At the top of Macau’s narrow Rua de Sao Paulo, lined with shops selling almond biscuits, custard tarts and beef jerky, near the Church of St Anthony of Lisbon a small doorway leads into a shady grove. Past a little chapel on the left, a few steps lead down into a walled graveyard known as the Old Protestant Cemetery with just 166 graves, the first of which was that of Mary Morrison from Dublin.
Born Mary Morton in 1791, she was the daughter of a surgeon with the East India Company who took her with him on a business trip to Macau in 1808. The enclave, which is an hour-long ferry trip across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, was under Portuguese control from the middle of the 16th century until 1999, when it was returned to China.
Soon after she arrived in Macau, Mary met Robert Morrison, who was the first Protestant missionary in China, and they married a year later in 1809 when she was 17 and he was 24. Robert, who was translating the Bible into Chinese as part of his missionary activity, worked as a translator at the English Factory, the East India Company’s trading post in Guangzhou.
Foreign women were not allowed to live in Guangzhou so Mary stayed behind in Macau, where she learned Portuguese and became friendly with the local sailors and their families. On March 5th, 1811, she gave birth to a baby son, James, but he died the day he was born.
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Because the Morrisons were Protestants they were denied permission to have their son buried in the Catholic cemetery and Robert buried the child under the city wall. They had two more children but when Mary died of cholera when she was about to give birth in 1821, Robert was again denied permission to bury her in the Catholic cemetery.
“I wished to inter Mary out at the hills, where our James was buried; but the Chinese would not let me even open the same grave. I disliked burying under the town walls but was obliged to resolve on doing so as the Papists refuse their burying ground to Protestants,” he wrote to his parents.
Agents of the East India Company bought a plot of land for £1,000 and buried Mary there, with the chaplain from the English Factory conducting the funeral service and Robert’s colleagues acting as pall-bearers.
“She is now beyond the reach of all evil; where there is neither sickness, nor pain, nor death. Yet, to me, oh! What a dismal blank has her demise occasioned; and to our children, what a loss! I can as yet form no plans respecting them,” Robert wrote.
When Robert set out on his mission to bring the Gospel to China he did not expect to succeed but in his darkest moments he can hardly have imagined that Macau would become the gambling capital of the world. Although gambling is banned on the Chinese mainland, Macau is like Hong Kong a Special Administrative Region with a separate legal system, in its case based on Portuguese law.
There are more than 40 casinos, the largest of which is the Venetian, a great tundra of slot machines and roulette tables with a shopping mall and a miniature version of Venice attached. When I visited most of the tables were deserted, their lonely croupiers gazing out across huge, windowless halls decorated in shades of beige and gold like jumbo-sized funeral homes.
The casinos drew almost half a million tourists to Macau in the first seven months of this year and tourism and gambling are the central pillars of its economy. GDP per capita has soared since the handover in 1999 and it is seven times that of mainland China and twice Hong Kong’s.
This may be one reason why polls show that, unlike Hong Kongers, Macau’s 682,000 citizens identify with the People’s Republic of China and trust Beijing. Portugal acknowledged Chinese sovereignty over Macau after the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the fascist regime in 1974 and pro-Beijing groups were dominant there long before the formal handover 25 years later.
Although Macau has seen nothing like the 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong and a national security law was introduced without protest, the authorities are taking no chances. Earlier this year they changed that law to extend restrictions on political opposition and civil society and included in its scope non-political groups operating outside Macau.
The secretariat for security defended the changes, saying that during a consultation period only 0.4 per cent of 111,000 opinions they collected disagreed with the new measures.