At midnight tomorrow China will take back Portuguese Macau, a little city of colonnaded squares and pastel-coloured neo-classical buildings on a promontory of the South China Sea coast. For the first time in more than four centuries, Asia will then be free of European colonial outposts.
Macau is the last of dozens of foreign concessions on the Chinese coast, containing today only a small population of Portuguese and Macanese of mixed blood. But it retains a certain Latin charm, with cobbled streets and restaurants offering chorizo sausages and vinho verde.
It is a bit like Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca, a Mediterranean-style city on a foreign continent run by a uniformed governor and preoccupied with gambling, gang murders, prostitution, espionage and secret societies. For some emigres, this 16-square-mile enclave of larger-than-life characters is a refuge of last resort, the place, as one said half-jokingly, where losers come when they have lost everywhere else.
When President Jorge Sampaio of Portugal returns the enclave to China's President Jiang Zemin at a formal ceremony tomorrow, he is unlikely to express any regrets. Indeed, he has said it will be a privilege. A lifelong socialist, Mr Sampio opposed the colonial past and was an active member of Portugal's clandestine left-wing opposition, which after the revolution in 1974 tried to give Macau back to Beijing. The offer was declined. After the British handed back Hong Kong in 1997, however, the end of the Portuguese administration of Macau became inevitable. China decided to get rid of the last vestiges of foreign occupation before the end of the millennium. The date, December 20th, was set quite arbitrarily.
Unlike Hong Kong, the process has been relatively trouble-free. Most of the 430,000 population of Macau are patriotic Chinese, especially those who arrived as refugees from Cambodia, Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam, and they are happy to rejoin the motherland, and convinced that China will want Macau to prosper. Democracy and civil rights have never been big issues here. Many people say that China has for a long time been the real power in Macau. Portugal's authority was fatally compromised as long ago as 1966 by the famous 1,2,3, incident, so-called because it happened on December 1st, 2nd and 3rd, when Portuguese soldiers shot dead at least eight Chinese protesters in disturbances inspired by the Cultural Revolution, and the governor then apologised abjectly and paid reparations.
Local people - approved by Beijing, of course - will now run Macau for the first time under the one-country-two-systems arrangement adopted for Hong Kong, which allows it to keep its government, laws and way of life for 50 years.
Macau's way of life can be summed up in one word: gambling. It is a company town, the company being the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversos de Macau (STDM), headed by the almost legendary Dr Stanley Ho, of Hong Kong, who has controlled the casinos of Macau since 1962.
Though banned on the mainland, gambling will continue after the handover, otherwise Macau would collapse. At least half the government's revenue comes from a 30 per cent tax on gross casino earnings, and gambling brings tourists, eight million of them in 1996, the last year before the Asian financial crisis cut tourist revenue.
The casinos also attract gangs. Chinese triads control most of Macau's crime, getting their income from money-lending and protection rackets.
Their numbers increased when Hong Kong and Taiwan decided to crack down on gangs in the 1990s. Most of the murders - there have been 30 this year - are the result of turf wars or domestic violence, and tourists are relatively safe, unless foolish enough to walk out of the Lisboa casino late at night counting their winnings.
The triad wars have intensified because the gambling licence expires in 2001. A senior police officer said: "Certain people are trying to make sure they are in a strong position when that happens." China and Macau have, however, been cracking down on both sides of the border to help ensure a crime-free handover.
One of the biggest catches made by the Macau police was 14K triad boss "Broken Tooth" Wan Kuok-koi. He owned the Heavy Di night-club, where a life-sized mannequin dressed in police uniform was once hung from a noose for the amusement of clients. Broken Tooth financed a movie about himself last year called Casino, which was shown in Hong Kong to a cinema full of appreciative gang members, but it did not have a happy ending: he was jailed last month for 15 years.
Combating crime and reviving the economy will top the agenda of the new leader of Macau, Edmund Ho (no relation to the casino boss), when he takes over tomorrow night from the Portuguese Governor-General, Mr Vasco Rocha Vieira, who leaves Macau after 8 1/2 years. The 44-year-old heavy-set banker with good mainland connections was chosen as the enclave's future chief executive by a committee of 199 Macau citizens hand-picked by Beijing.
He has a tough assignment. Where Hong Kong's new administration took over a clean orderly government, a sound legal system and abundant reserves, Edmund Ho will take over a mess, with "a corrupt government, a blurred line between officials and criminals, gangs on a rampage, and an empty coffer", as Hong Kong's Ming Pao Daily News put it.
Macau, unlike Hong Kong, has no large professional middle class to defend its autonomy. Tourism has yet to recover from the Asian crisis. The economy is sluggish. A stroll along the Avenida da Amizada reveals the result of blind investment in Macau real estate, crumbling high-rise buildings containing 30,000 empty apartments.
Mr Ho's task will be made more difficult by the abrupt departure of Portuguese policy-makers and career civil servants this weekend. Under Macau's post-handover constitution, the posts of heads of government departments must be filled by ethnic Chinese residents or Macau-born Portuguese.
The one institution of foreign origin to remain will be the Catholic Church. Macau has been a centre of Christianity in China since Jesuit priests arrived here with Portuguese merchants in the 16th century and founded St Paul's College, the first Western university in the Orient.
Several splendid churches were built, and the 1602 facade of the Church of the Mother of God, destroyed by fire in 1935, has become a tourism symbol for Macau.
Most Chinese believers practise Buddhism or Taoism, and there are fewer than a dozen Jesuit priests left, though several diocesan fathers minister to a Catholic congregation of about 30,000 and Catholic institutions still run half the schools and most social programmes.
The Catholic Church is closely identified with Portugal, and at Easter the liturgy is said in Portuguese, something which Father Peter Cheung, a founder of the Catholic Pastoral Youth Centre, says he would like to change.
One of the best known characters in Macau is Father Lancelot Rodrigues, director of the Catholic Social Services. When I went to see him early one morning, the 75-year-old priest insisted on breaking open a bottle of whiskey. He spent a lifetime looking after refugees in Macau and now runs charitable programmes for the disabled on the Chinese mainland.
The Vatican is concerned that nothing should change now. Pope John Paul II this week called for the preservation of religious freedom in Macau and urged the enclave's diocese to strengthen "its missionary vocation in the midst of the Chinese world" and to continue to "speak out without fear".
The comments, in a message to the Bishop of Macau, Dom Domingos Lam, point to future difficulties. Only a government-sanctioned Catholic Church is allowed to function on the mainland, and the handover will give the Vatican its second legal foothold in China after the return of Hong Kong. Bishop Lam said: "I have some concerns for the future of our church, but I don't have a sense of being in danger."
The departing Portuguese have tried to leave a few new reminders of their role, including a "Gate of Understanding", two black-granite pillars erected as a symbol of "the centuries-old friendship between Portugal and China".
But the fate of an ancien regime is the auction block. Hundreds of signs bearing Portuguese colonial symbols will be auctioned off after the handover, while others will be dumped in a museum.
The replacing of colonial signs, something which Hong Kong avoided, will begin immediately after the handover. "There are hundreds of them, and those carved into walls will be covered by material," said Ms Cheung So-miu, vice-director of the Islands Council. Colonial symbols will have stickers placed over them bearing the new emblem of the Macau Special Administrative Region, a lotus flower with five stars. Thus will start the process which will transform the Casablanca of Asia into just another Chinese city.
