Modernizing Macao, the Old-Fashioned Way: Macanese and Chinese Entrepreneurship in the Colonial City, 1877–1884

Abstract

In 1877, Miguel Ayres da Silva and his Chinese partners were authorized by the governor of Macao to reclaim a portion of the city’s riverfront. Councilman Silva was one of the first native-born Portuguese, as the aristocratic mixed-blood Macanese called themselves, to bypass traditional employment in the administration or the military and to become a renowned entrepreneur. His project, in line with the government-promoted restructuring of the inner harbor from the 1850s to the 1870s, employed the modern principles of progress and sanitation and set the tone for a new age of centralized urban planning in Macao. The 1877 riverfront reclamation would be the first urban extension to be carried out under the supervision of the newly created Public Works Department. From the early 1870s on, a new generation of engineers, coming both from the metropolitan schools and from the military schools of the Portuguese State of India, promoted a modern European model of urban governance throughout the Empire. In Macao, this meant favoring the Portuguese government’s claim of full control over the territory to upgrade both the city’s insalubrious additive pattern and its inhabitants’ autonomous practices of appropriating space. However, Silva’s blatant disregard for government regulations in the construction process, as well as the ensuing succession of patched up settlements, resonated profoundly with Macao’s old-fashioned and informal methods of city-building. By focusing on Silva’s approach to the 1877 reclamation project, this essay looks at the transition from century-old bottom-up practices to the Public Works top-down model, a contested process that reflected both the ambitions and the contradictions of modern Macao.