Hong Kong Travels - Macau
My understanding of Macau before I arrived was that it was a former Portuguese colony and a gambling destination. On arrival, one of these seemed to vastly outstrip the other. On reflection, I would argue that preservation is a quieter activity that is easily overshadowed.
Before I even discuss the city, I must advise you not to take the ferry to Macau. I was recommended it because the bridge was meant to be boring, but all I saw through the frosted windows was a choppy sea that made me unwell, for the most part. However, the closer you get, there is more you can make out - small buoys marking the lanes for different shipping, for instance – but the largest is, of course, the bridge itself. It looks lonely on the water, until it’s joined by others. They are some of the largest and longest I have ever seen, possibly ever. Bulging, taught tendons connecting this body of islands together. And examples of titanic architecture only accelerate from there.
I also have to acknowledge how wonderful Daisy, my friend and tour guide. She made it so that I saw far more in two days than I ever would have by myself, and I am immensely grateful for her tolerating me as I often wandered out of sight.
After getting into the car with her, I was shocked by how much Macau feels like a theme park in places. Even the streets around the ferry are marked for Grand Prix races. The tallest buildings are elaborate casinos and monumental hotels which completely dominate the skyline. The city itself is also relatively small. You can jog (as Daisy told it) from one side of the city to the other in an hour, which means the Grand Lisboa, a golden glass firework, is hardly ever out of sight. In the end, we never visited it.
Instead, the first place we went to was Ali Curry House by the Avenue de Republica, in the area of São Lourenço. The waterfront looks across the still Sai Van Lake to the various hotels and further away to the Torre de Macau. A key landmark, it appears oddly isolated at the edge of the sea. It is so tall that you have the option to bungee jump from the top, and so skinny that you miss hardly any of the background. With the heavy cloud coverage of that particular day, the tallest skyscrapers disappeared into the sky in the distance, with the rest appearing like adolescents waiting for a growth spurt. The Porte de Sai Van (or the ‘McDonald’s Bridge’ as Daisy refers to it, thanks to the huge m-shaped suspension towers) spans the gap between Macau and Taipa in a long, gentle rise and fall. The whiteness of it manages to stand out against even grey backdrops.
The obvious modernity of the city across the lake is in contrast to the character of the rest of the area, however small. An obvious example being the cobbled promenade and Portuguese colonial houses. These include the Palacete de Santa Sancha, the state guest house and former residence of the colonial governor of Macau. A single guard stands outside, dissuading people from taking pictures, but if you are quick enough you can plausibly pretend you’re only taking a selfie. The building’s style stands out against the surrounding glass and steel. Bricks painted white and muddy red, white wooden shutters, and only two storeys tall. If you wanted to, it would be trivial to hop over the low wall and get into the grounds. I was astounded by how easy it would be, especially compared to other houses around it which have spiky railings to avoid such an eventuality.
A collection of houses around it are in a similar style, with many large windows and balustrades to spare. But most of them, as you work your way up the hill, are more modern (but not current) in design. Some are even seemingly abandoned, with rusted rails and smashed windows. Most of the buildings had guards. One had several expensive cars on the other side of a gate. All of them line the way to the Chapel of Our Lady of Penha.
Aside from Man Mo Temple (which I did not visit), the church is one of the most notable landmarks in that part of Macau. Certainly, at the top of a hill, it is the most visible of the older buildings, but still not high enough to compete with the megalithic casinos. Rebuilt in the 1600s, the current church is from the 1930s. The different coloured grey bricks show what the newer additions are, and even fresher stone indicates areas of renovation, particularly around the clocktower. It is weathered enough that the imperfect lighter and darker patches are like liver spots on a scalp. Our Lady, holding Jesus, looks out passively across the lake, refusing to be drawn on the newer constructions. This would be the trend for other buildings of a similar style around the city. Lower down the side of the church, an outdoor space allows for airy prayer, weather permitting. The balcony overlooking it is an excellent space to declare the overthrow of a republic, should the moment ever come. The interior was quiet when we entered, with fewer faithful than I can count on my hands and a couple of nuns attending the modest altar.
The next stop was closer to the centre of Macau, and where most of the day was spent. The amount of graffiti you can find throughout the city feels very Portuguese by itself. Anyone who has visited Lisbon can attest to this. For this reason, even the Mariazinha Parking is worth seeing if you’re lucky enough to use a car to find your way around the tight streets. The polychromatic crumbling brick walls scratch an itch in my mind. The blend of abandoned, creeper-cluttered buildings framing the Grand Lisboa can be quite the metaphor too. The large, washed-out wall art feels like a casual inclusion in a car park, so I wonder who commissioned it and why. Perhaps no one did, and the artists got permission themselves, or perhaps not even that. Not to mention the parking exists in a space conspicuously unoccupied by any development. The walls tell you there was once something there, and what circumstances led to it being as it is now unclear. But this is far more than I think anyone expected from a car park already. You don’t go to Macau to park a car.
Of course, the area has much more to offer than missing bricks and plants springing out of condemned structures. The twisty streets and sporadic paved paths carry you around Old Macau – a side of the city that felt harder to find without deliberate intention to go there due to the tiny windy roads.
The Rua dos Ervanarios was our first stop. You are immediately hit with an explosion of coloured baubles and lanterns hanging across the street. Brightly painted shops create a serious contrast with the residence surrounding it. Independent coffee shops mostly fill out the street, with smatterings of tourist knick-knacks and artsy second and third floors encourage you to lose a few more minutes looking around.
