Thoughts About Macao

I followed a docent's tour yesterday on the portion of the Sackler Museum's extraordinary exhibit on Portugal's navigational exploits of the 15th and 16th centuries and their ongoing influence across the globe. Yesterday's tour concentrated on China.

In 1557, the Chinese granted the Portuguese the right to establish a community at Macao. This led to Portuguese rule of the Macao peninsula and nearby islands for 442 years, ending in 1999, when the territory was formally ceded to the Republic of China. The Sackler exhibit deals with trade, with religious missionary movements, and with the relationship between the Portuguese and the royal court in Beijing. Beautiful silks, extraordinary porcelains, maps and paintings populate the three exhibit rooms. A mixture of cultures, neither overtaking the other.

And, I recall Macao always being compared to Hong Kong, the British Chinese coastal colony, and always coming out second best (and nowhere near Hong Kong in glitz, prosperity, or in any other category).

Switch to 2007. Look at today's New York Times and the article entitled "High Rolling Right Past Las Vegas". Let me quote: "The $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort, scheduled to open here Tuesday, will give Sin City more than a run for its money. The Venetian has more floor space than four Empire State Buildings. The hotel's slot machines, baccarat tables, and other games of chance sprawl across a casino more than three times the size of the largest casino in Las Vegas. The 15,000 seat sports area nearly rivals Madison Square Garden, the convention center has a 6,000 seat banquet hall and the luxury shopping mall has three indoor canals with singing gondoliers; the Venetian in Las Vegas has just one.....But what is most surprising about the 3,000 suite project is that it is merely the first of 14 interconnected hotels being built here by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation....and the [overall] project is just the largest of a series of giant gambling complexes being constructed here in Macao, on the southwestern lip of the Pearl River."

So what happened here? What happened to the silk and porcelain? What happened to good old Catholicism's inroads on the Chinese religions?

And what's more, what does this say about the world? Think Darfur, think Iraq, think the entire Moslem world, think Cuba, think...... And, lest it be forgot, the country of which Macao has now been a territory since 1999 is Communist China!!

I cannot process this at all.