This Way and That

Paving in Portuguese

Ten years after its handover to the People’s Republic of China, the old Portuguese colony of Macau hardly abounds with the tongue of its former master. Portuguese signs still cling to shops and older buildings, but the language of the streets is unmistakeably Cantonese — with the occasional whiff of Mandarin coming from the direction of mainland tour groups. Macau’s future, its leaders have decided, is as a gambling destination, and increasing numbers of visitors from across Asia pack its Vegas-brand hotels night and day.

But the enclave’s Lusitanian design vocabulary remains remarkably intact, and nowhere is this more evident than in the patterns that swirl beneath its pedestrians’ feet. Calçadas (literally “pavements”), the unique street mosaics that decorate the cities of Portugal and its former colonies from Lisbon to Luanda.

The origins of calçadas are somewhat unclear. The popularity of tiles in Portuguese art first exploded with the introduction of geometrical ceramic arts by the Moors. Decorated tilework, known in Portuguese as azulejo, soon came to cover houses and churches across the country. But the first recorded calçada was not the product of an artist’s whimsy, but as a makework project for prisoners thought up by an army officer.

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An Afternoon in Macau

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Follow the Cat

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A Perch on the Edge of the World

There are two types of architectural birdcages in Macau: casinos and balconies. One of this southern Chinese city’s most famous casinos, the gloriously kitschy Lisboa, could coop up a giant parrot, and across town, a massive aviary greets visitors at the city’s newest gambling complex, in the Four Seasons Hotel. This is the only place in China where gambling is legal—in 2006, revenues surpassed those of Las Vegas—but unlike in nearby Hong Kong, traditional aesthetics are not yet lost. It doesn’t take long to wander away from the casinos into crowded streets that double as living rooms; amid the Portuguese street signs and droopy banyan trees, you’ll see dozens of balconies and windowsills, each enclosed by iron grates. The bars are a precaution against burglary, but the effect is a jumble of human-sized birdcages above the street, with potted plants and laundry instead of seed trays and perches.

Those balconies are a large reason why, despite the flashing casino lights on the horizon, Macau continues to feel lived-in and down-to-earth. They’re a bridge between the private and the public, inviting domestic activity into the street and social life into the home. If the city is a stage, the balcony is just that—the balcony, a spot for observing drama and, as with the two old men in The Muppets, occasionally participating in it.

And balconies are unique in every city. In Vancouver’s West End, where apartment buildings nestle into lush greenery, they are for quiet post-dinner conversation and solitary reading. Neighbours are glimpsed, voyeuristically, but interaction is rare. In the coastal Indian city of Chennai, by contrast, teenagers flirt “across floors and across blocks,” reports The Hindu, prompting mothers to warn their daughters against spending too much time on the balcony. Of course, there are few cities so passionate about its balconies as Montreal, where, as memories of the long winter melt with the snow, summer brings the whole city outside. Almost every evening from May until October, the murmur of conversation and clinking of beer bottles drifts down from overhead.

Things are different in Hong Kong, where I now live. Here, across the Pearl River Delta from Macau, summers are muggy, and for decades balconies had the all-important task of providing ventilation to sweltering apartments. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both British colonial tenements and tong lau—literally “Chinese building”—were graced with spacious balconies and large, recessed verandas.

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Well-Aged

Street sign on Taipa, Macau

City in Ruins

Forget the $2 slot machines and high-stakes poker of Cotai – Macau’s true soul hides within the city centre’s Ruínas de São Paulo, otherwise known as the ruins of St Paul’s. Every day, an endless stream of photo-snapping visitors flow north from the Largo do Senado (Senado Square) to gaze at the cathedral’s magnificent Baroque façade, the only thing left standing after a fire devastated the building in 1835. It has since become a potent symbol of Macau itself – but do any tourists know why?

César Guillén Nuñez, a research fellow and art historian at the Macau Ricci Institute, an organisation dedicated to exploring historical links between China and the West, hopes to make it clear exactly why St Paul’s matters. His new book, Macao’s Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China, attempts to reconstruct the cathedral as it existed before it was destroyed in an inferno. From its architecture and religious art, Guillén draws a portrait of Macau’s position as an early hub of Catholic missionary activity.

“St Paul’s is one of the glories of Macanese architecture,” he says. “It became synonymous with Macau. If you look at any image that exemplifies Macau’s past, it’s an image of St Paul’s façade. It is a strong statement that Macau is a Portuguese Christian city right here in China. That’s very powerful.”

Built towards the end of the 16th century, St Paul’s was part of a cluster of buildings that included a college, a parish church and several charitable institutions, all of which were run by the Jesuits, an influential order of the Catholic Church particularly active in China and Japan. In the 1620s, a few decades after the cathedral’s construction, a new façade was built by labourers from Fujian and Christian Japanese craftsmen who had fled persecution in their homeland. It featured a number of unusual touches, including a granite relief depicting Mary above a dragon-like hydra, accompanied by a Chinese inscription meaning, “The Holy Mother tramples on the dragon’s head.”

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Figures from the Back Streets

Stencil graffiti in the streets near Senado Square, Macau

The Motorcycles of the Pearl River Delta

The fast ferry between Hong Kong and Macau is disorienting. It is essentially a floating airline cabin, with neat rows of preassigned seats in which you are expected to remain for the duration of the trip. Roving attendants offer drinks and sandwiches. There is no outside deck on which you can stand and taste the salt air, or feel the wind on your face as you move inexorably towards your destination. Instead, you sit down, take a nap and then, one hour later, emerge into a city that in theory shares a language and culture with Hong Kong but in practice is so much more exuberantly Latin.

Macau is an disorderly but very intimate city, especially in the labyrinth of crowded streets and laneways that make up its oldest, most interesting and thankfully least-touristed section. The first thing you notice when you leave the ferry terminal and emerge into its streets is the abundance of motorcycles and scooters, giving Macau the feel of a grimy Mediterranean port that somehow washed up on the shores of the Pearl River Delta.

From a practical standpoint, scooters make sense in Macau because the city is so dense and compact. The Macau Peninsula, home to 390,000 people, covers just 8.5 square kilometres—in the Santo António parish, 104,200 people are squeezed into a single kilometre—so scooters are the fastest and most space-efficient way to move the population. In fact, scooters are so popular they outnumber cars 66,000 to 64,000. Something about the constant buzz of tiny motorcycles speeding down impossibly narrow streets and leafy boulevards gives Macau an unpredictable edge that even Hong Kong lacks.

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Alley Cats

“Princess,” Rua do Duque, Lisbon

“Don’t feed the cats,” Macau