Snapshots from a Bygone Macau

by Susan Blumberg-Kason

My grandparents first visited Macau in 1965 and took these slides. I scanned them a number of years ago, and the quality of the photos has suffered from wear and tear. Nonetheless, it’s still easy to make out some interesting details from old Macau.

**Pier Photo**: The Macau-Hong Kong hovercraft was a hop, skip and a jump between the two cities compared to the old steamers that took all night. Because of the risk of communicable diseases, travellers had to carry immunisation cards when they went between Hong Kong and Macau. My uncle worked for TWA back in the 1960s and often flew to Hong Kong on his airline employee pass. He described how a nurse greeted passengers arriving in Hong Kong by boat from Macau. If passengers hadn’t had their yellow fever vaccination, the nurse would give them one upon arrival! As for the different spellings of Macau vs. Macao on the building, author Ivy Ngeow explained the difference to me. Macao is the English word and Macau is the Portuguese.

**Hua Sheng Restaurant**: I love the gorgeous colonial architecture of this restaurant. Back in 1965, this restaurant was owned by Australians and was called Waltzing Matilda in English, which sounds a bit like the Cantonese, Wah Seng.

**Cobblestone Street**: My grandparents took a photo of this quaint cobblestone street with distinctly European architecture. One of the businesses is a barber shop, or barbearia in Portuguese. The sign on the right side in the foreground looks like a German doctor’s office. Just near that sign, there’s a half circle of spikes. If I’m not mistaken, those were installed to prevent birds from perching on the ledge and building nests. Macau still has similar cobblestone streets today.

**Trishaws**: Trishaws seemed so foreign to my grandparents when they visited Macau, unlike today when trishaws are found in touristy areas in the West. In this photo, the Lee Hing Loon shop produced and exported Chinese arts and furnishings in various types of wood. Notice the round Lucky Strike cigarette sign on the far right side of the photo. A thing of the past!

Moorish Building: My grandparents visited the Sun Yat-sen home in 1965. This Moorish building was constructed in 1912. The following year, Dr. Sun’s first wife, Lu Muzhen, and their children, Sun Yan, Sun Wan and Sun Ke moved into the house. Dr. Sun’s first wife lived in Macau until her death in 1952. The Chinese on the blue sign reads “the memorial house of the father of China.” The house looks pretty much the same today, down the blue sign over the front door.

**Senado Square**: Today Senado Square is a popular tourist destination in Macau with restored cobblestone streets, but it was pretty quaint back in 1965 when my grandparents travelled there. The statue in the photo commemorated Vicente Nicolau de Mesquita, an officer in the Portuguese Army in Macau around the mid-1800s. It’s hard to see, but the statue is supposed to be pulling out a sword. A year after my grandparents visited Macau, riots broke out related to the Cultural Revolution and the statue was pulled down. Another change—which occurred decades later—was that the Long Kei restaurant (marked by the vertical blue sign with red characters) closed in 2011 after 70 years of business.

I haven’t been to Macau since 1994, but I hope to visit it again soon and see if I can find all of the places in these photos.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books‘ China Blog, Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. She received an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Blumberg-Kason now lives in Chicago and spends her free time volunteering with senior citizens in Chinatown. (Photo credit: Annette Patko)