Night Boat to Macau
Story by Georgia Hesse
When I was the Dragon Lady, Queen of the South China Sea, I was tall and willowy, dressed all in white and wore a dagger in my garter. I operated out of an opium den in Macau, the wickedest port in the world.
That was when I was 12 years old, not incidentally. Macau was out of Rudyard Kipling and Noel Coward, out of Robert Louis Stevenson and “Terry and the Pirates,” the seemingly eternal Milton Caniff cartoon strip. I didn’t know what opium was, but it sounded swell. So did the name Macau: mysterious, dissolute, delightful.
It seems that once Macau may have been as villainous as I wanted it to be. Dutch author Hendrick de Leeuw in his Cities of Sin (1934) painted it in the purplest of proses: Macau “harbors in its hidden places the riffraff of the world, the drunken shipmasters, the flotsam of the sea, the derelicts, and more beautiful, savage women than any port in the world. It is a hell.” Heaven.
Many years ago, on my first visit as an adult, I spurned whatever speedy transportation existed from Hong Kong (40 wave-tossed miles away) in favor of the “night boat to Macau.” That sounded more romantic but was just more tawdry, a case that frequently occurs. I stayed at the then new Hotel Lisboa, a gaudy confection where gambling (the sine qua non of Macau’s economic life) went on 24 hours a day. (Macau came under China’s control in December, 1999, and gaming returned to the island in 2002. Today, there are more than 30 casinos; it’s a maxi-Vegas.)
Away from the garishness and the games tables (craps, roulette, blackjack, baccarat in addition to the Chinese dai siu and fan tan and the slot machines, in ever-descriptive Chinese, known as “hungry tigers”), I found the city sad and scruffy, the only tone of faded colonial splendor sounding at the creaky old inn, the Bela Vista.
Early in the ’90s, I found myself crossing from Hong Kong to Macau again, this time aboard a jetfoil that streaked across the 40 miles in 55 minutes. (There were other vessels available: jetcats, jumbocats, hoverferries, high-speed ferries and helicopters, but no more stomach-churning night boats.)
Macau then was living through tremulous, perhaps even parlous days. (I like the ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”) It had changed faster during the previous decade than in four centuries under the Portuguese flag.
Macau is the oldest European outpost in Asia, settled between 1554 and 1557 during Portugal’s great era of expansion. It’s a small peninsula dangling off the belly of China, south of Guangzhou (Canton) and two small islands in the Pearl River Delta, Taipa and Coloane, to which it is joined by bridges.
The Portuguese jewel grew rich from the China-Europe trade and became the summer home of the British taipans (big traders). But in 1841, when the Brits established Hong Kong as a trading Crown Colony, Macau slipped into a languid backwater, a free port (since 1846) where tourists and Hong Kong residents came to shop (particularly for gold) and to gamble.
They also came to eat, to drink inexpensive Portuguese wines (such as the estimable Dão) and to disport themselves, enjoying the good life with bad girls.
For years, Macau slumbered, a lost leaf off the blooming Hong Kong plant. When Ian Fleming, creator of Bond, James Bond, arrived in 1959, he found it “as picturesque as, and deader than, a beautiful graveyard.”
In 1992, I found Macau a two-day escape from whatever else I was doing then; a look back in nostalgia. The reproduction of a brilliantly red 1920s London bus followed a fixed route along the more touristy streets, emblazoned with a sign reading “For the Cordialities Showing Oriental
Elegance.” I began again at the very real beginning, A-Ma Temple, to pay respects to the Taoist goddess of seafarers.
One day, long ago (most happenings if not all in Macau were long ago), a junk sailing across the South China Sea found itself trapped and battered by a sudden storm. At its height, a beautiful, young woman who had boarded at the last moment rose to command the gale winds and the mad seas to calm. They did, and the ship floated safely into port. The woman (named A-Ma) stepped ashore, walked to the crest of the nearby Barra Hill and ascended into heaven in a halo of light and a waft of perfume.
Centuries later, when Portuguese sailors landed and asked the name of the place, they were told “Am-Ma-Gao” (Bay of A-Ma). Eventually, Amagao became Macau.
Fireworks, the odor of incense from burning joss sticks, a celebration of shrieking children: all these seemed memories of an old, old culture. So did the baroque facade of St. Paul’s with its intricate carvings, standing tall since the church itself burned down in 1835. Tourists snapped each other wearing Hawaiian shirts, pretty springtime dresses and T-shirts bearing messages such as “Refresh the Spirit Excellent.”
In those days, antique shops near St. Paul’s sold precious (one presumed) items from the Chang dynasty (1644–1912) or even Ming (1368–1644) bowls, etc., smuggled out of China. You could touch the past in the Old Protestant Cemetery, where lay Dr. Robert Morrison (compiler of the first English- Chinese dictionary), George Chinnery (doyen of China coast landscape artists in the 18th century) and Capt. Lord John Spencer Churchill (commander of the H.M. Druid — an inspired name — and an ancestor of Sir Winston’s).
Luiz Vaz de Camoens, soldier-poet who composed the national epic “Os Lusiades” strode here. So did Vasco da Gama, the first European to sail ’round the Cape of Good Hope, and Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the modern Chinese Republic and medical practitioner in Macau.
One had to visit Taipa village on Taipa Island, to eat (to dine would be too formal an act) at the irrepressible Pinocchio’s, where the shrimp and the crab seemed to have jumped upon your plate at your beckoning. Fortified, you continued to the isle of Coloane to view the arm bone of St. Francis Xavier in a silver reliquary along with remains of Christian martyrs who died far away in Nagasaki and Indochina — more lively stories.
On its website, I read that “Macau has shifted from being primarily a manufacturing-based economy, with a heavy emphasis on the textiles sector, to becoming a service economy focused heavily … etc., etc.” all that stilted stuff. Stable growth, recovering economy and restoration of public order are concepts tossed about, and a leading attraction is the Cyber Fountain in the Nam Vam Lakes, largest of its kind inAsia, with water jets and music controlled entirely by computer. Clearly, it’s a fountain into which the inebriated and unruly dare not jump.
Planes land in the spiffy airport, gliding in over waters innocent of night boats. Days and nights, the city celebrates with youth symphony concerts, puppet shows, women’s hockey, children’s choirs, string quartets, fireworks competitions and sketching exhibitions at Old Ladies House.
So where will the Dragon Lady linger languorously tomorrow? I doubt she’ll be back. Macau is no longer wicked enough.
Biography: Courtesy of Russell Johnson
Georgia I. Hesse was born on the 28 Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek at the foot of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. A B.A. graduate of Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, she then studied political science as a Fulbright scholar at Paris’ Sorbonne, then at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, France. She became the founding travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner (flagship of the Hearst chain) and then of the Examiner-Chronicle. Georgia holds the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government and the Chevalier de l’Ordre de la République from Tunisia. Her articles have appeared in many national magazines and newspapers and she is the author of travel guides to France and California by three publishers, and a contributor to several anthologies. Georgia passed away on February 4, 2022, at the age of 88.
