Between China and Europe

Person, Culture and Emotion in Macao

João de Pina-Cabral

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000322972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the mid-1500s to December 1999, Macao was the longest-standing site of economic, religious and political contact between the Chinese and European worlds. Yet this surprising capacity for survival has resulted, ironically, form the very weakness of the Portuguese presence. In particular, since the foundation of Hong Kong (in 1840), Macao had depended on a creative use of its marginality - as a centre for gambling, for the coolie trade, the opium trade, the semi-clandestine gold trade and so on. As a rear window on China, Macao provides us with fascinating examples of marginality that allow us to study the limits of the systems that characterize the Chinese world.

CHAPTER 1
MACAO BAMBOO

Seagulls glide over a mirroring sea

Sailing boats return over gentle waves

In the morning, I buy fresh fish in the market

Forgetting the perils of seafaring

Liang Peiyuan (1996 [1968])

Since its foundation in the second half of the sixteenth century Macao has been one of the few permanent points of contact between China and Europe, managing to weather all of the often stormy clashes between two of the greatest and most distinct civilizations and political conglomerates in history. Macao’s longevity is without doubt surprising, if we take into account its troubled history.

Its capacity for survival is directly related to its fragility. It was always impossible to protect the city in military and commercial terms, as it is situated at the tip of a minuscule peninsula surrounded by hilly islands in the Delta of the Pearl River – the coastal hinterlands of the wealthy Chinese province of Guangdong. Originally slightly over 3 km², the peninsula grew and, at the time of the handover in 1999, it amounted to over 8 km² (cf. Wang et al. 1997).

China always was a continental power. Macao was China’s sea gate where foreign merchants could settle because they did not thus upset the order of things by entering into China proper. The Empire’s inner waters began at the Bogue (Boca Tigris), further up the Delta, half-way to the great city of Canton.

Thus, Macao was always at the mercy of the Chinese State. Today one can hardly guess at its existence, but for over three centuries there was a wall that cut across the middle part of the peninsula – on the sea side lived the Catholic subjects of the King of Portugal; on the inland side grew the Chinese bazaar. Inside this wall the Portuguese were protected from attack and could live their life as they wished; on the Chinese side the mandarins¹ ruled.

Further up, however, cutting across the minuscule isthmus, there was another wall or, rather, a set of gates – the Portas do Cerco, Gates of Siege – beyond which Europeans could not go without a special licence and which protected the Chinese from any sort of Portuguese whimsicality. The Chinese mandarins, with their headquarters at Casa Branca (White House), further upriver, only had to close these doors when they were dissatisfied with Portuguese activities. Within days, the foreign citadel invariably surrendered for lack of food, drinking water and goods for maintaining the commercial activities. For example, an American merchant who visited the city in the second half of the eighteenth century comments:

at present it is much fallen from its ancient splendour, for though it is inhabited by Portuguese, and hath a Governor, nominated by the King of Portugal, yet it subsists merely by the sufferance of the Chinese, who can starve the place and dispossess the Portuguese, whenever they please. This obliges the Governor to behave with great circumspection, and carefully to avoid every circumstance that may give offence to the Chinese. (Yee 1989: 18)

In his evocative cosmogony of Macao, Father Benjamin Videira Pires S.J. identifies the two human forces responsible for the founding of this city: the boat people who, since time immemorial, permeated down from the tea-rich province of Fukien and who created and cared for the Temple of Ah-ma; and the Portuguese sailing merchants, who left behind the Japanese-inspired ruins of St Paul. They shared a common feature, he says: being subject to ‘a kind of oceanic nomadism, which was, above all, spiritual’ (1994: 6).

In these southern waters of the China Sea, navigation always carries a corollary – the impending typhoon (lit. in Cantonese, the big wind, daai6 fung1).² That is, to my mind, the import of our epigraph. The poet captures a sentiment that inevitably, even if only sporadically, assaults all who have lived in this city: the awareness that here the comforts of daily normality are charmed, for they depend on the forgetting of ‘the perils of seafaring’.

In Macao, today as in the past, the typhoon is never very far away. And I do not speak merely of meteorology – like Father Videira Pires, I have in mind above all the more spiritual perils of cross-cultural nomadism.

In order to illustrate these, I have again chosen the words of a poet. Cai Yin Yuan, a literatus, was sent by the imperial authorities on an inspection tour of Macao in 1864. Whilst he was there, he met a number of Portuguese residents. He seems to have been well treated. In the notes to his poem ‘Hearing music played by an European girl’, he tells us: The foreign mistress of the house told her daughter to greet us and to play the organ. Gallantly dressed in silk as fine as a cicada’s wings and ornamented with jewels, she plays lightly and graciously, and only stops when the visitors leave.’

