Macau

Portuguese traders settled the peninsula around 1557 with the tolerance of Ming officials, paying an annual ground rent, and Macau became the hub of Portugal's trade with China and Japan and a base for the Jesuit mission to East Asia — the Church of St Paul and its college were built in this period. As Guangzhou opened and Hong Kong and the treaty ports rose in the nineteenth century, Macau's commercial importance faded, and it leaned on gambling, licensed from 1847.

Portugal declared full sovereignty in 1887. After Portugal's 1974 revolution it offered to return the territory; China preferred to wait, and Macau was redefined as "Chinese territory under Portuguese administration". The 1987 Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration set the terms, and Macau was handed over on 20 December 1999 as a Special Administrative Region with its own Basic Law and a 50-year guarantee of its system, on the "one country, two systems" model.

In 2002 the government ended the decades-old gaming monopoly and licensed new operators, including American casino companies. Gaming revenue overtook the Las Vegas Strip by 2006 and grew to several times its size, funding an annual cash handout to residents and a vast building boom on reclaimed land between Taipa and Coloane, the Cotai Strip. The pandemic shut the border and collapsed tourism in 2020–22; visitors have since returned, and Beijing is pressing Macau to diversify away from its near-total dependence on gambling.

Macau is overwhelmingly Cantonese-speaking and Han Chinese, but four and a half centuries of Portuguese presence left a distinctive layer: pastel colonial buildings and baroque churches, calçada wave-pattern paving, Portuguese street names, and the Macanese — a small Eurasian community of mixed Portuguese and Asian descent with their own near-extinct creole, Patuá, and their own cuisine.

Catholic and Chinese religious life run in parallel, sometimes on the same street: the A-Ma Temple to the sea goddess who may have given Macau its name, and the churches of the historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Festivals follow both calendars — the Feast of the Drunken Dragon and A-Ma alongside the Procession of the Passion — and the Macau Grand Prix, run since 1954 through the streets of the peninsula, is the city's great secular event.

About 685,000 people live on roughly 33 square kilometres, making Macau one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Gaming and the tourism around it account for the bulk of the economy and, directly or indirectly, most jobs; residents receive an annual share of the gaming windfall in cash.

The territory is knitted ever more tightly to the neighbouring mainland city of Zhuhai and to the wider Greater Bay Area, with huge daily cross-border flows of workers and visitors and the long bridge to Hong Kong. Property is expensive, imported labour fills many service jobs, the population is ageing, and crime is low. Everyday life is compact and walkable in the old core, and shaped by the rhythms of the casinos and the tourist week.

Macanese cuisine is often called the world's first fusion food, blending Portuguese techniques with ingredients and spices gathered along Portugal's trade routes through Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Signature dishes include minchi (minced beef or pork with diced potato, soy, and a fried egg), African chicken (grilled in a coconut-and-chilli sauce), Portuguese chicken, tacho (a winter hotpot), and serradura "sawdust pudding".

Alongside it, Macau has excellent Cantonese cooking, and its snacks are famous: the Macau-style Portuguese egg tart with a scorched top, the crisp pork-chop bun, and the almond cookies and slabs of bak kwa jerky sold along the Rua do Cunha in Taipa Village. Portuguese wines, vinho verde, and port are widely available, a legacy of the colonial connection.

The historic centre threads from the Ruins of St Paul's and the Monte Fort above it, past the Macau Museum, down to Senado Square with its rippling paving and pastel façades, and on to A-Ma Temple by the inner harbour. Other stops include St Joseph's and St Lawrence's churches, the Mandarin's House, the Moorish Barracks, and the Guia Fortress with its lighthouse and chapel, the oldest on the China coast.

Taipa Village keeps a strip of Macanese houses, now a museum, and green Coloane has the black sand of Hac Sa beach and a quiet colonial-era church. The Cotai Strip is the other Macau entirely: casino-resorts built as themed cities — a canal-and-gondola Venice, an Eiffel Tower, a mock London — with arena shows, shopping malls, and the "House of Dance" spectacular.

Macau Tower offers a glass floor and one of the world's highest commercial bungee jumps, and the streets of the peninsula host the Grand Prix each November, when Formula 3 cars and motorcycles race past the same baroque churches.