6. Globalizing Macau the Emotional Costs of Modernity (1910-1930)

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Nazarbayev University Repository 108 Fulong Wu, ed., Globalization and the Chinese City, Routledge Contemporary China Series, London, Routledge, 2006. Pages 108-124. Please send your comments to [email protected]. Note: The four maps of this chapter are missing. 6. Globalizing Macau The Emotional Costs of Modernity (1910-1930) Philippe Forêt This chapter deals with the ambiguity that political authorities feel toward culture and history when they are pressed to enlarge and modernize urban infrastructures (Caldeira Cabral et al, 1999, and Yusuf et al, 1997). I will discuss the strategy followed by the Harbour Works De- partment of Macau as the city sought to reposition itself as an international trade centre. I examine Macau’s spatial transformations between 1910, when a progressive regime came to power in Lisbon, and 1930, when the first extension phase of the Porto Exterior facilities was completed. I review the tactics used to promote a new image of the Portuguese colony, and seek explanations for the contradictions found in the official discourse on the changing envi- ronment. I rely mostly on the comparison of the visual narratives provided by the tourist guidebooks published during the period (Ho, 1994, and Pittis et al, 1997). Paying attention to the omissions, repetitions and silences found in the descriptions of this unique historical landscape allows me to test the limits set by culture to the globalization processes that are trans- forming the southern coast of China (Cartier, 2001). From postcards in the 1910s to the public image of the 1930s For centuries, the city-port of Macau has facilitated the exchange of goods, ideas and people between China and the rest of the world (Cheng, 1999a, and Pons, 1999). Colonial Macau took advantage of an informal agreement between Portugal and China to develop a sense of place that brought together military and religious architecture, romantic aestheticism, and crude forms of capitalism. Beginning in 1915, engineers and urban planners infatuated with modernity cast away the image of a chic summer resort. While the port authority continued to refer to the territory’s cachet until 1930, its promotional literature presented the progress of industrialization, the extension of the harbour facilities, and the assets of the Colony for international commerce (Figure 6.1). 109 In order to look at the history of progress in colonial Asia, I will examine how the greatness of Portugal, the exoticism of China, and the promises of modernity came to be jointly exalted in an unlikely forum. The attraction that Macau exerted on Europeans and Americans’ imagi- nations was such that the first photographs taken of Asia, in 1844, were those of its peninsula.1 Seen from the stately Rua Praia Grande, the landscape of Macau yielded its own vision of global relations, with values based on aesthetic contemplation, intercultural exchanges, and tolerance of vice (Pons, 1999, and Taylor, 2002). I will draw on pictures and urban maps that enhanced the image Macau had between 1910 when Portugal became a Republic with an empire, and 1930 when work on the Outer Harbour was completed and, as a result, Macau acquired a new maritime façade. My analysis will cross several boundaries as I move between a river estuary, a reclaimed area, a Portuguese promenade, and the Cantonese low houses that extended inland, behind the lofty arcades of Rua Praia Grande (Johnson, 1997, and Pons, 1999). The geographical and ethnic boundaries that separate the littoral from downtown, and Portuguese institutions from Chinese stores, are easy to locate in the urban fabric. I am however interested in a much more elusive boundary, one that delineates antago- nistic perspectives on Macau’s past and future (Schein, 2001). I will focus on the trope of a ‘charming bay’, understood as the aesthetic fusion of geographical confusion (Macau as an imitation of Naples or Lisbon) and historical denial (the 18th century landscape present in 20th century Macau) (Corbin, 1995). Understanding how an image of contemplation gave way to another of action would assist in understanding how the city’s uniquely complex identity changed over time (Dubbini, 2002). Examining the photos taken by the administration helps in underlining the significance of contradiction and ambiguity in the cultural values of Macau’s colonial elite. A geographical study of Macau’s waterfront can therefore contribute to our general assessment of colonial rule and internationalism because this peculiar example directly magnifies the leading role of culture in the history of modernity (Taylor, 2002). Although often overlooked, tourist guidebooks and postcards provide an intricate insight into the interplay of globalization and colonialism (Arnold, 1910). Old tourist booklets can provide evidence on the contradictory attitudes and silence policies that government agencies experienced