CHAPTER FOUR
Macaense communities in China
– Macau, Shanghai, Shantou and Shameen –
From the Opium War to the Cold War (1842 – 1952)
Treaty aftermath – a survey of the early decades
The Opium War (1839 – 1842) marked the beginning of a significant period in modern Chinese history. Indeed, in the context of China’s relations with the West, it would be difficult to find a more defining moment. Perhaps the first arrival of the Portuguese on the China coast and the influences that came in their wake might be considered comparable in the enormity of its impact. The defeat of Chinese forces by the British and China’s subsequent defeats at the hands of other Western nations left deep lingering scars upon the Chinese national psyche which could not be so easily healed.4_1 For the Macaense community in Macau, the inauguration of the new treaty ports sent shock waves throughout the whole community and provided the greatest challenge to date in their centuries old history on the China coast. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Nanjing it became quite evident that as one by one the foreign traders re-located elsewhere, the dilemma for the Macaenses and their families was profound. In the next three chapters, we traced the evolution of this community, how they adapted to the new realities, how they joined the other foreigners in various parts of China and in the process seeded the Macaense communities there. They thrived with varying degrees of sophistication contributing to the social and commercial life of those foreign settlements before their eventual retreat following the Communist victory in 1949.
Canton
Canton, the focal point of the fighting during the Opium War, was razed to the ground and abandoned by foreign traders who retreated to the relative safety of Macau. At the conclusion of the war, some foreign traders returned there but the majority began setting up branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai and other newly opened ports (treaty ports). In 1857, following another round of fighting, the Anglo-French force finally re-captured Canton and it was decided to rebuild the foreign enclave at a new location about half a mile upriver from the old factory premises. An artificial island was created upon the sand flats to act as the foreign settlement. It was called Shameen according to the local Cantonese dialect. Shameen comprised the British and French concessions encompassing an original area of 1,000 ft by 300 ft and was linked to the Chinese city via two bridges.4_2
Soon the firms and consulates returned and it became almost mandatory for the larger firms to have a branch in Shameen as part of their network of offices around China.
Macau
For the Macaense community in Macau, the loss (to the newer ports) of its capable and mostly younger generation had profound implications for the Portuguese enclave. In the census of 1896, one could almost hear the stampede of Macaenses’ feet as they headed for distant shores. The 1896 Macau census figures were contained in the publication Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai and other Treaty Ports, which was a monumental survey of the treaty port world at the height of the British imperial experience at the turn of the twentieth century.4_3 Covering 850 pages, it contained a segment on Macau contributed by the renowned Macaense educator, Pedro Nolasco da Silva. Born in Macau in 1842, da Silva was a teacher of Chinese at St Joseph’s Seminary College at the time when he contributed the article.4_4
He included the following figures from the 1896 census in Macau:
The number of inhabited dwellings was 7,190. Population totalled 78,616 broke down as follows:
| Portuguese | Chinese | Foreigners | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macau city | 3,806 | 61,755 | 161 |
| Taipa & Coloane | 92 | 12,802 | Nil |
| Totals: | 3,898 | 74,557 | 161 |
Source: A. Wright (ed): Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai and other Treaty Ports, London, 1908.
The exodus of Macaenses from Macau was graphically illustrated by the numbers of Portuguese recorded as having emigrated to other Far Eastern ports: to Hongkong 1309, Canton 68, Foochow 13, Shanghai 738, Singapore 71, Surabaya 3, Yokohama 88, Nagasaki 10 and Bangkok 71, giving a total of 2,371 persons. This represented some sixty per cent of the total Portuguese population. We do not know for sure whether the numbers of the Portuguese garrison were included in the census. It was likely that they were and if their numbers were deducted from the Portuguese segment of the statistics, the percentage would be much higher.4_5 Although care should be exercised in the interpretation of these figures due to the lack of information concerning the nature of the relevant census questions and the lack of comparable data over a relevant period of time, nevertheless, it could be safely concluded that a major proportion of the population did leave Macau and that they dispersed to a vast geographical area.
According to Da Silva, the public and private buildings in Macau were gaily painted, the principal streets were lit by electricity while the minor streets were lit with “petroleum” but the signs of decline could be seen in that the city had “lately become a retreat for invalids and businessmen from adjacent ports”. There were three comfortable hotels: Boa Vista, the Macao and the Oriental; two clubs: Club de Macau (for civilian) and Grêmio Militar for the military, and two hospitals: one military, the other civilian.4_6
Another visible sign of Macau’s decline in importance could be seen in another area. At the time of the Opium War, Macau was the main contact with the outside world for traders located in Canton and other ports. Half a century later, it had lost its paramount importance as the main contact with the outside world. It had to rely on Hong Kong instead, being connected via the telegraph while a ferry service departed Macau for Hong Kong and Canton twice a day.
For the Macaenses, with the exception of one school and the Chinese schools, the tuition was all in Portuguese. Regarding education facilities, the main European schools were listed as St Joseph’s Seminary College, the Lyceum of Macao, the Central Schools, the College de Santa Rosa de Lima, the English Commercial School and a school to teach Portuguese to Chinese boys.4_7@7
Not only was there a major shift in the population profile, the economy of Macau at the beginning of the twentieth century had contracted and became overly reliant on gambling and opium. Government revenue for the year 1907-1908 was budgeted at 1,397,988 Mexican dollars broke down as under:4_8
| Fantan gambling | $ 456,400 (33%) | |
| Opium | $ 334,000 (23%) | |
| Lotteries | $ 222,000 (16%) | |
| Other taxes and duties | $ 385,588 (28%) | Included Santa Casa lottery as “duties” |
Source: A. Wright (ed): Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai and other Treaty Ports, London, 1908.
The reliance on the promotion of social vices for much of its revenue was one reason behind many of the stereotype image of Macau during the period. When da Silva described Macau as a city for tired businessmen and convalescents, he was expressing similar sentiments as an article that appeared five years earlier in a Hong Kong newspaper which described Macao to be fit only as a place of rest:
Crossing from Hong Kong to Macao is like crossing from London … to some sleepy continental town. … Everybody is at rest – except the sun, and one could wish he did not keep such long office hours. The post office is closed except for two short intervals daily. Money cannot be drawn. It is one long Bank Holiday…. I do not know when Macao flung away ambition, but it was once the Open Door to China, and now it leads to nowhere. … I think you will hardly find a more pleasant bund in the Far East than the Praia Grande. On that wide, well swept esplanade, shaded by wind-bent trees, there is actually room for you. [To enjoy Macao] one must value its want of variety, and revel in its poverty of resources. There are thoughts within us unopened and books belonging to us unread. There are daydreams all unfinished. Let us enjoy ourselves.4_9
To be fair, Macau did not fling away its ambitions as the writer above had suggested above but the stereotypical images stuck as gambling, opium and prostitution became the mainstay of its economy.
