MACAO, THE MONTE CARLO OF THE FAR EAST
A prettier marine journey than from Canton to Macao, is not possible in
the Orient, and it is of only eighty miles and accomplished by daylight
with convenient hours of departure and arrival.
As on all passenger-carrying craft plying the great estuary having Hong
Kong and Macao for its base and Canton its apex, you find the native
passengers on your boat confined below the deck whereon the state-rooms
and dining saloon of European travelers are located, and you perceive
racks of Mausers and cutlasses at convenient points of this upper deck.
To American eyes it is novel to see every stairway closed by a grated
iron door, and a man armed with a carbine on your side of each of these
barriers. You perceive on the main deck three or four hundred Chinamen
of the coolie class, some playing card games, others Smoking metal pipes
with diminutive bowls, but most of them slumbering in a variety of
grotesque attitudes. None of these Mongols who observe your curiosity
seems to hold any feeling of resentment for the effective separation of
the races, which places him, the native of the land, in a position that
might be called equivocal.
The English skipper and his Scotch engineer, who take the seats of honor
when tiffin is served, respond willingly to your appeal for an
explanation of the doors of bar-iron and the display of weapons--every
first-class passenger always asks the question, and on every trip the
British seafarers tell the story of Chinese piracy as practised up to
comparatively recent times in the great estuary having a dozen or more
names.
And an interesting tale it is, for it recounts deeds of the sea quite as
audacious and high-handed as anything performed on land by Jesse James
and his stage-coach bandits. Up to fifteen or eighteen years ago the
estuary bristled with Chinese pirates, and wherever native fishermen and
sailors foregathered, at Hong Kong, Canton or Macao, schemes for
holding-up and sacking steamers carrying bullion and valuable
merchandise were hatched with a frequency that gave a phase to local
commerce that was anything but comforting, and more than one brave
Yankee or British sailor went to his death fighting yellow thugs against
overwhelming odds. The public decapitation of a handful of these
murderers appeared to place no check on the outlawry.
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL SECTION OF MACAO]
Once a Canton-bound steamer, carrying the mails and a considerable
amount of specie, had her progress obstructed by two junks that wilfully
forced her into shoal water. In the confusion that followed the
grounding, a score of coolies, who up to that moment had been regarded
as honest deck passengers, rushed to the pilot-house and engine-room and
murdered every white man on board. Practically everything of value was
then transferred to the junks, now conveniently alongside, and the spoil
was landed at such points in the estuary that made official detection
well-nigh impossible. This is but a sample of the stories you may hear
while yellow-faced Chinamen are serving your food, and it must be
confessed that it affords a sense of confidence to know that the grates
of the stairways are actually locked, and that the rifles of the guards
are loaded with ball ammunition. As he sips his black coffee at the
termination of luncheon, the captain assures you that until within a few
years a skipper was suspicious alike of every native deck passenger and
every fishing junk indicating a disposition to claim more than its share
of the channel; "but the old days in China," he concludes, "have
disappeared forever, and piracy as an occupation has passed with them."
Getting back to the forepart of the ship, the views on land and sea are
engrossingly interesting. On the shores of the mainland and on an
occasional island are ancient forts which revive memories of interesting
experiences of the white man's invasion of the Celestial kingdom, and
the foreground of rice-fields is backed by interminable groves of
mulberry-trees explaining China's preeminence as a silk producer.
Numerous villages are passed, and from them the traveler obtains a fair
idea of the rustic life of China. Now and again a pagoda is visible,
crowning an elevation, and recalling childhood's school-book
illustrations. You jump at the convenient conclusion that these
structures of from six to ten stories had to do with the religion of the
country, which surmise is erroneous, for the towers were reared to guard
the geomantic properties of their respective neighborhoods, and in
reality are relics of a bygone age of superstition.
The pioneer European settlement of the Far East--Macao--is at last in
sight, and it presents immediately a visual contrast to Canton, by
reason of its picturesque situation. There is something about the
promontory that takes you back to Southern Europe, to the summer sea and
the shores of the Mediterranean, perhaps to a brightly situated fishing
port of the littoral of the Riviera. As the vessel rounds the cape and
comes to anchor in the pretty crescent formed by the Praia Grande,
flanked by terraced houses colored with minor tints of blue and yellow,
you know instantly that this stranded Eastern rainbow is Monte
Carlo--no, the Oriental equivalent of the beauty-spot of Latin Europe.
