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Macau
Europe's first foothold in China and its last to leave, now a casino city on the Pearl River
For more than four centuries a sliver of the South China coast was run from Lisbon, and when Portugal lowered its flag in December 1999 it closed the longest-lasting European colony in Asia. Macau is now a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, governed under the formula of one country, two systems, which lets it keep its own legal system, currency, customs territory, and border controls until at least 2049. Few places pack so much into so little ground. Baroque church facades stand beside Cantonese temples, street signs appear in Chinese and Portuguese, and the casinos of the Cotai Strip earn more from gambling than Las Vegas has in most years.
Macau sits on the western side of the Pearl River estuary, about 60 kilometers west of Hong Kong, and borders the mainland city of Zhuhai in Guangdong province. It consists of the Macau Peninsula and the former islands of Taipa and Coloane, now fused by the reclaimed land known as Cotai. Reclamation has roughly tripled its area since the early twentieth century, to about 33 square kilometers, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth with close to 690,000 residents. Beijing handles defense and foreign affairs, while a locally selected chief executive and legislature run daily government. Cantonese is the street language, and Chinese and Portuguese are both official.
Portuguese traders settled here around 1557 with the tolerance of Ming officials, and Lisbon formally secured perpetual occupation in an 1887 treaty with the Qing court. After Portugal's 1974 revolution it offered to give the territory back, and the 1987 Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration set the return for 20 December 1999. Unlike Hong Kong, the transfer was not seriously contested by either government, and both sides describe it as a resumption of Chinese sovereignty. Since then gaming concessions have turned Macau into the world's largest gambling center, renewed in 2022 for ten years, while Beijing pushes diversification through the Hengqin cooperation zone on neighboring island territory. Electoral rules tightened in 2021 now require candidates to be certified as patriots, a change critics say narrows political competition.