Beside the vices referred to above, Macau was also criticised for its participation in the controversial trade in coolies to the plantations of South and Central America. This trade had begun in the decade following the Opium War and coolies were sent not only from Macau but also from Hong Kong, Amoy and Swatow. By the time the trade was stopped in 1875, an estimated 500,000 Chinese coolies had already made their way abroad but only fewer than 120,000 were sent via Macau.4_10
A significant achievement was the Sino-Portuguese Treaty of 1887 that put an end to speculation about its status. Armando M. da Silva wrote that the Opium Wars and the Taiping rebellion had weakened the Qing dynasty and “it did not take long for the Crown of Portugal to take notice of China’s vulnerability.”4_11 On 26 March 1887, agreement was reached in Lisbon between Sir Robert Hart of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs and Portugal in which China recognised Macau as Portuguese territory. It was most fitting that after two centuries in which the Macaenses had helped the British in their trade with China, a British civil servant representing the Chinese government would be the instrument by which the Macaenses achieved their greatest dream – formal security of tenure in Macau. Soon after the Treaty of 1887, plans were initiated to improve the harbour that had been silted up by centuries of erosion. The aim was to provide a deep harbour facility for the new bigger ships plying the China trade in the hope of trying to restore Macau to at least some of its old commercial prosperity. At the end of the nineteenth century, major infrastructure works were in progress including reclamation of the foreshore, construction of a new main road that would link the ferry terminal in the inner harbour to the Praia Grande and sewerage works with new sewers being constructed and old ones enlarged.4_12
Shanghai
No place in China, not even Hong Kong, could compare with Shanghai’s spectacular growth in the early decades of the Treaty Century. Long before Shanghai became the most important treaty port, its potential was already recognised in 1832 when the East India Company despatched a reconnaissance mission from Macau. According to a contemporary account published in 1836, the Company’s representative confirmed that rumours of Shanghai’s importance were no exaggeration judging from the “numerous junks of every size and shape … and the spacious wharfs (sic) and warehouses”.4_13 It was not surprising then that the British included Shanghai in the list of ports to be opened to foreign trade in the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842.
In the first year of the port’s opening, the foreign community consisted of twenty-three foreigners representing eleven mercantile firms. By 1848, these numbers had grown to over a hundred residents and the number of firms to about thirty. The residents included a few women and the firms were mostly branches of the old Canton firms. Sometimes there were two to three hundred ships anchored in front of the settlement representing a “forest of masts” to sightseers.4_14
The Macaense historian and resident of Shanghai, Montalto de Jesus described the business environment of the early days in his Historic Shanghai (1909):
Those were the days of romance and of true oriental magnificence in commercial life, without the tell-tale telegraph, … when foreign merchants knew how to maintain a solidarity among themselves which was something to be reckoned with by native merchants, [when] bullion poured out of its boxes, for bank-notes were then not in vogue and the merchant princes were their own bankers.4_15
In 1848, the Franco-Chinese Treaty was signed and the French Concession was established. Bishop Boone also founded the American settlement in 1848 north of Suzhou Creek.4_16 Unlike the French and British areas, this area was never officially conceded to the Americans. Nevertheless, their ships and merchants came for trade and their missionaries came to spread the Christian religion in the largest mission field in the world. In 1863, the American sector was joined to the British to form the International Settlement and together with the French Concession and the Chinese controlled section, this made up the city of Shanghai.
In June 1862, Japan joined the scramble for China when its ship Zensai Maru appeared in Shanghai with some government officials and “a cargo of sundries” to explore trading opportunities directly with the Chinese.4_17 From then on, it was not long before the Japanese community became the largest in Shanghai.
By 1863, Shanghai enjoyed rapid growth and economic prosperity being the centre for trade in opium, tea, silk and military weapons. Luxury hotels had been built with top class restaurants, billiard rooms and even a ten-pin bowling alley. There was also the Sea Horse Floating Hotel that catered to permanent and casual guests and even the racecourse had been expanded.4_18 However nothing demonstrated Shanghai’s prosperity more than the constant need for expansion. In 1899, new boundaries were agreed to that resulted in a trebling of the Settlement’s area to 8.35 square miles. The foreign population at this stage totalled about fifteen thousand, including a large number of Japanese.4_19
The phenomenal growth of the foreign concessions in Shanghai was replicated in smaller scale across China. Besides Canton and Shanghai, the first group of treaty ports also included Ningbo, Fuzhou and Xiamen, all on the eastern seaboard. In a relatively short period of time, the Western powers were able to force additional ports to be opened such as Tianjin, Dalian and Shantou on the coast and inland river ports like Hankou, Suzhou, Wuzhou, Jiujiang and Zhenjiang. Some of these ports were more developed than others with their own international settlements or foreign concessions modelled on Shanghai’s. At all these smaller ports, called “outports” by the British, the foreigners generally lived together in compounds reserved for them while the missionaries tended to live amongst the indigenous community. Near some of these ports, there were hill stations and resorts to which the foreign community would escape in the summer months. The most famous of these was Beidaihe near Tianjin.4_20
Macaense communities in China
Macau
As these foreign settlements and outports enticed the Macaenses from Macau, she received a big jolt in 1910 when the Portuguese royal family was overthrown and a republic was proclaimed in Lisbon. Although the republic was greeted enthusiastically in Portugal, in Macau it exposed serious divisions amongst the soldiers and citizenry leading to protest marches and demonstrations that resulted in the resignation of Governor E. A. Marques (1909-1910).4_21 At the same time, China itself was in the throes of revolution but the fall of the Qing dynasty one year later did not cause nearly as much concern.
More serious for the Macaenses in Macau were the outpourings of resurgent nationalism that followed in the wake of the May Fourth (1919) demonstrations in Tienanmen Square, Beijing, when three thousand students protested the decision reached at the Paris Peace conference to grant Japan control over the former German colonies in China.4_22 This was despite the fact that China had sided with the Allies during the war and had sent several hundred thousand men to keep the factories operating and to dig trenches on the battlefields.4_23 In Macau on 28 May 1922 rioting erupted when Portuguese soldiers fired on a crowd that had gathered to intervene on behalf of a Chinese woman allegedly molested by a black soldier.4_24 Other riots and strikes were to follow, mirroring the other ports where nationalist sentiments were running high.
