On the quay men besieged us with their cards and prospectuses, each of them trying to lead us into the hotel that they were charged to represent. We took a Chinese interpreter called Fun, who spoke a few words of English, and promised to show us all the sights of Macao. He took us to the Hotel Hing-Kee, standing on the marine esplanade called “Praia-Grande,” where a military band plays every evening. The hotel is built Portuguese fashion, with a gallery running around the four sides of the “patio” leading into the various rooms. The gallery is divided in several parts by wooden partitions communicating by doors which we opened, appropriating thus the whole gallery. Outside the air is mild, but it is very cold indoors; we were obliged to have a fire. In front of our hotel a boat, belonging to the Portuguese Customs, is moored; the opposite shore belongs to China.
January 13th.—We went about all day in palanquins, seeing the sights of Macao. Nearly all the streets bear clerical names: “Rua Padre Antonio,” “Callada de bon Jesus,” “Traversa de San Agosto.” Macao is a very pretty town. The houses are generally not more than one storey high, most of them painted blue, pink, or yellow, with green shutters, and terraces instead of roofs, all having overhanging balconies reaching out to one another in friendly wise across the narrow streets, which swarm with Chinamen, who, contrary to their fellow-countrymen in Canton, look very peaceful. One of the particular features of the streets of Macao is the abundance of Portuguese priests, wearing long black beards, and women enveloped from head to foot in black mantillas. The natives of Macao are not attractive-looking. They are a race of half-castes—Portuguese father and Chinese mother, resembling orang-outangs, with their prominent jaws.
Fun suggested that we should visit a silk manufactory, where about six-hundred Chinese women were employed. Their Superintendent, a fat Portuguese dame, with a cigarette between her lips, forbad our gentlemen to pass before the rows of workwomen. After showing us through a dozen rooms, Fun brought us into a large hall where numbers of Chinese coolies, in Adam-like dress except the rag-vine-leaf, were occupied in boiling silk cocoons.
We were carried from the manufactory to the frontier of Macao and China. Our porters clambered up the stony ladder-staircases bearing the name of streets, which are all two yards broad, veritable corridors paved with sharp stones, with grass growing between them. We passed through the Chinese quarters of the town, where all the fronts of the houses have recesses containing grotesque-looking idols with twisted legs, the gods of prosperity, before which incenses are burnt.
Here we are on the frontier called “Porta Portuguese”. Chinese soldiers guard the boundary. After having set foot on Chinese ground, we were carried back to Macao by a winding staircase-like path, and passed before the grotto of Luis Camoens, the celebrated Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century, exiled in the year 1556 for his daring liberal ideas. The great poet, who had been shipwrecked in these inhospitable seas, gained the shore of this newly-founded Portuguese colony, and took refuge in a grotto situated in a chaotic assemblage of rocks, in the hollow of a dale, where a monument has been erected to his memory. The site is desolate and wild, looking upon the Chinese Empire and the ocean, where there is no land before the icy polar regions. Camoens lamented here his life of exile, and glorified his country in verse. By the side of the monument, on a large stone, a book is sculptured in the rock, bearing the names of all the works of the great poet.
Before returning to the hotel, we went to a Chinese photographer to have our group taken in palanquins. Our carriers were quite amusingly afraid of the apparatus, it being against the teaching of their religion to have their pictures taken, especially together with white-faced men. They paused, undecided what to do, to fly or to remain, and the next moment they suddenly disappeared; look where we would, we could in no manner discover them, and had our group taken sitting in palanquins placed on the ground.
Macao is a sort of Monte-Carlo of the East, where the principal industry is play. All the numerous gambling saloons are kept by Chinamen. After dinner Fun took us to one of these play-houses, where a risky game named “fonton” goes on. We sat over the gambling tables on the top of a gallery where the game is carried on also. Our gambling neighbours put their stakes into a basket which was dropped down into the hall by the means of a long cord. We saw a venerable white-bearded Chinese croupier take a handful of counters which he placed on the middle of the table and began to count them with a long rod. I also tried my fortune and lost a dollar. Things are done here very unceremoniously; our croupier feeling hot, undressed and remained almost without clothes!
I wanted very much to see opium-smokers, and Fun led us by a queer old back-street to a bamboo barrack where a score of half-naked Chinamen lay on the floor in different stages of intoxication produced by the effect of opium, with ghastly smiles, their faces expressing the ecstatic delight of extraordinary bliss; the “haschish” carrying them away into paradisaical dreams. Beside each smoker a small cocoa-oil lamp was burning, to light their long pipes saturated with opium. After two or three puffs, the smokers fell into ecstacies, and swoon away showing the white of the eyes and looking altogether horrible. The smoke in the room blinded me and my head swam from the nasty smell of the opium.
January 14th.—To-day we visited the seminary of San Paula, built by the Jesuits. When we entered the cathedral, a young Irish monk, in the brown habit of the Franciscan order, girded with a thick cord, came towards us, breviary in hand, clinking his sandals on the flag-stones. He took my husband and his companions to show them over the seminary; he said that ladies are not admitted within the walls of the seminary, and I had to remain in the cathedral with Maria Michaelovna. We went over the church and read all the inscriptions, after which we became a little bored and were pleased when our gentlemen came back, accompanied this time by the prior of the seminary, a grey-bearded Portuguese padre, round-faced and benevolent, who happened to be less Puritan than his young colleague, and invited me to come and drink a glass of Malaga in the refectory, but I refused point-blank this time.
We were back at the hotel just in time for the table d’hôte. After dinner we went to the pier, where we admired the phosphorescence of the sea, produced by the myriads of animalcules with which the ocean is infested at certain periods. The evening was fine and the air very mild. When we passed before the Governor’s abode, a sort of pavilion surrounded by a small garden named “Villa Flora,” we seated ourselves on a broad stone parapet and listened to the band playing in the “patio” of the villa. How jolly it was to throw etiquette to the winds, and feel like simple mortals!