Staying in China Another Day

The author of the next National Geographic Magazine article, Edgar Allen Forbes, has an equally exalted opinion, as did the author of the last article, of his favorite location in China, the city of Macao.  He describes Macao as "the Monte Carlo of the Orient. . . beyond question, one of the most beautiful cities of the extreme East," Macao, "Land of Sweet Sadness": The Oldest European Settlement in the Far East, Long the Only Haven for Distressed Mariners in the China Sea, September, 1932, p. 337.

The city of Macao is "but the tip end of the unimportant island" (also named Macao). Built in 1864, its small lighthouse, the first on the Chinese coast, was a haven for mariners.  The island of Macao was a Portuguese colony in 1932, having been founded centuries before, in 1557.  The Portuguese also protected seamen from Chinese pirates.  The city is thirty miles south by steamer from the giant metropolis of Hong Kong.

This article's eight-page section of colored photographs reveals a city crowded yet clean.  In 1932 the chief product for export was firecrackers - mostly bound for the American market.  Mr. Forbes visited a factory and regretted that it spoiled "the enjoyment of firecrackers ever afterward, if you happen to have both a memory and a conscience.  It seems like a sacrilege to set off an entire bunch with one match when you remember the time and patience that entered into its manufacture" in Macao (p. 355).

Macao was rich in 1932 from its extensive gambling houses, wildly popular.  Another source of wealth in that era was an opium factory, "a dingy, dirty place, as becomes so vile an industry. . . Where grow the poppies which furnish the raw juice and by what devious paths the finished product reaches the poor wretches who are willing to barter their very souls for it are details not explained to the traveler," (p. 357).

Mr. Forbes judges Macao thus: "All in all, this Portuguese outpost in China is a most curious mixture of the poetic, the historic, and the vile," (p. 357).  The Macao of 1932 was indeed a curiously unique part of the world!