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. President Jorge Sampaio of Portugal arrived in a rain-swept Macau last night to return the Portuguese enclave formally.
President Jiang Zemin of China arrives tomorrow to participate in a triumphal flag-raising ceremony marking the end of China's historical humiliations at the hands of foreign powers.
As foreign dignitaries began to arrive, Macau police tracked down and expelled several followers of China's banned Falun Gong movement who were planning a demonstration against the treatment of their members in mainland China to coincide with the handover ceremonies.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, will arrive in Macau tomorrow for the ceremonies.
They begin with the lowering of the green and red Portuguese flag at 7 p.m. and the raising of the red flag of communist China at midnight.
At that moment Macau will become a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, and the outgoing Portuguese governor, Gen Rocha Vieira, will hand over control of the city to its Beijing-approved chief executive, Mr Edmund Ho.
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 Sampaio returns the enclave to President Jiang 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.