Compared to Hong Kong and Shanghai, Macau was considered backward, despite schemes to improve its infrastructure through the dredging of its harbour and land reclamations. Manufacturing industries during the first three decades of the twentieth century remain confined mainly to traditional activities, such as firecrackers, incense, matches and fish products. In 1930, fish products made up 25 percent of total exports and were the largest employer of labour in the colony so that it was not inaccurate to describe Macau before World War II as a large fishing village.4_25 In 1930, government revenue continued to rely heavily on gambling (50.6 percent) and opium (18.4 percent) prompting a writer to label Macau as the ‘City of Super Sin’.4_26 Those writers not wishing to be moralistic generally described the place as not having much future as this April 1927 article had stated:
There is no future for Macao such as the early explorers and poets dreamed of. Her harbour is silted with mud. Already the island has been joined to the mainland by mud banks. The beaches are spoiled. The houses are empty: street after street is laid out where no houses stand. … A place of rest and reflection is Macao: of ruined walls, sandbanks, tottering churches, abandoned houses, priests and beggars. Decay and dreams!4_27
Despondent about the lack of a future, Macaenses in Macau for a time found a champion in Montalto de Jesus with the publication of the second edition of his Historic Macau in 1926. Montalto laid the blame for Macau’s lack of economic progress on the Macau authorities and the Portuguese Government. According to Montalto, even minor positions were “usually assigned to incompetent, wretched proteges sent from Portugal” despite the local experience of the Macaenses.4_28 Not only were they incompetent, they were a financial drain.4_29 Of greater concern to Montalto was that the lack of opportunities in Macau forced many Macaneses to emigrate in search of a living. He claimed that Portugal had alienated the Macaenses to such an extent that they “would only feel glad if some day Macao were to pass into the hands of some great colonial power.”4_30
Understandably, this drew strong condemnation from the Macau authorities but it struck a sympathetic chord with segments of the Macaense community. Unable to attack the government within Macau, some resorted to attack it from bases off-shore. On 24 August 1929, a Canton newspaper published an article from an anonymous contributor entitled “Macaenses have no show in Macao”. The article revealed a high level of frustration. Echoing Montalto’s complaints, it decried the lack of provisions for the Macaenses and raised the slogan: “Macau for the Macaenses!” It depaired that “the sons of Macao are despoiled even of their birth right from earning a living in the land that gave them birth.”4_31
This controversial publication was declared illegal and confiscated by the Macau Government. The Macau police raided the printing office where the books were stored, the author’s house and several private residences, confiscating about 500 copies of the book.4_32 Montalto de Jesus was charged with treason for suggesting that Macau should be placed under the administration of the League of Nations because, according to him, Portugal and the Macau authorities had reduced Macau to “an insignificant colony, lifeless, parasitic in that it exists only on the profits from the two vices of the Chinese.”4_33 He appealed against the confiscation and lost. On 10 April 1928 the South China Morning Post reported that Montalto de Jesus was sentenced to forty days imprisonment with the option of a fine.
Jack Braga appealed to Macaenses in other places to help Montalto to pay the fine and keep him out of jail. According to Monsignor Manuel Teixeira, Jack Braga was responsible for the 1926 edition. Indeed amongst the Braga Manuscripts in the National Library of Australia, there is much evidence to support this including hand-written sonnets by Montalto intended for inclusion in a future third edition, burnt fragments of the second edition in a small envelope and a copy of the controversial second edition that carried Jack Braga‘s hand-written inscription inside the front cover, as follows:
This book contains some annotations made by myself, together with a number of transcriptions of additions which Montalto de Jesus prepared for an intended third edition of Historic Macao. These additions must be considered in the light of the bitterness felt by Montalto de Jesus after the suppression of the second edition of the book.4_34
Montalto de Jesus died penniless and was forgotten, but according to Monsignor Teixeira “Macau has a debt to pay to Montalto and Braga, two great historians and two sons of the city.”4_35
Other writers such as the Hong Kong-based Stella Benson preferred to focus on less weighty matters with regard to Macau. She marvelled at the ethnicity of the Macaenses when she wrote: “The more Portuguese the dancers looked the more gracefully they danced, but a Portuguese look in Macau is no proof of a Portuguese pedigree.”4_36 Benson also described Macau’s unforgetable jazz clubs, its progressive Chinese millionaires, and its yesterdays:
Macao will always remain most graciously enthroned in the memory as a place of Yesterday. The Yesterday is very old, and, like an ancient tapestry, woven of various threads. There is the Portuguese Yesterday, enshrined in the burnt cathedral, in the miracles, in the old churches and monastries, in the old gnarled avenues. [There is] an English Yesterday in the very sentimental old graveyard of the East India Company with well known English names – the names of soldiers and sailors killed a century ago in early Cantonese wars, the names of early English missionaries and traders, … the names of English women and English babies who died in large numbers in this alien air, [The] Chinese Yesterdays sleep in the old crumbled walls of Macao, [in] Chinese temples [where] men and women of latin-seeming faces bow before Kwan-yin.4_37
The constant criticism of its reliance on gambling and other social vices did not deter the Macau authorities. Perhaps it was necessary for places like Monte Carlo and Las Vegas to gain universal acceptance before people could recognise how innovative Macau had been in managing to survive on such a flimsy economic base. Tourism, entertainment and gambling are considered legitimate industries nowadays and encouraged by many governments. In the 1930s social attitudes were somewhat different.
Contradicting the popular belief that Macau was quiet and boring in the 1930s, the Macaense literary figure Henrique de Senna Fernandes remembered it as being quite the opposite for the community. Social life for th+e community was active, not just in the clubs but at anniversaries, baptisms and weddings. “Thus, one was always at this or that house for tea, for dinner or simply for good evening conversation. Opera arias, old English ballads, the fado, were played and sung. … Music was a pretext for improvised dance sessions at the sound of improvised orchestras or of the latest music-hall soundtrack records played on gramophones, since in those days owners of radios were very few.”4_38
Senna Fernandes described the period between the two world wars as the patriarchal era when families were presided over by the father, “mostly an austere man, surrounded by numerous children, in a clan-like atmosphere, occupying a whole building or houses with a garden, and attended by endless servants that the cheapness and abundance of food justified.”4_39
Macau city in those days was divided into two sections: the “Chinese city” and the “Christian city”. He believed there were no Portuguese families inside the Chinese city but there was a Chinese enclave inside the Christian city. The Macaense community was extremely devout. In the homes after dinner, there were rosary prayers with children and parents kneeling beside the altar. In addition to formal education, the learning of proper etiquette was extremely important and closely supervised by the parents and grandparents. At school, girls would learn languages and the piano as well as domestic chores. After schooling, most girls would stay home “waiting for marriage and learning how to perform the duties of a house wife.”4_40
In Senna Fernandes’ description, one could detect a certain feeling of regret that in the 1930s, the Macaense dialect, the patuá, “was discouraged at home, in school, in the newspapers … except of course during the vibrant days of Carnival [the reason being that the] great Macanese families [resolved as] a matter of honour to speak only in the most genuine Portuguese”.4-41 According to Senna Fernandes, there was also no feeling of difference ‘between the Portuguese from here and the Portuguese from there.”4_42
Regrettably the lifestyle vanished with the coming of World War II and the aftermath of emigration. The idllyic existence of the Macaenses in Macau described by Henrique de Senna Fernandes reflected his family background as part of the Macaense elite.4_43 We could expect that other less well-to-do Macaense families were unlikely to experience the same social and familial life. Away from Macau, the pattern varied even more, as to be expected, because Senna Fernandes was describing a Macau that had a sizeable Macaense population and was governed by Portuguese-speaking bureaucrats within a strict Roman Catholic environment. As the Macaenses increasingly flock to the other treaty ports, their circumstances were very different to those in Macau and they had to adapt as illustrated by the case of the McDougall family in Shantou.
