Macau

A special administrative region of China on the south coast, population around 700,000 in about 33 square kilometres — small enough that locals joke it’s the size of a major city’s airport. Like Hong Kong it runs its own currency, legal system, immigration and passports.

Harry’s framing is that it is a European-Asian hybrid he has seen nowhere else, and that the casinos are what everyone knows and the least interesting thing about it.

How it got Portuguese

• 1557: the Portuguese are permitted by the Ming dynasty to set up a trading post — the gateway for European traders who wanted Chinese tea, porcelain and silk. It was hugely profitable and they were confined to this small patch; China never gave them more.
• 1800s: Portugal gains international recognition of the territory, which China did not accept.
• 1999: handed back to China under one country, two systems, keeping its own legal system, immigration and currency.
• The name is a mistake. The Portuguese landed by a temple and asked locals what the place was called; the locals answered about the temple. It stuck.

Portuguese is an official language and roughly 5% of people speak it. The signage is bilingual everywhere and the spoken language is Cantonese.

Getting there

• From Hong Kong airport without entering Hong Kong: the E2 transfer desk, then a bus across the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau bridge. Harry rates it as very easy and never clears Hong Kong immigration.
• The bridge is the world’s longest bridge-and-tunnel system — 55 km, and he gives the cost as $20 billion.
• Also by ferry, or by air — Macau has an airport, just far less well-connected than Hong Kong’s.
• Visa-free for UK passports.
• Cars carry two or three number plates — one for Macau, one for the mainland, sometimes one for Hong Kong.

Macau Tower

338 metres, and the site of the world’s highest bungee jump. 3,000 (Hong Kong or Macanese dollars) including the video. Harry rated his own reluctance a ten out of ten and did it anyway.

The old town

The historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005.

• The Ruins of St Paul’s — the façade of a church built over roughly 40 years, in stone and marble, alongside a university. Harry is careful to correct the assumption: it wasn’t destroyed in a war between the Portuguese and the Chinese, it burned down. Fire safety, he notes, is what has taken most of the world’s monuments.
• Senado Square and around, where the Portuguese met the Qing government to make decisions, and where Harry says you could believe you were in Lisbon — right up until the Chinese New Year decorations.
• It is extremely crowded. His line: a Guinness record for the most people photographing one thing at once.

Taipa and Coloane

• Taipa is where the real Portuguese buildings are — low-rise, no skyscrapers, and Harry’s favourite part to walk. Café Von K here had a queue round the block, for beef stew, which he assumes went viral.
• Coloane village is quieter and has fewer tourists, and is where you go for Lord Stow’s Bakery, the original Portuguese egg tart shop. Harry’s verdict: much less sweet than the Portuguese version and far more eggy. Staff were uneasy about filming.

Everyday Macau

• A traditional tea house — cha for tea, casa for house, which is the language fusion in one word. Harry calls it a must-do and a proper heritage experience.
• The wet market: dried oyster, dried shrimp, dried squid, tofu. Sellers who speak no English at all and are delighted anyway.
• Temple fortune-telling. Twelve shrines, one per zodiac animal; you worship at yours, pay for a blessing, light incense and candles in a prescribed order, and hand red envelopes of money to the temple staff. Harry was told his year was bad but not the worst.
• The Cotai Strip is the Vegas comparison — the Venetian, a scaled-down Eiffel Tower, an imitation Trafalgar Square with a British telephone box, and an Apple store beside all of it. Harry finds the British nostalgia hardest to process: Chinese visitors treat UK culture as cool, and he says he no longer does.
• Alipay may not work on a foreign account here, unlike the mainland.
• It is hyper-walkable.

A note Harry leaves in

A temple seller hands him something for free, and his host jokes that it’s white privilege. Harry agrees on camera — foreigner privilege, at least — rather than editing it out.

Harry’s tips

• Come for the history, not the casinos. Four hundred years of it, and the casinos are what everybody already knows.
• Transfer straight through from Hong Kong airport if Macau is your first stop — you never enter Hong Kong.
• Go to Coloane for the egg tarts, not the crowded old-town branches.
• Do the tea house.
• See a local take you round. The temple ritual in particular is unusable without someone to walk you through the order.

Source

• I Went to One of the Wealthiest and Most Advanced Cities — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T263hFcMBoA