and implemented. The landscape paintings of Macau and the photographs of the institutions located near Praia Grande (the Boa Vista Hotel, the Governor’s Palace, the Sé Cathedral, etc.) reveal the resilient complexity of the colonial order (Ho, 1994). The city government, while usually unable to fund them, invited architects and urban planners to prepare reclamation projects in the immediate vicinity of Praia Grande. These projects resulted in exquisite maps, lofty statements on progress, as well as new guidebooks to modern Macau (Do Inso, 1930). The comparison of photographs and postcards of Praia Grande with these texts gives us an insight on concepts about mapping, collage and disappearance that are both local and universal in significance (Mathews, 1998). Instead of speaking about real places and true events, I suggest that we look at how subjective geography, one that plays with feel- ings of lack and loss, successively celebrated Praia Grande, divorced the bay from the Pearl River delta, and finally stopped photographing it. Such attitude changes reveal much about 110 larger issues about Macau, such as its image of self, its conceptions of modernity, or its strategy to avoid marginalization at the frontier that the Portuguese, British and Chinese Empires shared. In Macau several communities, each with its own subculture, met and never merged: Chinese and more precisely Cantonese immigrants, Portuguese bureaucrats, and Catholic Macanese residents who were Chinese looking but Portuguese speakers. The presence of a fourth group was tolerated in the city: international travellers and merchants who were wel- comed for reasons we will discuss below. The Colony invited international tourists to turn their backs to the Cantonese city and marvel at the muddy waters of the picturesque Praia Grande. The perception of Praia Grande changed dramatically, as the bay seemed unable to respond to the economic needs of a progressive time. A new age began in the late 1920s when the construction of Outer Harbour changed the face of Macau forever. In the name of modernity, Bahia Praia Grande, for centuries the major attraction of the Colony, came to visually disappear sixty years before the bay was actually reclaimed. I connect the disappearance of Praia Grande as a central theme to the emergence of a space of transition on the Eastern shore of the peninsula. I pursue this theme through an examination of what is missing in the travel literature of colonial Macau. I deal therefore with the photographing policies of Praia Grande when I speculate on the absence of pictures of a bay. Bahia Praia Grande remained physically present but the tide of modernity swept away its raison d’être. A landscape that had acquired a dual quality since it reflected the actual Chinese and Portuguese built environments as well as visions about an idealized future thus lost its Proustian character to assume only utilitarian functions. I will not attempt to review the especially vast scholarly literature on Macau. Richard Louis Edmonds (1993) has written a comprehensive account of the geography of Macau as well as a bibliographical introduction to the territory. Historians have been prolific on Macau, taking advantage of well-documented city archives to analyze the relationship between Portugal, China and Macau. Jonathan Porter and Charles Boxer are probably the two best know schol- ars in Macau studies; many have enjoyed Porter’s (1996) Macau, The Imaginary City: Cul- ture and Society, 1557 to the Present. Austin Coates has written the semi-fictional City of Broken Promises on Macau in the 1780’s. Academics may enjoy Macau. A Cultural Janus by Christina Miu Bing Cheng (1999b). The general public may consult the richly illustrated Revista de Cultura published by the Instituto Cultural de Macau (ICM).2 The South China Morning Post and Hong Kong Standard, both edited in Hong Kong, are reliable sources of information on daily trivia in Macau. The history of Macau from 1557 to 1910 Portugal officially founded Macau in 1557.3 After Portuguese vessels defeated the pirate fleets that plagued the coasts, merchants, officers and priests from Portugal gained residency rights on a tiny peninsula, at the entrance of the most important waterway in South China.4 Although administered by Portugal, the city paid taxes until 1848 to the Chinese government since it was part of China. In 1887, after Portugal sought to suppress the opium trade, the 111 Qing court admitted Lisbon’s occupation of the city of Macau and of the islands of Taipa and Coloane.5 Beijing and Lisbon altered the political status of Macau in 1979, when China ac- cepted the retrocession of a territory that post-Salazar Portugal no longer wanted to rule.6 This agreement between the two countries over the definition of a zone for political ambiguity turned Macau into the only neutral venue that China and Europe had for four centuries (Montaldo de Jesus, 1902, and Ptak, 2001).

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