Shantou.
Shantou was an important outport for British companies such as Butterfield & Swire where its manager was said to “rule the roost”.4_44 Although having a Scottish name, the McDougalls were a prominent Macaense family from Hong Kong closely related to the Ozorio and Remedios clans. The Scottish surname came from Michael McDougall’s great grandfather who came to Hong Kong in the 1880s. In a series of articles written for his club magazine (Lusitano Club of California, USA) in 1993, Michael McDougall told the story of his family’s experience of life in Shantou.4_45 He informed us that although his maternal grandfather went to Shantou from Hong Kong only in the early 1900s, other Macaense families had been there since the port was opened for trade. His maternal grandfather was employed in a shipping firm that serviced the China-Malaya route from Shantou where his mother and four of her siblings were born. His father Edward Lionel McDougall arrived in Shantou around 1926 to work for Jardine Matheson & Co. as a book-keeper. There his parents met and were married in 1928.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, there were quite a few Macaense families there, numbering about forty to fifty persons.4_46 They were mostly employed by the foreign banks, shipping firms, import-export firms and Standard Oil Company of USA. However by the late 1930s, there was “only a handful” left due to people leaving for Hong Kong and Shanghai in search of better business and employment prospects.
According to McDougall, life in an outport like Shantou was “primitive” compared to Hong Kong and Shanghai. If one needed to consult a lawyer, a medical specialist or architect, one would need to go to Hong Kong or Shanghai. There was not the shopping, entertainment or cultural facilities available as in Hong Kong, but there were compensating factors such as the close communal feeling and the lack of “the snobbish class distinctions”. Schooling was in Chinese only and there were “the continuous rounds” of parties, outings, club events, hunting, swimming and sports. In many respects, it was typical of life in the foreign enclaves around China though not of the same intensity.
Expatriate life was centred on the Customs Club whose membership was “cosmopolitan, informal, and inclined towards easy fellowship”. The Club facilities included the bar, billiard room, card room, tennis courts and reading room. The Club provided a relief for the mixture of Europeans, Americans, White Russians, Macaenses, a few people of Middle Eastern background (some with United States passports) and a few Chinese. McDougall noted that the missionaries kept to themselves and did not get involved in the life of the Club. Business life, too, was more informal and there was not the snobbery of Hong Kong.4_47 Even without the overt class distinction of Hong Kong, the heads of Jardines and Butterfield & Swire, the Customs Commissioner and the British and American consuls were considered senior members of the foreign community in Shantou. Whenever there was a function, there were important seating and serving protocols to be observed.
Despite their relatively small numbers, the Macaenses and other foreigners in Shantou were not immune from anti-Western demonstrations such as occurred during the anti-British strike of 1925 which originated at Shanghai. During the strike in Shantou, no Chinese were allowed to work for British or American firms or their private houses. Michael McDougall‘s mother, then only eighteen years old, wrote:
We could not buy anything to eat, to wear or use. As we have been so used to having servants in the house, it was a most difficult time for us all. Business came to a standstill. Every private home was under surveillance. Mother worked herself to the bone while I helped what I could. I found the laundry difficult to manage for my brothers and my father refused to do their own. … Even transport was denied us.4_48
Eventually the community started a store of their own with weekly supplies from Hong Kong. These violent demonstrations of Chinese nationalism were thankfully infrequent. Together with the other foreigners, the small Macaense community enjoyed “a carefree existence, lulled, perhaps, by a false sense of security from extra-territorial treaties, and the presence of British and American gunboats”.4_49
In 1938 Shantou fell to the Japanese “without firing a single shot” although during the previous year, the Japanese had bombed it and blockaded its harbour, causing the evacuation of foreign women and children to the relative safety of Hong Kong or the International Settlement of Shanghai. Despite interruptions to shipping and the shrinking foreign community, McDougall’s father
decided to stay on and was appointed the Agent of Jardine, Matheson & Co in 1940.
Following Pearl Harbour, Allied nationals were at first interned, but then allowed to returned to their own homes and even permitted to go shopping for necessities. In March 1942, it was decided that all Allied internees in Shantou would be transported by ship to Mozambique via Shanghai as part of an international exchange of prisoners under the auspices of the International Red Cross. They were to remain in Shanghai for approximately four months before leaving for Mozambique. In facing repatriation, McDougall expressed the dilemma of competing identities faced by his fellow Macaenses:
Repatriation meant an uncertain future, even finding new jobs or starting from scratch, but at least they would be free of the Japanese yoke. Our family had similar thoughts [but] having lived only in the Far East, we considered England a foreign country. In fact, when we were first asked by the authorities in Shantou if we wanted to be repatriated, we chose to stay, for life in China was all we knew; but ultimately they forced us to leave.4_50
Shameen
The Macaense community in Shameen was larger than that in Shantou due to its longer history and the relative importance of Canton. There had always been Macaenses in Canton before and after the Opium War. In 1846, when the Hong Kong Postal Service opened a branch office in Canton, the Clerk in Charge was a Macaense, João B. dos Remedios. He was listed in the Hongkong Almanac and Directory for 1849.4_51
When Canton was destroyed in the 1857 hostilities between the Chinese and the Anglo-French forces, a new location was selected. Known as Shameen, the settlement was gradually rebuilt. For the foreign traders, such was the pull of Shanghai, that in the 1880s Shameen was considered sparsely populated. In the built up areas, the streets were narrow, some only eight feet wide but none more than twelve feet wide. The British concession was where the big “hongs” were established, but the French concession was almost barren. The British residents used part of it as a cricket ground. Even the French Consul was located in the British Concession. In 1894, the attractiveness of the French Concession improved with the sale of a big piece of land for development by the Chinese Maritime Customs. Soon the French Bank, French religious missions and Parsis also invested in property there.4_52
The place was of sufficient importance and size to warrant a Portuguese consul. The Portuguese consulate was established in Shameen in 1870. It had jurisdiction over one of the largest foreign communities in the settlement. There were also approximately two hundred Macau Chinese who were entitled to its protection. At the turn of the twentieth century, the consul was Costa de Moraes, well known for his “cocked hat and handle-bar moustache from ear to ear”.4_53 Born in Lisbon, considered by the foreign communities as the “doyen” of the consular corps, Moraes had been in the diplomatic service for twenty-five years with postings to Barcelona, Gibraltar, Paris and now Shameen.4_54 At the time of the republican revolution of 1911, the consul was a Macaense named Carlos Augusto Rocha D’Assumpção. Born in Macao, he became consul for Portugal after serving in various capacities.4_55
Amongst the Macaenses who lived in Shameen for a period was S.A. Noronha, son of the founder of Noronha and Company, Hong Kong. After working for his father’s firm for a number of years, he went to Shameen where he established a printing company of his own. He remained there until the strike in 1925 when he returned to Hong Kong.4_56 Another prominent member of the Macaense community in Hong Kong, Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales, was born in Shameen in 1920. He lived there until the age of nine before going to Hong Kong for his education.4_57
In terms of occupation, the Macaenses were similar to their compatriots elsewhere, working for the foreign businesses and banks as clerks, book-keepers and the professions. The archives of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation contained a letter from a Macaense manager in its Shameen branch who felt compelled to write and requested a salary increase because the rising cost of living meant that he “could no longer afford to buy tennis balls”.4_58
In terms of governance, Shameen mirrored Shanghai and had its own Municipal Council, and various consulates to administer the laws of their own countries to their own nationals. In social life, it was not as varied or intense as Shanghai’s but the elements were there, such as the churches, dances and balls, the consular receptions on National days, early morning horse riding in nearby Tongshan, golf, tennis and cricket. On Portugal’s National Day such as in 1928, the Shameen Portuguese community would gather to celebrate and invitations were extended to other consuls and foreigners to participate.4_59
The Macaenses living in Shameen were not immune from political tensions that threatened its peace such as the Franco-Chinese dispute in 1898 when rioters threw stones at the French consulate windows; or the Boxer Rebellion when foreign women and children were evacuated to Hong Kong as a safety precaution; or the 1911 republican revolution when Chinese refugees flooded into the place overwhelming the small foreign settlement.