One might have thought that he appreciated it. However, a little further on he comments:

Foreign music is always characterized by its vigour, standing out for its harmfulness and violence, lacking gentleness and elegance; full of iron sounds, this music destroys the spirit and softens the will. There are the just sounds played in the Ming and Qing palaces, where mandarins are in authority and merchants are subjects. Let the Chinese literati appreciate the elegant classical music, preventing our people from being degraded by the foreign arts. (Quoted by Zhang Wenqin 1996: 58)

The cultural chasm between the two civilizations that met in Macao was such and their mutual sense of legitimation was so strong that we can safely consider that, in the majority of instances, what took place was more a mutual agreement to disagree than, properly speaking, a cross-cultural dialogue. For centuries there were, in theory, two cities: the Portuguese citadel and the Chinese bazaar, on either side of the city walls. You were either a Catholic subject of the King of Portugal or a subject of the Emperor, respectively – the two things were not compatible. And if you crossed this border of allegiance, you normally crossed it alone. Very seldom did such people keep anything like family relations on the other side, as we will see.

In fact this agreement of separation did not work fully and superimposition was always and constantly occurring, especially after the colonial period (1846–1967), when the two cities started physically to merge. It was not only legally and geographically that the borders of Macao were never fully agreed upon by the two States involved (see Chapter 3). People had to manage the discomforts that superimposition produced in all sorts of manners. In the pages that follow we will come across many instances where people came afoul of this Charybdis of intercultural navigation.

There is one fascinating manifestation of this still present in Macao’s life today. When we visit the older section of the city, we discover that it is not only the toponymy that differs between Portuguese and Cantonese names (so that, for example, the ‘Street of Pedro Nolasco da Silva’ in Portuguese is called in Cantonese the ‘Street of the White Horse’, or the ‘Hill of the Truths’ in Portuguese is called in Cantonese ‘Hill of the God Na Ja’); it is also the popular topography that does not correspond (so that a spot that is normally identified by the name of a square in Portuguese may well be identified by a street name in Cantonese).

PERIODS IN THE CITY’S HISTORY

I will now present the reader with a set of temporal referents for classification of the city’s history so as to facilitate the comparison between the discussion of each of the various cases that will be analysed below. These are meant as nothing but rough guides to the more detailed analyses that will be undertaken later. The first period is far too large, but I have opted for leaving it thus vague, as we will seldom deal with it.

1557 to 1688 – Early period

Portuguese merchants and missionaries, mostly interested in the link with Japan, founded Macao roughly around 1557. As the Ming had broken commercial relations with Japan, the Portuguese found a window of opportunity (both commercial and religious) that worked particularly well for a few decades. By 1587, however, Shogun Hideyoshi banned Christianity in Japan and evicted the Portuguese. Nevertheless, the internal Asian trade continued to enrich the city. But after the Dutch took Malacca in 1641 and imposed a blockade on the Strait of Malacca, the vital link with Goa was broken and Macao lived through decades of great abandonment.

1688 to 1744 – Early Qing period

In 1688, the young Kangxi Emperor positioned a Chinese Customs office in Macao. This was the period when the Portuguese Jesuits living in Peking had great influence in court and Macao played an important role in terms of China’s opening to the world. Commercially, it was the high period of the Canton trade in tea, when the British East India Company established its East Asian headquarters in the city.

1744 to 1846 – Late Canton Trade period

This was the period when the opium trade became more important and the ‘country traders’ started increasing their importance. In Macao, these were dark times, when Qing intransigence with foreigners increased, as their problems with pirates also mounted. During the second half of the period, Portugal underwent a particularly difficult stage of civil war and social upheaval in the wake of the Napoleonic invasions.

1846 to 1967 – Colonial period

Hong Kong was founded in 1843 in the midst of the Opium Wars and, shortly after that, the principal British and Chinese merchants abandoned Macao. Faced with immediate crisis Macao attempted to renegotiate its position vis-à-vis the Chinese State, which was then in the middle of a great internal crisis.³ This period was launched by the actions of Governor Ferreira do Amaral, of whom we will hear more in Chapter 3. By the time the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assumed full control over Mainland China (1949), this situation of colonial independence had to come to an end, as it eventually did in the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (3 December 1966 uprising).

1967 to 1987 – Post-colonial period

Contrary to what they expected, Portuguese authorities discovered that the Chinese leadership in Canton and Peking did not want to recover the administration of the city. Rather, they wanted to keep Macao under Portuguese administration but in such a manner that they could dictate the terms of the local policies. Such a situation continued until roughly 1987 when the Joint Declaration was signed that established the terms of the transition. This period can be further sub-divided. The period up to the Portuguese Democratic Revolution (1974) and Mao’s death (1976) were years of relative hardship and abandonment. After that, however, Macao entered a cycle of prosperity and development such as it had not seen before in modern times.