Macao is a little place large with history, in fact is an atom of Europe
almost lost to public gaze by the vastness of Asia, and as much a part
of the kingdom of Portugal as Lisbon itself. As the most enterprising
maritime and trading nation of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese
were the first to sail the Eastern seas, the first to open up
commercial relations between Europe and the great empire of China, and
holding the monopoly of all Oriental trade until the end of the
eighteenth century. Owing to the prospect of increased gain, following
on this European invasion, the waters of the Pearl River estuary soon
became infested with pirates, which the Portuguese magnanimously
assisted the Chinese government to subdue, and, in return, it is
recorded, received in 1557 the cession of the rocky peninsula on which
the Portuguese colony now stands. More than once Portugal had to
maintain her rights by recourse to arms, but the colony has remained
Portuguese without interruption for more than three hundred and fifty
years, and is a hoary patriarch beside infantile British Hong Kong and
German Tsing-tau. The oldest lighthouse on the coast of China is that of
Guia, standing sentinel on the highest point of the Portuguese colony.
The colony has a population of perhaps eighty thousand persons, and
practically all these are Chinese. There are, of course, a few score of
civil and judicial functionaries springing from the mother-country; and,
as in all places where Europeans have long lived in friendly association
with Orientals, the Eurasian class is strikingly numerous. In no court
on the Tagus are the laws of Portugal construed with more tenacity and
precision than in Macao's chambers of justice; and the flag of Portugal
floats over the homes of hundreds of loyal subjects who know only in a
hazy manner where Portugal really is--they are rich Chinese and others
evading the Chinese tax collector, or escaping burdensome laws, and for
many years these crafty Mongols have made a sort of political Gretna
Green of Macao. Certain influential Chinamen carrying on business in
Canton or other southern communities live in almost regal splendor in
Macao, and when the minions of the Chinese government attempt to hale
them before a tribunal of law, or compel them to share the expense of
carrying on the administration of a province, they exclaim in Chinese,
"Oh, no; I'm a subject of the King of Portugal"--and prove it. The great
sugar planter of the Hawaiian Islands, Ah Fong, whose Eurasian daughters
were beautiful and accomplished enough to find splendid American and
European husbands, was a subject of the Portuguese crown, strange to
say. His domicile on the Praia Grande is one of Macao's proudest
mansions.
[Illustration: FRONTIER GATE BETWEEN CHINA PROPER AND THE PORTUGUESE
COLONY]
The colony of Macao is scarcely more important than one of Anthony
Hope's imaginary kingdoms, but for the fact that it is on the map, for
the area of Portugal's foothold is not more than two or three miles in
length, and a half-mile to a mile in width; it is merely the rocky
promontory of the tip end of the island of Heung Shan. A wall of masonry
with artistic gateway separates the dominion of Portugal from the great
Chinese empire--on one side of the portal the law of the Emperor of
China is absolute, and on the other the rule of the monarch of Portugal
is sacred. In various ways the place and its people remind strongly
of a comic-opera setting--but the officer there serving his far-away
sovereign discourses with serious countenance of Goa, and Delagoa Bay
and Macao as important colonial possessions. Until Hong Kong under the
British began to rise as a port and base of commercial distribution,
Macao had a considerable trade; but with the decline of business the
harbor has silted up until now an oversea ship could not find anchorage.
A few industries, like cement making and silk winding, are carried on in
the outskirts of the colony, and a suspiciously large amount of prepared
opium is shipped, although the closest observer can detect not a poppy
under cultivation anywhere on the rocky promontory.
The old Protestant cemetery contains many graves of good men and true,
such as naval officers and seamen, who have died on Eastern seas, and
whose comrades preferred to leave them interred in Christian soil rather
than intrust their cherished remains to cemeteries in pagan lands. The
headstones of Macao's God's-acre bear name after name once carried with
pride on the rolls of the American, British or French naval and
merchantman services, and diplomatic and consular titles are recorded on
more than one headstone. It is interesting to scale the steps to inspect
closely the façade of the Jesuit church of San Paulo, erected some three
hundred years ago. Nothing remains but the towering façade, as erect as
if reared yesterday, and bearing silent testimony to the courage of the
pioneers in the Far East of the Catholic faith. A 'rickshaw journey
through every important street, from the center where are the hotel and
government buildings to the remotest patches of farming land near the
"frontier," consumes scarcely two hours. In the public park you come not
infrequently upon statues with tablets informing all observers of the
importance and majesty of the home country welded to the peninsula of
Europe, once famed for the intrepidity of its navigators and
adventurers. If Macao move the visitor to voice an opinion, it is that
under certain conditions which you might name the place could be a
veritable paradise, but that benevolent Portugal is there conducting an
earthly Nirvana for all and sundry of China's affluent sons mustering
the ingenuity and influence to gain shelter beneath the flag of dear old
Portugal.
