Macao

The name Macao is redolent with myth, legend and history. Since it was first established by the Portuguese in 1557 as their trading base for East Asia - and, subsequently as an outpost for the Catholic Church - Macao has been a city where disparate cultures have met and mingled. Its position on China's doorstep ensured that trade flourished; it became a rich warehouse, where more goods were exchanged than anywhere else in the world. It was, too, famously a place of debauchery and turpitude, with gambling dives, opium dens, secret pleasure houses and an astonishingly successful smuggling industry. Here, the worst rubbed shoulders with the best, for Macao's saving grace was being hospitable and open to everyone, from die-hard-adventurers to exiles, from refugees fleeing oppression to debtors escaping their creditors. Therein lay its greatness.
Administered by China since 1999, after two decades of intensive development, parts of Macao have now been transformed. But from the end of World War II until the 1980s time seemed to stand still, and the city - preserved for a while from modernity, possessed a unique charm and atmosphere, where East and West lived side by side. It is that lost Macao, a place of curved Chinese roofs, Corinthian columns and cast-iron balconies, where statues of the Virgin were matched by shrines dedicated to local divinities, and where Portuguese palaces slipped into genteel decay, that Philippe Pons's evocative text recovers.