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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