Macao's claim to renown rests chiefly upon the fact that Portugal's
greatest bard, Camoens, there wrote in part or its entirety the immortal
"Lusiad," which in epic form details the prowess of the sons of ancient
Lusitania in Eastern discovery and oversea feats of daring, and in which
work the voyages and discoveries of Vasco da Gama are recorded with the
fidelity of a history prepared by a sympathetic admirer. As scholars
know, the "Lusiad" was first published in 1572, is in ten cantos and
1102 stanzas, and is translated into most modern languages. Important
American and English libraries possess it by at least four translators,
each being more or less a standard.
[Illustration: BUST OF CAMOENS, MACAO]
The life of the great poet is underlaid with romance and sadness. Born
at Lisbon about 1524, he was given an education fitting him for a
courtier's life, and it was an unfortunate affection for a high-born
donna in attendance upon the queen that caused him to be banished from
the land of his birth. After a roystering career as a soldier in Africa,
he sought shelter at Goa, in India. There he wrote a volume severely
castigating the home government for its official abuses in the East, and
this led to his being treated by his countrymen as a traitor and
outcast. Now in a Goa prison, now at liberty, he at last went to Macao,
and it was there that by his pen he redeemed to some extent his good
name, to the extent certainly of being permitted to return to Lisbon,
and there he died about 1580, poor and neglected. It is insisted that
Camoens's influence and efforts preserved the Portuguese language from
destruction during the Spanish occupation of the neighboring country,
and it is a fact that before 1770 no less than thirty-eight editions of
the "Lusiad" were published in Portugal.
To commemorate the eight or ten years he passed in Macao, a public
garden is named for him, and there, in a grotto of impressive grandeur,
is a bust of the man singing the praises of his natal country as no
other writer in verse or prose has ever succeeded in doing. The bronze
effigy rests on a plinth upon which is engraved in three languages these
lines from the pen of a pilgrim to the Eastern shrine once hallowed by
the presence of the bard of a nation:
Gem of the Orient earth and open sea
Macao! that in thy lap and on thy breast
Hast gathered beauties all the loveliest
O'er which the sun smiles in his majesty.
The very clouds that top the mountain crest
Seem to repose there lingering lovingly.
How full of grace the green Cathyan tree
Bends to the breeze and how thy sands are prest
With gentlest waves which ever and anon
Break their awakened furies on thy shore.
* * * * * *
Were these the scenes that poet looked upon,
Whose lyre though known to fame knew misery more?
* * * * * *
They have their glories and earth's diadems
Have nought so bright as genius' gilded gems.
The lines were written by Sir John Bowring, English scholar and
traveler, who visited Macao in the latter half of the last century, and
the expense of the memorial and its grounds was borne by a patriotic
Portuguese, Lorenço Marques, whose name has been preserved by being
given to the seaport on Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa.
For a place whose commerce is notoriously in eclipse, you are curious to
learn whence springs the golden shower giving the appearance of
prosperity to Macao, for the general air of the colony suggests an easy
affluence. To keep the governor's palace and the judiciary buildings
covered with paint costs something, you know, while the paved streets
and bridges and viaducts give support to the surmise of an exchequer not
permanently depleted. Portugal, nowadays almost robbing Peter to pay
Paul, is in no condition to succor an impecunious colony situated in
another hemisphere, you are aware, and you appeal for elucidation of the
fiscal problem. "Very easy, dear sir," your cicerone promptly rejoins,
"this is the Monte Carlo of the Far East. Gambling is here a
business--all the business there is, and the concessions for the fan-tan
and lottery monopolies pay for everything, practically making taxation
unnecessary."
The statement would cause something of a shock to a guileless stranger,
especially to one who had believed he had perceived a natural likeness
between the little principality on the Mediterranean and this beauty
spot of the Orient. But China is rather too far to the eastward of Suez
for simon-pure guile, and the globe-trotter decides to thoroughly
explore local conditions by way of adding to his worldly knowledge. If
you go to the post-office to mail a letter, you recognize perforce how
backward a colony of Portugal may be in supplying the trifling
requirements of life, for you stand minutes in a nondescript line before
your stamp is sheared from a sheet by a functionary having a capacity
for activity possibly rivaled by an Alpine glacier--then you wait at the
communal mucilage pot to secure in turn the required adhesive substance.
A good correspondent in Macao would pass half his time at the
post-office, you conclude.