Once you reach the end, you see a little more of the reality of life in that part of Macau. Every upper floor window has a grate attached, leaving a very limited space you could hardly conceive of as a balcony. Most looked like prison cells for drying clothes. Nondescript alleys lead to modest, iron-stained restaurants that are locally famous, and chess societies playing under the awnings of (closed) corner shops. There are random hollow buildings, some abandoned and some mid-construction (and abandoned) and vacant plots hidden behind rusty grey gates. Fresh fruit and vegetables exist quietly nearby handfuls of locals at fold-away tables talking over the hiss of a working wok. Combined with the sea of scooters on every available inch of curb, the Old Town you see from the Chapel of Our Lady of Penha feels a world away. You can also buy a tasty egg tart and be impressed by the bakery’s range of croissants.
Outside the small streets, but still just an alley away, are the ruins of Saint Paul’s, a 17th century church that was destroyed by a fire. In the shade of the greatest marker of Portuguese colonialism, you begin to understand how alien it must have felt to experience their rule. The neo-classical columns are stacked on top of each other four storeys high. Saints I do not recognise from their nameplates are tucked into concave compartments and stand out from the grey granite, since they are sculpted in bronze. Patterns and monsters and angels and symbols adorn every part in low friezes. There is even a panel of a caravel, the ship used extensively during Portugal's colonial expeditions of the 15th-16th centuries.
There are a few Chinese characters (script, not people), but they are so high up that they are difficult to see. The guardian lions, in contrast, stand out more as they hang off the edges. An example of cultural sensitivity from the builders, or inclusion of local artistic traits as they stamped their mark on the territory? The crowds sounded mostly mainland Chinese to me, and tour guides held little flags in the air to keep their groups from getting lost amongst the selfie-takers and loiterers that lined the way to the facade.
As a short aside, while Daisy and I were exploring the crypt of the church, we noticed they had displayed surviving skeletons in the walls. There was some confused clarification, and I momentarily convinced Dasiy they were dinosaur bones. The idea of Christian dinosaurs was very funny in the moment.
Something I did not expect is the apparently quintessential jerky, or ‘bak kwa’, that has an iron grip on the area around St. Paul’s. Hawkers offer samples outside their shop fronts to any who look interested, and this captures more than a few people. The jerky density is at the same level as the dried fish shops in Sheung Wan (which is a lot). So much is on offer that you could have your fill without buying any from a single place. The shortbread stalls are also reasonably common, but the shortbread itself is unreasonably powdery. What’s more, the shopkeepers know how much moisture it sucks up, because they offer $10 bottles of water too.
Plenty of places around Macau are still preserved from the colonial period, though without reference it was hard for me to tell at the time how much has not been. Former government offices are free to enter, and you can see a very standard meeting room (from what you may find in a older building in the West) of wooden furniture and portraits of former colonial governors next to grandfather clocks.
St. Augustine Square is aggressively Portuguese. The patterned, cobbled floor, green bollards, pastel colours would feel at home in any Lisbon district. In the larger Senado Square – busier and monochrome – can see tiled signs, blue on white, with Chinese on top and Portuguese on the bottom. We found lengthy graffiti in an alleyway next to one ‘patio’ which turned out to be a lengthy treatise on the benefits of calcium in your diet, which has nothing to do with the topic but was a curious find, nonetheless.
As in Europe, so in Macau, after a few visits to churches, you become slightly tired of seeing them for their own sake. Yes, there are several very pretty churches to see in Macau, but one can only describe statues of saints and chandeliers so many times. However, St. Dominic’s Church does have a sign outside (in English and Mandarin) which asks for quiet contemplation and “NO ENTRY FOR NOT CATHOLICS” in red.
Something you could easily miss (and something Daisy had missed until I wandered in) is Lou Kau Mansion, just around the corner from St. Dominic’s. Another preserved spot, but unique in that it is a 19th century Chinese design rather than Portuguese. It sports multiple courtyards, one of which acts as a garden too. The space is darker, earthier, and the contrasting design is a nice break from the other architectural styles in the area.
For what time I spent in the “Macau” side of Macau, there was on last place we visited in the evening: Fisherman’s Wharf. At first glance, you would hardly think it was for fishermen. On closer inspection, you’d be right. Apparently, it was never a wharf but did used to be an amusement park before it was redeveloped as a strip for entertainment, retail, and restaurants. The painted facades of the structure try to mimic the idea of colonial Portuguese architecture, even though the location was developed much later. At night, when we went, it was mostly empty, save for a corporate event hosted in the middle, catered independently of any of the empty restaurants surrounding it. In fact, it was so quiet that I could enjoy the echo of my claps lingering for a moment. By the waterfront, a few customers occupied some seats at a bar, which looked out across to the various bridges. Old wooden stilts held up air and reminded me of Hastings pier. A pretty place for noone to go except restaurant staff standing outside, alone, holding menus.
Right at the end, in the shadow of the Sands casino hotel, is a replica of a Roman Amphitheatre. More accurately, a replica of a ruined Roman Amphitheatre. If St. Paul’s feels out of place, this feels positively alien. Even more confusing is that it is a post-colonial construction – it is not a Portuguese vanity project. So, judging it as it is, it is quite impressive how accurate they make it seem. But, it is as once too complete to pass as a full ruin, but too incomplete to be new. It even has its own version of Trajan’s Column! It is an expression of what people expect a Roman ruin to be, which is a reasonable idea but misses the opportunity to go the extra step of simply building a new amphitheatre. It is aesthetically pleasing, and a nice event space, but that’s as much meaning as I could find.
Still, late night pizza on the empty tables outside the amphitheatre is an atmosphere all of its own. The waffle truck nearby looks lonely but is a nice cap on a long day.
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