Then & Now | Those nostalgic for an ‘old Macau’ are pining for a place that never existed
A tranquil, tropical haven, or ‘a material and moral rubbish heap’? In the former Portuguese settlement, sentimentality and reality collide

Despite massive new casino and hotel developments, and legions of regional tourist arrivals – especially from the mainland – large tracts of Macau remain tranquil and little visited by day trippers. Pastel-painted tropical baroque churches; picturesque hillside forts; mossy public gardens; lazy, hot summer afternoons lavishly marinated in vinho verde; and the whole torpid effect served up with generous lashings of saudade (“nostalgic longing for times past”) encapsulates much of the former Portuguese territory’s wistful appeal. With little effort, the temptation to sigh regretfully over a heavily reimagined, now-vanished storybook “old Macao” – or cash in on those sightseers that do so – creates a marketable romanticised vision that magically appears from the mists of history.
So far, so nostalgic. But how was the tiny, impoverished, water-scarce Portuguese settlement actually seen in the past? In urban Hong Kong’s first rough-and-ready decades, Macau was a fondly familiar place; most early arrivals had spent time there, and the Portuguese settlement rapidly became a popular weekend holiday resort. By the 1850s, Macau had been established for some three centuries, which meant life there was settled, stable and predictable. And the fact that virtually anything went there – as it still does – formed a large part of the city’s appeal.
Like many of the world’s gently faded, charming-yet-shrewd old tarts, Macau beguiled unsuspecting punters almost against their will; it was part of the city’s perennial stock-in-trade.

Camilo Pessanha, the opium-addicted Portuguese symbolist poet who lived in Macau for decades, and died there in 1926, described the city as “a material and moral rubbish heap”, a common, if liverish, observation among those whose personal experience with the place extended beyond a day tripper’s casual acquaintance. British poet W.H. Auden, visiting in 1938, called it “a weed from Catholic Europe, which took root”.And in Asia’s Bright Balconies: Hong Kong, Macao, Philippines (1962), Australian travel writer Colin Simpson observed that it was “a charming watercolourwith a pornographic drawing on the back. The city which prides itself on having more churches and chapels to the square mile than any other place in the worldalso happens to be one of the last places in Asia where you can see teenage prostitutes sitting in the doorways of open brothels, and one of the principal smuggling ports for heroin and opium”.
Throughout its history, casual visitors have regarded Macau as picturesque but seedy – a view shared, with more cause, by many long-term residents. From the mid-19th-century, virtually any native Macanese with even a modicum of get-up-and-go got up and went. And – usually – never returned.