1987 to 1999 – Transition period

The Luso-Chinese Joint Declaration concerning Macao’s future was signed on 13 April 1987. From then onwards, the Portuguese and Chinese authorities started collaborating closely to organize a smooth transition. Following Hong Kong by a few years, Macao became a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 20 December 1999. Its relative autonomy has allowed life to continue without great upheavals during the transition and after. This is not the end of Macao’s history and it is not even the end of the structural contradictions that have characterized Macao’s history, as will be argued in the last chapter.

Although this book is in no way an ethnographic monograph in the traditional sense – as each of the examples discussed is followed through in its separate temporal development – the conception of the work does correspond to a temporal conjuncture. I carried out fieldwork in Macao at the expenses of the Cultural Institute of Macao between 1990 and 1995 in order to write an ethnographic monograph about the Macanese – the Eurasian community of Macao.⁴ During that period I stayed in Macao annually for three to four months. I was initially accompanied by a sociologist colleague, Nelson Lourenso.

Thus, my arguments and my sensitivity concerning the Territory are definitely marked by that temporal perspective (cf. Pina-Cabral 2000b) quite as much as by the facts that I am Portuguese and that, in the middle of fieldwork, I got married to a Macao-born Chinese.

THE INCIDENTES – INSTABILITY AND PERMANENCE

When I first arrived in Macao, I discovered that the Cultural Institute had drawn up a list of ‘privileged informants’ that I was supposed to interview. They even organized transport for me to these interviews in official cars. One of the first people on the list was Carlos D’Assumpção, the most prestigious political figure in the Territory at the time. A Eurasian, he had studied Law at Coimbra, where he had already distinguished himself as a student leader in the camp of the dictatorship. In 1961, at a relatively young age, he played an important political role as lawyer to Stanley Ho, when the latter collaborated with the Governor in wrenching the gambling monopoly away from the old syndicate. This benefited the Territory greatly, as the new owners paid considerably more taxes into the coffers of the Administration, which allowed an important set of public works that launched the modernization of the city’s infrastructures to be undertaken.

When we met, shortly before he died, he had the bearing of a distinguished senior politician. He called my attention to the fact that Macao’s longevity was not based on continuous peace but on regular crises. I asked him to explain further and, smiling, he said:

We, the Macanese, are not like the iron that breaks; we are like the bamboo that bends. The typhoon comes and we are thrown to the ground. But then we straighten up again and spread our branches.⁵

This image of the Macao bamboo is perhaps one of the best points of entry in order to understand Macao’s social construction. As we will see later, the secret of Macao’s survival was its capacity to bend with the winds of history, its acceptance of its own weakness. We are reminded of Confucius’ saying, which may well be the historical ancestor of this particular founding myth. When his disciple asked Confucius whether it was necessary to execute those who contravene the Way, he answered: ‘Is it really necessary to kill in order to rule? If you choose goodness the people will improve. The virtue of the noble man is powerful like the wind; the virtue of the small man is like the grass that, under the wind, folds and lies down.’⁶

Thus, Macao’s virtue was that of the small man and, to that extent, Macao lived under the permanent threat of higher powers. The risk of annihilation was always in the air. When we look through the literature that has been written about Macao, we inevitably come across sentences that announce the death of ‘Macao as we know it’ in the near future or the imminent disappearance of the Macanese – the Eurasians – that part of the population most directly associated with the city’s history. This prophecy of doom is associated to an image of abandonment locally called ‘the Macanese Diaspora’.

For example, a certain author tells us, ‘in the period that followed on the leaving of the Japanese [at the end o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication Page
• Chapter 1: Macao Bamboo
• Chapter 2: The City’s Profile
• Chapter 3: Hollering in Bronze: Memory and Conflict
• Chapter 4: Paradoxes: Gambling and the Imperial Civil Service Examination
• Chapter 5: Equivocal Compatibilities: Person, Culture and Emotion
• Chapter 6: Stone Silences: Organized Amnesia
• Chapter 7: Names: Personal Identity and Ethnic Ambiguity
• Chapter 8: Correlate Asymmetries: Gender, Class and Ethnicity
• Chapter 9: Habits of the Heart: Modern Women and Filial Piety
• Chapter 10: Triad Wars and the end of Portuguese Administration
• Appendix: Governor’s Telegram Concerning Statues
• Glossary of Cantonese Words
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index