The early 1920s were particularly tense, marked by labour disputes and anti-foreign demonstrations. There was the demonstrations against the Indian firms for better pay and conditions in 1923 and a general strike in 1924. In June 1924 there was an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the French Governor of Indochina who was in Shameen on a visit. The most serious disturbances were the Hong Kong-Canton strike of 1925 and the unfortunate shooting of Chinese in June 23 by the Scottish police inspector in Shaji leading to boycotts and troubles which did not end until October of the following year.4_60
Perhaps the most striking aspect about the period was the loss of Canton’s pre-eminent position in China’s foreign trade as business gravitated to Shanghai and the other ports. The degree to which it had been surpassed could be seen in statistics published in 26 January 1938 in The Daily Press Hong Kong in which its Customs revenue collection ranked below Shanghai, Tianjin, Hankou, Qingdao and Kowloon in descending order. Shanghai’s revenue was twelve times Canton’s, a remarkable achievement in that 1937 was the year that Japan finally declared war on China.4_61
The Macaenses in Shanghai
The Macaense communities in Shameen and Shantou were small compared to Shanghai’s. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Macaense community in Shantou was estimated to be about forty to fifty persons whereas in Shanghai the 1929 census figures revealed that of the approximate 100 foreign communities, the Macaense community ranked fifth largest with 2113 persons behind the Americans (3614), the Russians (7687), British (9331) and Japanese (25650).4_62
The census figures put the Macaense community at a number greater than that reported by the Portuguese Consul-General Francisco de Paulo Brito Jr. in March 1928. The difference could be due to timing and the method of registration in that not all the Macaenses in Shanghai would be registered with the Portuguese consulate. Those Macaenses who were entitled to protection as British subjects would register with the British.4_63
The official census of 1929 was conducted during the period considered by many as Shanghai’s “golden days” (1920s and 1930s) before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War.4_64 A contemporary visitor described its frenetic pace in an article published on 6 November 1928:
Little that is anywhere is un-represented here. … More and more people flock to Shanghai from all the world. … Some seeking succour after years of travail, … some anticipating economic opportunity, … some intrigued by rich-hued tales of the fascinations of this wonder city of the East. … To meet their needs there mount day by day ten storied apartment houses, new and greater hotels, residences in number scarce reckonable. … There spring into being week by week, new shops, new restaurants, new amusement places of a dozen descriptions.4_65
Harriet Sergeant in her book Shanghai captured this vibrancy and its seedy reputation:
Shanghai became a legend. No world cruise was complete without a stop in the city. Its name evoked mystery, adventure and license of every form. In ships sailing to the Far East, residents enthralled passengers with stories of the ‘Whore of the Orient’. They described Chinese gangsters, night-clubs that never closed and hotels which supplied heroin on room service. They talked familiarly of warlords, spy rings, international arms dealers and the peculiar delights on offer in Shanghai’s brothels. Long before landing, wives dreamed of the fabulous shops; husbands of half an hour in the exquisite grip of a Eurasian girl.4_66
The Macaenses went to Shanghai in search of new opportunities and challenges. Among the early group of Macaenses was Antunes Martins de Oliveira, a businessman.4_67 Born in Macau on 20 October 1830 he arrived in Shanghai just eight years after the port was opened to foreigners. According to his granddaughter he became involved in business and owned property including a large house on four blocks of expensive land in the city. She described her grandfather’s lifestyle thus:
Grandfather lived on a grand scale. He had twenty-five suits and dozens of shirts, with the days of the weeks marked on the tails so that grandmother could see that they were arranged in seven neat piles when they came back from the wash. He travelled around the city in a shiny black private rickshaw. … He kept a flat-bottomed houseboat and a permanent crew of rowers so that he could go up-country whenever he wished to hunt wild boar and game birds. [He died in Hong Kong on 15 April 1895.]4_68
In her book Shanghai, Harriet Sergeant made several references to the community. They introduced the ball game of jai alai, available at the French Concession.4_69 They were mentioned twice in conjunction with the Shanghai Volunteers Corps.4_70 A Japanese woman recalled that her regular luncheon partners in Shanghai consisted of twelve working women from various national backgrounds, of whom, at least one was Macaense.4_71 The Macaenses were mentioned as residents of Hongkew in the 1920s known for “its famous market”.4_72 Together with other Eurasians, Macaenses were said to have monopolised the clerical positions in the foreign owned businesses.4_73 The new offices of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank that officially opened for business on 23 June 1923 contained a lavatory specifically for use by its Macaense staff, separate from the British and Chinese staff who also had their own separate lavatories.4_74 Two of its prominent members were mentioned: Dr A.J. Alves, the Consul-General of Portugal in 1938,4_75 and J.A.S. Alves, a member of the Shanghai Race Club, descended from one of the earliest families to come to Shanghai.4_76 It was a commentary about those days that a woman said that: “As a child, I associated Portuguese with Eurasians, I thought it another name for them. After I left China, I was amazed to find they had their own country.”4_77 Indeed in Bickers’ book, if looking for “Portuguese” in the index, one is directed to “see Eurasians”.4_78
While Sergeant mentioned the Macaense community more than most writers, the picture deserved to be filled out more. The Macaense historian Montalto de Jesus who lived in Shanghai around the turn of the century mentioned that a convert of the Macaense priest in Nanjing, João da Rocha, built the first church in Shanghai.4_79 He also cited Commander Teixeira who was in the employ of the French police at the French Concession where many Macaenses also lived. On 16 July 1898 Commander Teixeira ordered his men to fire on rioters when they stormed and demolished a wall at the local police station, resulting in twelve Chinese deaths and several foreigners wounded by the stones thrown by the rioters.4_80
In March 1928, the Portuguese Consul-General Senhor Francisco de Paulo Brito Jr. provided a comprehensive profile of the Macaense community in Shanghai in the early twentieth century. Of those who registered with his consulate, the ratio of male and female was about the same with men accounting for only fifty three per cent. While the overwhelming majority (over ninety percent) were employed in commerce, other occupations were listed as customs officers, teachers, musicians, civil engineers, businessmen, lawyers and solicitors. According to the Consul-General Brito, there were four Macaense business enterprises the most important being the Botelho Brothers, headquartered in Hong Kong and H. Oliveira & Son from Macau.4_81
Consul-General Brito reported that for the majority, their pay was “average”. Those that worked for the commercial firms were obliged to contribute to a provident fund for retirement purposes which earned attractive interest rates. They also benefited from whatever contributions their employers might care to make. The Consul was proud of their sporting achievements and their prominent contribution to the Shanghai Volunteers Corps.4_82
Amongst the musicians was Emílio Epigménio da Encarnação, who made an outstanding contribution to the social life of Shanghai and Beijing. He was born in Macau on 14 February 1874 and died in São Paulo, Brazil, on 6 June1963. At the age of twenty, he was asked to play at a party at the Customs House, Macau to welcome Sir Robert Hart, the head of China Maritime Customs, from Beijing. Sir Robert invited young Emílio to work for him in Beijing as an officer in the Post Office and also to organise a band, an offer that was readily accepted. In Beijing, Emílio founded the famous Sir Robert Hart Band which became a regular fixture at garden parties. An invitation from the Empress Dowager to perform at the Imperial Palace and to organise a band for her, wearing the imperial colours, might be considered the highlight of his career.
