often need it). The estuary of the Pearl River, forty miles wide, looks as vast and empty as the open ocean, with the next landfall at Saigon or Singapore. Suddenly the engines slow, a row of buoys slides alongside, and through the mist looms a bump of land crowned by the fortress and hermitage of Our Lady of Guia, a pair of ancient cannons, and the winking lantern of the first lighthouse ever built on the China coast-a very Portuguese mix of faith, antique firepower, and maritime know-how.
So, too, is the way Macau clings to the outermost edge of China, as Portugal itself does to the far end of Europe, with nowhere to go but to sea. A loose grip on the wheel, you feel, and you might miss Macau altogether. Yet at this hour, when night veils the casinos, the horse- and dog-racing tracks, the bank towers, and the other schemes Macau has had to adopt to stay afloat, the fort and the church beside it remind us what a mighty monument to human perseverance this brave little out-post has been-and still is.
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May 10th, 2009 traveler
What brought faraway Portugal to this unlikely spot? Over a bottle of Dao (excellent Portuguese wine, six dollars a bottle), I put this question to an old and famous friend, Monsignor Manuel Teixeira, the white-robed historian of the Jesuit order’s heroic bid to convert China and Japan to Christianity. “A Fe, o Imperio,” Father Teixeira replied, quoting the opening of Portugal’s national epic poem of discovery, Os Lusiadas. “For faith and empire,” he translated. “You’ll notice that our poet has put the faith first. He shared our priorities.”
Luis de Camoes (pronounced KaMOYNSH), a writer whose exploits make Hemingway and Mailer sound like the Bronte sisters, took a personal part in Portugal’s great adventure. Jilted by a highborn Lisbon lady, then having lost an eye in battle against the Saracens, the poet wounded a court official in a brawl and was banished to Goa, in India, and advised not to hurry back. In 1556, he landed the job of Trustee for the Dead and Absent in Macau, where only two years earlier Portugal had been allowed to set up a temporary trading post on an outlying Chinese island. Some money left by the dead, which had mysteriously disappeared, led to De Camoes being sent back to Goa in chains. Shipwrecked on the coast of Vietnam, he waded ashore with his manuscript held high above his head. When he finally made it back to Lisbon, he published his epic and was eventually buried beside his hero, Admiral Vasco da Gama. (Both are remembered by bronze statues in tranquil gardens in Macau. Personally, I prefer the whiskery one-eyed poet’s.)
What a story he had for his rhyme! Only six years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, hoping-but failing-to find the sea route to India, the Portuguese, led by Da Gama, got there via the Cape of Good Hope. By 1503 Da Gama was back in Lisbon with thirteen galleons loaded with fabulous Eastern merchandise, rather like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returning from the moon with a party of bug-eyed monsters and enough gold to pay off the national debt. King Manuel I gave the order to push on east, and fast. In 1510, Afonso de Albuquerque was named to succeed the Viceroy of India (where, in fact, the Portuguese had haggled in a few bazaars), and the following year he captured Malacea, near the modern Singapore.
Bristling with bronze cannons, a chain of brave little forts secured lines of communication all the way back to distant Portugal (we Sayles named our daughter Malindi after one of them still standing guard on the Kenya east). In 1513, Captain Jorge Alvares was the first European to sail into the Pearl River, the sea approach to Guangzhou (formerly Canton), already one of the East’s great trading cities. By 1543 the Portuguese were in Japan, where they found the people courteous and eager to buy not port wine, olive oil, Catholic holy pictures, and salted codfish (then as now tiny Portugal’s fastest-moving exports), but, rather, the very same costly Chinese silk and ceramics that all of Europe lusted after. Relations between Japan and China were, as usual, cool, and Chinese products were unobtainable by direct trade.
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May 10th, 2009 traveler
Overshadowed by bustling Hong Kong, East Asia’s oldest colony has long been a well-kept secret, fascinating in itself. But there are also good practical reasons for making Macau a handy base for witnessing the changes that the next few years must bring to all of Asia. With wages only half those of Hong Kong’s, everything is correspondingly cheaper. Like its neighbor, Macau is a free port, with Hong Kong, one of the great bazaars of the East, less than an hour away. Attracted by lower prices and a less tense lifestyle, many Hong Kong people have begun to commute from Macau; visitors are now doing the same.
Hong Kong is heavily booked until July 1997 and will be chock-full at the time of the great changeover (4,000 journalists are reportedly flocking in), when no one knows exactly what will happen; but nothing is planned for Macau, which will still have more than two years of its four and a half centuries of calm to go. China is as easy to visit from Macau as from its apprehensive neighbor: Visas can be had without hassle, except for anyone admitting to being a spy, a counter-revolutionary, or a journalist-particularly the latter.
Macau has its own Chinese industrial city, Zhuhai, nearby; Guangzhou is an easy day-trip by bus. Much of China can now be reached by air from Macau less expensively than from Hong Kong: An open-return economy round-trip from Macau to Beijing, for example, is $500, as opposed to $590 from its bigger neighbor.
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