Originally Published on March 7th, 2013
Any historian who attempts to search for Macanese origins inevitably uncovers scattered references, both within and outside the community, to inter-racial marriage.
Some facts are fairly certain. The descendants of the people who we identify as Macanese were originally from Portugal, and by the sixteenth century increased in number with the expansion of the Portuguese trading empire in India and Southeast Asia. It is also evident that this population grew as the result of unions between low ranking Portuguese noblemen (fidalgos), traders, fugitives, pirates, and adventurers, and women from Goa, Malaysia, Timor, Japan, and China. These unions were encouraged by Portuguese explorers and colonial administrators, and according to some historians, were condoned by influential clerics, including the Jesuits. Many of these unions were consensual, but some involved subordinate groups of women.[1]
Very little has been written about the plight of women in early Macau. Historian Elsa Penalva determined through original sources that many women came to the Portuguese colony through kidnapping, purchase, negotiations, and as rescued slaves. Due to a shortage of women of higher social status, many low born women were bought or kidnapped for “sexual markets” and marriage to Portuguese who could purchase them. These practices continued until a concerted effort was made by the Jesuits at the end of the sixteenth century to redeem such women, with the intention of reducing lawlessness by reforming the unruly sailors, traders, and adventurers who frequented Macau.
British historian C.R. Boxer devoted much attention to the origins of the slave trade, and to Portugal’s and Macau’s complicity before it was abolished in the 18th century. Many women were kidnapped as children, some from Japan and other trading ports. The majority, however, came from Kwantung province northeast of Macau. The circumstances in which they were enslaved were no doubt influenced by the poverty of rural peasants in the Pearl River delta and the willingness of Europeans to trade in human cargo as another commodity. Women, and some men, were especially prized for their culinary skills, but most were domestics and servants. Many of the women were kept as concubines, some with the acceptance of Portuguese wives and mothers. Boxer notes that unlike the English, Spanish, or Chinese, illegitimate children in Macau households were adopted into the families and treated like legitimate offspring.
As the Portuguese empire declined in Asia, the options for socially accepted unions dwindled, making inter-racial marriage an economic and political necessity. Despite the circumstances, Penalva writes, “These women were indispensible to sustain the marriage and bridal markets that allowed the survival of kinship systems, families, and households of the Portuguese and the growing “Luso-Asian” population.”
As for men, in 1834 Swedish historian Sir Andrew Ljunstedt asserted that the first Portuguese colonialists in India were predominantly hardened criminals. Specifically, they were those “…who should have finished their careers in the galleys, (rather than being) … sent on board the royal fleets to serve in India.” How this “unholy stock” was domesticated is explained in stages.
Due to expanding trade in the seventeenth century, many of these men “seized every opportunity to enrich their commander and his horde.” Many began as pirates and smugglers, but the most successful became traders and merchants. Eventually some of this “contaminated caste” settled in Macau, “with men of more correct morals”, when all Europeans were expelled from Canton by the Chinese Emperor in 1757. Finally, Ljunstedt pompously concluded, “those who had reluctantly run the race of vice, were by good example (apparently encouraged by the Church and the Society of Jesus) recalled to the comforts of social life,” which naturally meant marriage and families.
This version of history was sanitized (and perhaps corrected) by Portuguese historian Mantalto de Jesus writing in 1902, who noted that some men were related to the “best families in India”, arriving in Macau seeking women with substantial dowries provided by wealthy families. Boxer and others also mention the attraction of colonial men to “Órfãs del Rei ” (orphans of the king), a term used to emphasize the protected status of Portuguese women, whose dowries were provided by the crown to derail inter-racial miscegenation. As later generations became wealthy through commerce with China, however, many merchant families were able to offer dowries regardless of the racial mix of their lineages, lessening the effect of the royal stipends.
These observations are supported by Peter Mundy, an officer on one of the first British East India Company ships to dock near Macau. In 1637 Mundy published vivid descriptions of the opulence in which Macau’s merchant class lived, and the finery worn by some Macau’s women, including Captain-Major Antonio de Oliveira Aranha’s two Eurasian daughters. As the third generation of Luso-Asian families in Macau, de Jesus writes, they and others became the mothers of a new “mixed but legitimate and Christian race”.
This rising middle class, according to the chief of the Dutch East India Company, often lived in spacious multi-storied houses to accommodate the numerous children of the wives and concubines of the head of the household. As a result, the population of Macau grew steadily. In 1583, twenty-six years after its founding, there were 9,500 Macanese. A century later there were up to 15,000. By the 19th century, the population stabilized at about 30,000, not including many more Chinese mainlanders who traded and lived uncounted in the colony.
One of the first acknowledgments that this collection of outcasts had begun to adopt a cultural identity associated with Macau is memorized on a surviving corner stone of St. Paul’s Church:
VIRGINI MAGNE MATRI, CIVITAS MACAENSIS LUBENS, POSUIT AN. 1602
Loosely translated, the inscription reads: “Great Virgin Mother, the Macanese community dedicates this to you. 1602.” (see the translation note below)
The survival of this new race, dependent on maintaining trade relations with China, largely cut off from Portugal, and vulnerable to attacks by the Dutch and English, found its home in Macau. By 1841, the same qualities of determination, and the ability to leverage opportunities, eased their migration to Hong Kong under British protection. Writing over a century later, Boxer summed up by invoking Dryden’s poetic line [2] to suggest an apt description of the people of Macau:
“…a headstrong, moody, murmuring race as ever tried the extent and stretch of grace”.
Although written to describe the Jews, Boxer wryly ascribed Dryden’s sentiments to the Macanese, not only for their determination to survive under harsh conditions, but also their tendency to fight among themselves even when faced with external dangers.
[1] This historical sketch relies on the following references: C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East: 1550 – 1770, London, 1968, pg. 175, and Ch. VII and XIII. See also Elsa Penalva, A Mulher Na Sociedade Macaense: Seculos XVI e XVII, Lisbon, 2011 (Macanese Women in the 16th and 17th Century Society), Sir Andrew Ljunstedt, Historical Sketch of the Portuguese Settlements in China, Macau, 1834, Carlos Augusto Mantalo de Jesus, Historic Macau, Hong Kong, 1902, JP Braga, The Portuguese in Hong Kong and China, Macau, 1944, Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, 1634, as quoted by Boxer, and A.E. Van Braam Houchglest’s writing in 1794, as described by Boxer.
[2] John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel”, The Poetic Works of John Dryden, London, 1854, Volume 1
Translation Note: There is some debate over the meaning of the phrase: “CIVITAS MACAENSIS”. In the most literal translation, the phrase has been taken to mean: “Macanese city”, although other translations take it to mean: “Commonwealth Macanese”. However, the recognition by the Society of Jesus that a public entity could be called “Macaensis” suggests a commonly held belief that this was indeed a community of people who were identified as “Macanese”, that is, as the people of Macao. I have taken some license by adopting the latter translation to point out the first documented reference in 1602 to both the physical and cultural nature of Macao as home to the Macanese. REX