When Sir Robert returned to England in 1910, Emílio returned with his wife and family to Shanghai where he organised another band, playing for stage shows and dances. He also organised the band for the Portuguese Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. Emílio’s daughter remembered their home in Shanghai in 1924 as a suite of rooms provided by the Post Office. It consisted of “four bedrooms, parlour, study, dining room (where Mother used to invite friends for Christmas dinners and roast a whole piglet in the oven) two bathrooms, pantry, kitchen, servant quarters, two large verandas, one facing the river and the other the Post Office yard.”4_83
In Shanghai, the Macaenses had their own institutions such as the Club Lusitano which was the focal point for the community. Here the community gathered for social occasions and when they had serious community business to attend to. A local newspaper reported a 1929 meeting in which over three hundred were present, including some women. The occasion was to protest the article by “J.A.J” published in the China Review Weekly on 24 November on the “Macao Question”. The article, considered to be full of inaccuracies and slander, united the various Macaense communities of Canton, Hong Kong, Macao, Shanghai and Japan in a “vigorous protest”. J.F. Pereira, the oldest Macaense resident in Shanghai at the time, presided over the meeting which unanimously carried the motion: “That the local Portuguese community indignantly protest against the article published by the China Weekly Review, that it re-affirms its loyalty to Portugal and that without exception its members will always defend Macao, even with their lives, if necessary.”4_84
The community also had an association for its women, the Associação das Senhoras Portuguesas, which was active in charity work. In a newspaper report published on 25 June 1927, it was listed among the various organisations that received annual disbursements from the Shanghai Race Club. The amount allotted to “Portuguese Ladies Benevolent Society” was the same provided to other charities run by Jewish women, Shanghai women, British women and American women, attesting to the high social standing of the community at the International Settlement.4_85
Sports were high on the community’s list of achievements. The Portuguese Sporting Association was frequently involved in competition against teams from other nationalities and participated in inter-port games against other teams, notably from Macau and Hong Kong. Living in the midst of overcrowded Shanghai it must have been doubly satisfying to be able to play in a spacious “multi-court tennis area rented from the Municipality in the middle of the race course”.4_86
An outstanding sportsman was H.C. Collaço who was born in Shanghai on 24 November 1903, and died in California, U.S.A. on 1 March 1990. It was written that he “typified the super sportsman of his era, excelling in any sporting activity at which he choose to participate.” He excelled in soccer and at eighteen was selected to represent Shanghai in inter-port games against Hong Kong, Tianjin and Hankou, whilst continuing to be the mainstay of the Club Lusitano team in the local First Division League. At twenty he became a top player in the Shanghai tennis world, winning the Men’s Doubles Championship three times with Jack Wade, and the Mixed Doubles title with his wife Thelma. At twenty-two, he took up riding and soon became a top-notch jockey, winning many championship races. He left Shanghai in 1949 and lived in Hong Kong for four years before migrating to Sào Paulo, Brazil, then to San Francisco.4_87
Crimes and Misdemeanours
The Shanghai Macaense community had its share of notoriety. Under the principle of extra-territoriality, foreign consuls possessed enormous power over their nationals in China. Frederic Silva recounted such stories in his book.4_88 Many of the stories were usually about compassionate Portuguese consuls, however if one should run foul of one’s consul, there was no place in Shanghai to hide. The arrest of the Shanghai Macaense lawyer, C.J. da Silva, was reported in the North China Daily News on 27 March 1916. Da Silva was issued with a summons by the Portuguese Consul de Barjona de Freitas. The summons was understood to be connected to a pamphlet warfare against the Portuguese consul. Others involved were served with summonses successfully but da Silva refused to be served. At one stage, he pointed a revolver at the sheriffs and fired three shots into the walls and ceiling. Later he was persuaded by friends to go to Club Lusitano believing he would be safe there. However, he was mistaken and was arrested at the Club.4_89
The more serious offenders were normally sent to Macau for trial as the following two incidents indicated. Known as “the Shanghai Trunk Murder Case”, it was reported on 14 September 1933 that Particio Remedios, unemployed, admitted to the killing of Choy Ling in a fit of jealousy because of her friendly relations with other men. He had despatched her body in a trunk to Kobe, Japan. Remedios was sent for trial at Macau and was subsequently sentenced to twenty-one years’ exile to Timor.4_90
On 19 April 1934 Carlos Eduardo Lopes appeared before the Court in Macau. He had been transferred from Shanghai to face the charge of embezzling $4,245.00 from his employer, the Cathay Insurance Company in Shanghai. Judge Vasconcellos found Lopes guilty and sentenced him to two years imprisonment with hard labour as well as a fine.4_91
Defending Shanghai (Portuguese Company SVC)
When civil unrest threatened Shanghai, such as during the 1927 Guomingdang’s northern expedition to unify China, the Macaense community together with other communities took part in defence of the settlement in Shanghai. They contributed to the defence of Shanghai in two ways: first, the Portuguese battleship Republica was stationed in Shanghai to augment the troops and gunboats of other Western powers. A report published in the North China Herald on 28 June reported that the Republica under the command of Commodore G. Ivens Ferraz had been in Shanghai for nearly four months. During that period, the three-thousand odd members of the Macaense community provided hospitality for the Portuguese troops.4_92
Their other contribution was the Portuguese Company of the Shanghai Volunteers Corps. The Shanghai Volunteers Corps had been set up during the turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s and was an integral part of Shanghai’s civil defence although some considered such volunteers as “military protection on the cheap”.4_93 The Portuguese Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was officially inaugurated on 3 March 1906 and was made up entirely of Macaenses living in Shanghai. The Portuguese Company took great pride in their civil defence obligations and in parades on important occasions.
