by Mark Harrison

Macau became a Portuguese colonial territory during the Ming Dynasty in 1557. Four centuries later, James Bond visited in The Man With the Golden Gun, capering around British Hong Kong’s disreputable European colonial cousin. The same year, after the Carnation Revolution, Portugal’s new government offered to return Macau to China, and the urbane and ruthless foreign minister Zhou En-Lai, near the end of his life amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, declined.

Macau returned in 1999 on China’s terms. James Bond did too in 2012, as the embodiment of chiseled and cynical corporate masculinity, just as Macau’s casinos were now the gateway for hot mainland capital flowing into a borderless and cultureless global economy. Xi Jinping came to power determined to stop it all.

Beneath empire, global capital, and the power of the party-state, Macau has an urban fabric stitched over the centuries into an everyday life. Food, worship and family are found in corners of quietude. Temples are fitted into doorways and alleys. Catholicism is expansive, occupying city squares. Trees stand like watching sentinels. Sunny restaurants serve slow yum cha long into the day. There is a rhythm of survival in Macau’s whitewash, of a place whose wry, everyday syncretic culture endures the global forces that have played across it for centuries.

Mark Harrison is a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Tasmania. His work concerns culture and politics in the Chinese world, with a particular interest in Taiwan. He uses images as a research method and a mnemonic aid, and as a way of looking out from the institutionalised forms of academic knowledge.