Prologue: The Macanese Chronicles

The people who once lived on the southern tip of Imperial China, whose families fished for centuries off the coast of Guangdong province, always kept a wary eye on the horizon for signs of typhoons. In the regional lore, there is a story that while out one day near the Pearl River delta several boatmen were caught in a terrible storm. As the weather grew worse, they prayed to Neang Ma (Mazu), a Confucian sea-goddess, to save their catch and rescue them. As the mounting waves and wind threatened, it was only by the grace of the goddess that their shallow boats and all aboard were saved from certain death. Soon after, everyone in their village near the great stone, where it is said the goddess lives, helped build a small temple to commemorate her kindness. Dug out of a small hillside overlooking the sea, the modest shrine would celebrate their salvation and the growing devotion to the divinity.

The year was 1488. The small memorial was called the A-Ma Temple, named for the goddess in the local dialect. The temple soon grew to include several more chambers built higher up the hill, then alcoves for Buddhist and Taoist deities, and became a centerpiece for religious ceremonies in the region. (Take a video tour of the temple below.) And like most events outside Beijing, the capital of the Ming Empire to the north, the construction of the temple and the fortunes of the village were eventually forgotten to history.

The location of the temple, however, has long been a vantage point from which to witness the region’s development. More than fifty years before, during the era of the Treasure Fleets under the eunuch General Zheng He, the promontory where the temple now sits was a place where the people could glimpse the sails of the great ships passing along the horizon. Their destinations, from China to the Middle East to discover new cultures and seek trading partners, could scarcely be imagined by the villagers scratching out a living on fish and clams in the shallow waters between the delta’s islands. Then one year the great ships were gone, without an explanation, and never returned.[1]

In the years that followed, a different excitement occurred with greater frequency. It was the terror of marauding pirates who pillaged local villages, killing those who resisted, and capturing others as slaves.[2]  For seventy years in the absence of the Ming fleets, the situation along the coast where the temple was built remained unchanged. Then in 1553, the villagers heard distant explosions and saw fires on ships in the throes of battle. Then men with beards, dressed in breeches with their heads covered in the style of Arabs, took the battle to the village shores. The pirate leader, Chang Si-Lao, was soon trapped in his stronghold not far from the temple. [3] Once captured and slain, news of his death by the bearded men was reported to the mandarins in Canton and then to the Emperor as proof of their victory. As a reward, the newcomers were allowed to trade on the islands of Shanchuan and Lampacao, where they met merchants from Canton. Later they were permitted to build a settlement on Macau.[4] A new day had come.

The A-Ma Temple still stands today in Macau, the modern gaming city that took its name from the sea-goddess. The shrine and many other structures are remnants of a past that was scarcely noticed by the Ming empire, and all that is left of the Portuguese empire that settled Macau, and the British empire that succeeded both. The echoes of those empires are evident throughout Southeast Asia today, if only we attempt to understand their histories and listen to the stories of the people who have lived there for over a thousand years. My new book, The Macanese Chronicles, is an attempt to recapture some of that history, and to understand how the Asian descendants of those first bearded soldiers settled in the region and changed the world forever.

Here’s a video I shot while visiting the temple in Macau.

[1] Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleets of the Dragon Throne, 1405 – 1433, Oxford University Press, 1994.

[2] John E. Wills, Jr. China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

[3] J.M. Braga, The Western Pioneers and Their Discovery of Macao, Instituto Portugues de Hongkong, Macau, 1949: 109-110. See also CA Montalto, Historic Macau, University of Macau, 1906:25

[4] The settlement at Macau came after a forty year break in relations with China, dating roughly from Jorge Alvares’ landing on an island in the Pearl River Delta in 1513 to the piracy incident in 1553, the result of cultural misunderstanding and the actions of a rogue captain, Simao Peres de Andrade, who violated Chinese laws. In 1554 Leonel de Sousa, Captain-Major of the Japan Voyages, finally negotiated trading rights in exchange for the payment of duties. The permanent settlement on Macau in 1557 is now considered the “official” date of founding.