The Committee members responsible for creating the Portuguese Company of the Shanghai Volunteers Corps were João Nolasco (first commander of the Portuguese Company), ? 20908J.D. Chagas, D.M. Gutterres, F.J. d’Almeida, J.M.P. Remedios, F. Mattos, Ernesto dos Santos Carneiro and Pio M. de Graça.4_94 The first list of enrolments consisted of one hundred and fifty names, far in excess of immediate requirements, so a “reserved unit” was suggested and formed. The first drill took place in the compound of the Hongkew Police Station a few days after formation. The men were armed with carbines and short bayonets, and equipped with leather bandoliers, khaki haversacks and water bottles. English was used in the words of command, but in 1908, when the Volunteer Corps could perform field exercises with ease, permission was granted by the Municipal Council to adopt Portuguese military terms in their drills. The company had a Red Cross Section supervised by members who held first aid certificates. A brass band was formed and “proud was the day when the Unit marched to parade led by its own Band!”
In 1910, some members attended the memorial service in Macau of the Macaense hero Coronel Vincente Nicolau de Mesquita after whom the Portuguese Company was named.4_95 They were accorded the honour of acting as pallbearers. During their visit they took part in a shooting competition against a combined Portuguese Army and Navy team.4_96 In Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s there were frequent incidents and disturbances which gave the Volunteer Corps many opportunities for service. Some distinguished themselves such as Major Leitao who had been active for the past twenty four years and whose retirement as Head of the Weapon Training Committee of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was reported in 1935 by the North China Daily News4_97 .
The Portuguese Company of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps had been in existence for thirty-six years before the Shanghai Municipal Council ordered it to be disbanded after Japan had taken control of the International Settlement following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Since its formation in 1906, over 700 members of the community had enrolled for volunteer service.4_98 In recognition of the meritorious services rendered to the residents of Shanghai, and the assistance extended to the foreign armed forces during all the emergencies since its formation, the Portuguese government honoured it by conferring the company with the Order of Christ. During its existence, it was inspected by visiting dignitaries, notably General José Joaquim Machado (1909), General Gomes da Costa, Commander in Chief of Portuguese Expeditionary Forces in France in World War I (1923), Commander Ivens Ferras of the Republica (1927) and the Governor of Macau, Senhor Artur Tamagnini de Abreu Barbosa (1930).
A Macaense’s life in Shanghai 1920-1951
The autobiography of Felipe B. Nery provided many insights into the Shanghai Macaense community and was informative in that he was in Shanghai during the major emergencies such as the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, during World War II and the aftermath of the Communist victory in1949.4_99 Nery did not reveal how his parents came to be in Shanghai, but only that like a lot of their compatriots from Macau, they had left in search of opportunities which were more easily found in Hong Kong and Shanghai. His father worked in a bank and due to his mother’s continual ill health that required frequent and extensive hospitalisation, he had been brought up in a French Convent and later attended Saint Francis Xavier College as a boarder. Like many Macaenses who grew up away from Macau, Nery could only speak English, not Portuguese.
Felipe Nery described the simple pleasures of his childhood, of spending most of the summer holidays in the creek “hopping from one sampan to another, attempting to catch crickets. … These crickets, when caught, were used for combat against those of our friends.”4_100 He recalled that many fellow Macaense families were close neighbours living along Nanjing Road and how Hongkew Park was a special place for the whole community, the venue for many picnics and sporting events. Some Macaenses were well off owning their own homes in Shanghai such as the Collaços family who owned two.
According to Nery, Club Lusitano was the centre of communal life. Under its auspices, social and sporting activities were organised. The New Year’s Eve formal dance was considered one of the highlights of the Shanghai Macaense social calendar.
In line with common community practice, Nery was sent to Macau for his secondary education and returned to Shanghai in 1937 where at the age of seventeen he commenced his career at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Despite the low pay, working for the Bank was considered worthwhile because of its stability and the attractiveness of its pension scheme. The prospects for promotion were not that great. Being the Chief Clerk of a department was the highest position a Macaense employee could ever hope to attain in those days.4_101
Nery recalled vividly the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 as refugees from surrounding areas crowded into the French Concession and the International Settlement to escape the fighting but many succumbed to hunger, exposure and disease as the streets of the International Settlement were “littered with corpses every morning”. For the Macaenses who lived in Japanese-controlled Hongkew, the fighting forced many to move out to the French Concession or the International Settlement. This was not easy because of the severe shortage of housing and the need to pay “key money” for even the most basic accommodation. Consequently young Macaense children, women and those without a job were encouraged to leave Shanghai for Hong Kong or Macau.4_102
Beginning in 1938, Shanghai became a city of refuge for European Jews fleeing Nazism as no passport or visa was required to enter.4_103They came in such numbers and impoverished that the white community of Shanghai suffered a “loss of face”. Shanghai was a society where Europeans were respected for their power or wealth and manual labour was unheard of for Europeans. Wishing to seek employment it was not unusual to find English language newspapers that carried job advertisements with the warning: “No refugees wanted”.4_104 Such was the concern for “face” that the Chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council wrote to the Consul-General of Portugal, Dr A.J. Alves (as Senior Consul for the International Settlement) urging him to advise all Consuls to exert their influence to help stem the tide of Jewish refugees coming to Shanghai.4_105
In 1939 the declaration of war by Great Britain on Germany forced many British males of eligible age to leave Shanghai to enlist in the armed forces, thus creating a vacuum in the managerial positions in Shanghai. These were filled by Macaenses and other foreign nationals but only on a temporary basis as the British nationals were expected to return after the end of hostilities. Nery, feeling that he wasn’t getting anywhere in the bank, accepted work with the Municipal Council in the Accounts office of the Public Works Department.
Fear and apprehension engulfed the Macaense community the day after Pearl Harbour when Japanese troops entered the International Settlement and occupied or confiscated properties that belonged to Britain, United States and their allies. Japanese sentries were posted outside these buildings and the Shanghai Municipal Council was also taken over. The Japanese required all British, Americans and Jews to wear arm bands bearing the initials B, A or J. They were forbidden to enter night clubs, bars, theatres and other places of entertainment. Residency identity cards were required to be obtained from the police and must be in one’s possession at all times. Short-wave radios were required to be “modified” to make the short wave element non-functional.
