The world's most densely gambled city — Portuguese egg tarts at the colonial square, pork chop buns at a hole-in-the-wall, and Cotai Strip casinos bigger than Las Vegas
Macau is one of the most improbable cities on earth — a tiny Special Administrative Region of China (just 33 km², home to 650,000 people) that generates more gambling revenue than Las Vegas, Reno, Monaco, and Singapore combined, yet whose historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of extraordinary Portuguese colonial architecture: baroque churches, cobblestone lanes, Iberian-style town squares, and forts built over 400 years of Portuguese rule that ended only in 1999. The coexistence is genuinely peculiar and genuinely interesting — Macau's identity is inseparably Sino-Portuguese, reflec…
Macau was the first and last European colonial possession in China — Portuguese traders established a trading post in 1557 (making it the first permanent European settlement in East Asia), and Portugal only handed sovereignty back to China on December 20, 1999 (two years after Hong Kong's handover). For four centuries, Macau was the primary gateway through which European goods, Jesuit missionaries (Francis Xavier spent time here en route to Japan), silver, and Christianity entered China. The Ruins of St Paul's — the façade of a 17th-century Jesuit church destroyed by fire in 1835, now Macau's…