MORREU recentemente o David Tang, fundador da marca Shanghai Tang e autor de uma das melhores descrições da Macau contemporânea que já li:

"Macau must win the accolade of a city whose charm evaporated overnight when it was returned to Chinese sovereignty. For over 440 years, the place was ruled by the Portuguese. Utterly parochial with just a population of 400,000, the enclave had attractive colonial buildings and cobblestone streets and an atmosphere of history and the long, fruitful and harmonious community created by the Portuguese and Chinese living side by side.

Those of us who lived in Hong Kong, just 40 miles away, regularly took the jetfoils across for the weekend there, taking a girlfriend or a mistress or even a wife to a charming restaurant and staying the night at a romantic hotel. Sometimes, we would go gambling at the theatrical Lisboa Casino. But on the day after the Portuguese colony was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 garish casinos, hotels and shopping malls materialised, all built in record time by avaricious Americans and Chinese. They couldn’t wait a nanosecond to lay their hands on the Chinese punters from mainland China. And how right they were. Today, 17 million mainland Chinese come through Macau every year, and its gambling revenues recently amounted to $45bn, which is seven times more than the Las Vegas Strip. The price for this exponential growth is a gargantuan building site with tacky designs and tinny replicas of the Eiffel Tower and St Mark’s Square in Venice, replete with toy canals and gondolas, peddled by wobbling Chinese in full gondolier uniforms.

Casinos and shopping arcades now rule the roost and somnambulant punters come and go, some with grim countenances hiding their secret losses, and others smiling as they splash their spoils on ostentatious retail. Outside, the narrow streets are dead, the skyline an undulating mess of soulless silhouettes, and more and more cars jam the roads. Money launderers mingle with fortune hunters. In the shadows of the ubiquitous pawn shops, with their sleepless neon signs, the place filled with an overwhelming sense of depression, despair, despondency and delinquency."

(in Financial Times, 2016)