The Macaense community was exempted from these forms of harassment due to the declared neutrality of the Portuguese government. The connection of the French Vichy government with the Axis powers also saved the French Concession, where many Macaenses lived, from a similar fate. The closure of many firms affected the Macaenses badly. At the Municipal Council (pre-war a major employer of the Macaenses) Nery lost his job in 1943. He was dismissed along with all other foreigners when the International Settlement was taken over by the Chinese and all records were converted into Chinese. Times were so hard that the Portuguese Consulate had to maintain a refugee camp for the Macaenses in the French Concession and other consulates started to give out small monthly allowances to help meet “subsistence expenses”.4_106
In 1943 there were massive devaluations of the Chinese currency and soaring prices. Following the loss of his job at the Council, Nery and some friends had to resort to buying and selling gold bars, soap, flour, apartments, illicit liquor and anything else they had contacts for. He even tried his hands at selling Russian meat and vegetable pies (piroshkis) made by his future mother-in-law to shops, clubs and refugee centres.
Nery mentioned the 1943 imposition of price controls on essential items that were also subject to severe rationing. Wages were frozen and there were very long queues to purchase the expensive rations. Following the death of his father in 1944, he was offered his father’s old job as an interpreter at the Race Course during the racing season. With the Japanese surrender, Shanghai became a boom town again with plenty of jobs available and American products flooded the black-markets. Nery got a job with the American armed forces and later found work with a Jewish leather importer. In October 1946, he married his fiancée, a White Russian women who worked as a nurse at the General Hospital.
In 1949 when the Communist victory became imminent, many foreign governments urged their nationals to “go home”. This posed a dilemma for Nery and illustrated the crisis of identity facing many Macaenses in China: where was home? Shanghai was the only home he knew. Furthermore, many Western powers with colonies were facing pressures of decolonisation and most countries seemed to be economically impoverished and depressed following World War II with the exception of the United States. Macau had offered refuge to all Macaenses but Nery applied to emigrate to the United States instead. At the time, he still had a job with the French Tramways and despite the Communist takeover, opted to remain in Shanghai to await the outcome of his application.
Macaenses in Shanghai – post 1949
Nery was one of hundreds of Macaenses who for one reason or another did not leave before the Communists took control of the city. They chose to remain to see what would happen. Figures kept by the British Consul-General in Shanghai revealed that in June 1951, nearly two years after the proclamation of the People’s Republic, there were still nine hundred British subjects in Shanghai, of which one hundred and forty were clearly recorded as Macaenses. These figures did not include spouses or children.4_107 Due to the absence of figures from the Portuguese consulate in Shanghai, there were likely to be many more Macaenses who for one reason or another did not join in the mass exodus.
Nery and his Macaense friends would have witnessed the mass hysteria of people wanting to leave Shanghai in advance of the communist takeover. All ships, planes and trains were fully booked. Shops and stores were boarded up for fear of looting while the remnants of the Shanghai Police Force did its best to give some semblance of law and order. Nery wrote that purse-snatching and food-snatching were becoming an everyday occurrence on the streets.4_108
Why did so many Macaenses and foreigners decided to stay? According to John Luff, the headmaster of the Shanghai British School who was in Shanghai during 1949 and stayed on for a few more years after, it had to do with ignorance, naivety and the strong settler identity of the ‘Shanghailanders’. In a series of articles published in the newspaper The China Mail Hongkong in 1958, Luff wrote that if was because the Shanghai businessmen fundamentally believed that the new Communist regime would leave things as they were; that the Administration of the city would not be disrupted because of the special skills that was needed to run a city the size and complexity of Shanghai; that entrenched beside the “longest bar in the world” (located inside the Shanghai Club), they were oblivious to the realities around them. Lulled into a false sense of security, the Macaneses in Shanghai were no wiser. Many like Nery still had a job and they felt no compulsion to flee. According to M.H. Gutterres, another Macaense from Shanghai, many Shanghai Macaenses “had lucrative positions and [were] accustomed to a comparatively high standard of living prior to their exodus from the once glamorous city of the Orient. [During the first half of the twentieth century, the Shanghai Macaense] community as a whole looked on the various incidents as unavoidable phenomenon which will adjust themselves eventually and ignored the suggestions of other nationals to evacuate to safer zones.”4_109
The Shanghai Macaense mentality was not dissimilar to the general mentality of the foreign settlers as described by Luff. In reality, the Shanghailanders’ settler identity had infected the Macaense psyche:
I found that one was always too late in Shanghai, yesterday was always better than today. As I saw the Shanghailander, he was one with his face peering over his shoulder blades. He never spoke of today, always yesterday, about good times that was (sic) gone. Yet he had a wonderful lust of life. Optimistic to a fault. Generous, tricky at business, his eye always on the main chance; hard working, hard playing, hard drinking, with a zest for turning night into day, he was a likable chap. He had endured several invasions but always they turned out the same way. They petered out. He had been imprisoned by the Japanese, he had seen the city die, but only to spring to life again. No wonder then that as the armies of Mao Tse-tung mustered for the kill, he was as optimistic as ever. … Shanghai had endured, Shanghai would endure.4_110
The Macaense community and others also took comfort in the assurances given by the new communist regime that foreign interests and properties would be respected, and that there would be religious freedom. The takeover was quick and within twenty-four hours Communist forces were in complete control of Shanghai. As far as Luff knew, no civilian member was killed and certainly no member of the foreign community was hurt in any way. The next day, shops began to open again. The currency demanded as the medium of business was the US dollar and the Chinese silver dollar. Within a few days life was almost normal. By the following Monday, everyone had gone back to work. Luff wrote: “The takeover was magnifcent. The rights and property of the foreign community was respected. The Communists stayed icily aloof. Within a week, the river was re-opened, and the first ship entered Shanghai under the new regime.”4_111
Soon businesses started to suffer due to the new principle of worker participation in decisions of the management and the requirement for workers to attend political meetings. The new regime placed increasing restrictions on religious organisations and schools making it difficult to operate. The refusal of the Catholic Church leadership in Shanghai to renounce their allegiance to the Pope in Rome created severe obstacles between the church and the new regime. The Catholic Church was an important institution in the life of the Macaense community and Nery and his friends believed that they were under constant surveillance due to their active involvement in church activities.
Although his American visa had not yet been approved, Nery decided in early 1951 to leave for Macau by train, via Canton and Shenzhen. Finally through his wife, he managed to get a visa to emigrate to the United States arriving in 1952 at San Francisco to begin a new life at the age of thirty three.
Other Macaenses were not as fortunate as Nery. From stories gathered in the course of my research, some were denied exit visas from Shanghai because of their managerial positions in various enterprises. These Macaenses had to wait until indigenous staff could be trained to take over their positions while others had to find solid citizens of good repute and acceptable to the Communist regime to vouch for their good conduct. In the prevailing climate of fear, not many local people of sound standing were willing to stick their necks out for foreigners for fear of future repercussions.4_112 For those that could not managed to get out, the International Refugee Organisation eventually managed to resettle the last group of Macaense refugees in Brazil in August 1953.4_113