But there is nothing backward, nothing harking back to the middle ages,
in the plan by which the public cash-box is filled, you learn after
plodding investigation. The merits of direct and indirect taxation, even
of the Henry George program for raising the public wind, have never been
seriously considered by Portugal's administrators in the East, nor has
municipal ownership of utilities been discussed, you discover. The
official bigwigs who administer Macao know that it is as necessary for
the Chinaman to gamble as to have food--and the colony accordingly
legalizes fan-tan and semi-daily lotteries, supplies the requisite
machinery for carrying on the games, and reaps a _benefice_ for its
enterprise that runs the community without further ado. That is all
there is to Macao's fiscal policy. Hong Kong, only forty miles across
the estuary, bristles with commercial prosperity. The British government
permits Hong Kongers to bet on horse-races, buy and sell stocks, and
promote devious companies, but forbids fan-tan and lotteries. There is,
consequently, a daily flow of men, women, and dollars between Hong Kong
and Macao. Besides, no traveler not actively engaged in uplifting his
fellow-man, feels that he has seen the Orient unless he passes a few
hours or days in endeavoring to lure fortune at the gambling tables.
The colonial lottery is no more dignified or important than a policy
game in an American town, and seems to be but the Western idea clouded
by its adaptation to Asiatic uses, tourists affirm.
Macao licenses twenty fan-tan places, and these run all day and all
night, and are graded in their patrons from tourists and natives of
fortune and position down to joints admitting 'rickshaw coolies,
sailors, and harbor riffraff. The gilded establishment claiming
attention from travelers is conducted by a couple of Chinese worthies,
by name Ung Hang and Hung Vo, according to the business card
deferentially handed you at your hotel, and the signs in front of it and
the legends painted on great lanterns proclaim it as a first-chop _Casa
de Jogo_, and a gambling-house that is "No. 1" in all respects. The
gamesters whose garments proclaim them to be middle-class Chinamen pack
themselves like sardines into the room where the table is situated, for
they obviously believe in watching their interests at close hand. The
floor above, by reason of the rail-protected opening in the center, is
little more than a spacious gallery; but it is there that the big
gamblers congregate, natives in costly fabrics, and whose rotund bodies
tell of lives not spent in toil. They loll on blackwood divans and smoke
opium and send their bank-notes and commands to the gambling table by
servants, until yielding to the exalted dreams induced by the poppy
fumes. They are polite fellows, every man of them, and make it apparent
that they would like to do something for the entertainment of each man
and woman tourist in the room.
In this strange establishment globe-trotting novices sit around the
railed opening and make their bets on the game below through an
interpreter attendant. This obliging man lowers your coins to the
croupier in a basket, and draws up any "bet" you may have had the luck
to win. And what a medley of coins you are paid in! There are coins of
China and Japan obsolete years ago in those countries, money of the
Philippine Islands, even nickles and dimes whose worth has been stamped
by Uncle Sam. It is said that half the pocket-pieces of Asia find their
way onto the gambling boards of Macao, and that a thrifty croupier seeks
to pay them out to the tourist who will remove them from local
circulation. The linguistic representative of the management endeavors
to play the bountiful host to most visitors. He takes one through the
building, permits you to peep within a chamber filled with oleaginous
Chinamen in brocade petticoats, sleeping off the effects of the opium
pipe, explains painted fans and other attempts at decoration on the
walls, and indicates a retiring room where you may rest or even pass the
night, all without charge.
[Illustration: IN A FAN-TAN GAMBLING HOUSE, MACAO]
Then he orders refreshments brought, and with the manner of a veteran
courtier proffers a tray heaped with oranges, an egg-shell cup filled
with tea that is almost without color, and dried watermelon seeds that
you might munch after the manner of the neck-or-nothing gamblers on the
lower floor. When you politely decline these, the courtly one most
likely says, "You no likee tea and seeds--then have whiskysoda." Chinese
courtezans, with feet bound to a smallness making locomotion difficult
and obviously painful, wearing what in the Western World would be called
"trousers," and invariably bedecked with earrings or bracelets of
exquisite jade, edge their way to the gambling table, and put their
money down in handfuls as long as it lasts. To spend an evening in the
liberally-conducted establishment of Messrs. Ung Hang and Hung Vo is
enlightening in various ways.
Because fan-tan is the passion of Asiatics, the popular idea is that it
must be the wickedest of all games, if not the most complicated. Fan-tan
as a fact is simplicity itself, being no more than the counting off into
units of four several quarts of little metal discs called "cash," until
there remain one, two, three or four discs. The result determines what
bets, laid about a four-sided space on the table, win--a single
remaining "cash" makes the 1-side win, two the 2-side, and so on. Each
hazard is a one-to-three wager, and the bank pays on this basis after
deducting the recognized percentage supporting the establishment.
Spinning a top with four numbered sides would accomplish in a minute the
same result as the tedious counting of a heap of discs, varying with
every "deal" according to the whim or superstition of the players, who
may add to or take from the pile prior to the beginning of the count. It
is fortunate for the millions of the conservative Far East that their
principal gambling game is not a quick one, like roulette, for the
player of fan-tan gets "action" only about once in every ten minutes. At
roulette and most other games favored by white men a gambler knows his
fate in a minute.