Henrique Fernandes

Macau is a city-state in China just 40 miles southwest of Hong Kong, founded by Portuguese sailors trading with China and Japan. Like Bandra and Goa, Macau is full of Portuguese colonial architecture and people with names like Fernandes. Most of the Macanese are the offspring of Portuguese sailors and their Chinese wives. Some look like brown-skinned Chinese.

“A French philosopher once wrote the French conquered the world with a feather, the British with a sword, and the Portuguese through sex…” [Link]

Unlike the treatment of Anglo-Indians by the British, the Portuguese were more accepting of intermarriage:

The ways of the Portuguese in Macau were different from those of the British in Hong Kong, he says. “The Portuguese never put us aside; they married our girls.” In Hong Kong, the offspring of the British and locals were termed half-castes and later Eurasians. [Link]

Indo-Chinese food was supposedly developed by Chinese sailors and migrants using Indian veggies in Chinese sauces. In Macau the same process yielded Macanese cooking, Portuguese dishes incorporating Chinese vegetables.

The concept springs from the days when Chinese wives tried to reproduce Portuguese dishes for their husbands, but often lacked the right ingredients. So they began to improvise: cloves from the Spice Islands, saffron from India, Chinese sausage instead of Portuguese, crabs and prawns from the local market, and, of course, rice. All with a smidgen of Thai, Vietnamese or Philippine food. [Link]

Goans fret over the influx of Indians and foreigners buying vacation properties, but it’s not issue of immediate dilution. In contrast, Macanese culture and dialect, a mix of Portuguese, Cantonese, Malay and Japanese, truly is dying out. The colony was ceded back to China in ‘99, two years after the Hong Kong handover. Many of the Macanese emigrated to Portugal, Canada and the U.S. after the handover over fears of Chinese repression. Most new Macau residents are Cantonese-speaking Chinese.

… defending this culture is like trying to stop the incoming tide. In the last ten years, Macao’s population has almost doubled as new immigrants from China have flooded in. Many of them have little concept of things Portuguese and little desire to learn… The Portuguese administration has spent its final years building a fortress of cultural institutes, museums and academies. [Link]

There are scarcely 4,000 Macanese among Macau’s approximately 400,000 residents… “We are very few to begin with and, in future, there’s going to be very few Portuguese people to intermarry. So perhaps we are a dying race…” [ Link]

“… for many centuries, they had played a role between the Portuguese Government and the Chinese Government. They had been the middle people. This role is now over…” [ Link]

The Macanese patúa dialect retains archaic Portuguese words, much like many desi parents in the U.S. freeze Indian culture as it was in the ’50s.

The dialect’s base is Portuguese, though it contains many words and constructions that fell out of use in Portugal more than a hundred years ago (for instance, the plural of casa, meaning house, is casa casa in patúa and casas in modern Portuguese). [ Link]

Like Goa, Native American reservations and small nations like the Cayman Islands, Macau prospered by encouraging slick modern casinos and international banks. The North Korean regime laundered high-quality counterfeit American bills through Banco Delta Asia, and this is a sticking point in the U.S. negotiations with the Kim Jong-il regime over their nuclear program.

Portuguese architecture, Chinese tourists (courtesy of foxy_moron)

Check out more Macau photos on Flickr.

Related posts: Fort night, Bandra Fort, Brasilian Bandra, Lands End