The Macau-Liverpool Border

International audienceSome of today’s Macau landmarks stood in more solitary splendour in 1978 and were visible from afar. I stayed in the other-worldly Bela Vista Hotel for a night; while not too expensive, on a student budget I could not afford to stay longer. I recall that the staff, as in other hotels, would not accept tips. I’d visited Lisbon two years before, at the height of the mid-1970s Portuguese Carnation Revolutionary fervour where gratuities had, temporarily, disappeared, along with the old fascist order. But I hadn’t expected the tip-less culture to have been extended to Macau; but there again China’s Cultural Revolution had also left its scent. I stayed mostly in a cheap, ramshackle guest house on the island of Coloane, not far from the Tam Kung temple. The guesthouse, more a sort of a dormitory, was on a low promontory by the shore. The sunset over the channel that separated Coloane from China was almost magical