For more than a thousand years all trade between China and the West had been carried out by land along the Silk Road through Central Asia, but in the fifteenth century the growth in European seafaring, pioneered by the Portuguese , finally led to the demise of the land route. Henceforth, sea trade and control of sea ports were what the European powers looked for in Asia.

 

Having gained toeholds in India (Goa) and the Malay Peninsula (Malacca) in the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese finally managed to persuade local Chinese officials, in 1557, to rent them a strategically well-placed peninsula at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta with fine natural harbours, known as Macao (Aomen). With their important trade links with Japan, as well as with India and Malaya, the Portuguese soon found themselves in the delightful position of being sole agents for merchants across a whole swathe of east Asia. Given that the Chinese were forbidden from going abroad to trade themselves, and that other foreigners were not permitted to enter Chinese ports, their trade boomed and Macau grew immensely wealthy. With the traders came Christianity , and among the luxurious homes and churches built during Macau's brief half-century of prosperity was the Basilica of St Paul, whose facade can still be seen today.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, Macau's fortunes were already on the wane, and a slow decline, which has continued almost ever since, set in. A combination of setbacks for the Portuguese, including defeats in war against the Spanish back home, the loss of trading relations with both Japan and China, and the rise of the Dutch as a trading power, saw Macau almost wiped off the map by mid-century.

In the eighteenth century, fortunes looked up somewhat, as more and more non-Portuguese European traders came looking for opportunities to prise open the locked door of China. For these people, Macau seemed a tempting base from which to operate, and eventually they were permitted to settle and build homes in the colony. The British had greater ambitions than to remain forever as guests in someone else's colony and when they finally seized their own piece of the shore to the east in 1841, Macau's status - as a backwater - was definitively settled. Despite the introduction of licensed gambling in the 1850s, as a desperate means of securing some kind of income, virtually all trade was lost to Hong Kong.

Over the last century, Macau's population has increased massively to over half a million as repeated waves of immigrants have flooded the territory, whether fleeing Japanese invaders or Chinese Communists, but, unlike in Hong Kong, this growth has not been accompanied by the same spectacular economic development. Indeed, in 1974, with the end of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the Portuguese attempted unilaterally to hand Macau back to China; the offer was refused. Only after the 1984 agreement with Britain over the future of Hong Kong did China agree to negotiate the formal return of Macau as well. In 1999 , the final piece of Asian soil still in European hands was surrendered.

When they departed, however, the Portuguese left one rather low-profile legacy - the Macanese , offspring of mixed Chinese-Portuguese parentage, many of whom are entirely rooted in the fundamentally Chinese world of Macau, but still maintain Portuguese traditions and speak Portuguese.