A citizen's tour on Macau
THROUGH THE HERITAGE OF THE CITY



Text and Photos by António Conceição Júnior
Note: The places visited are far from exhausting the theme. They are just a result of the limited available time and personal choice.
1. Between memory and change

Decidedly, leaving the very heart of the city and wondering through the veins of the city's fabric where visitation is made through the image and the sensoriality of a body of memories of someone who, being a city and life walker assumed his citizen's condition. This is but a small journey into my own Macau, that where my instinct and memory leads me.

It is unquestionable for me that, more than the façade of the Church of the "Mater Dei" of St. Paul's, a cliché that saturates me for the abuse of it's use, the pedestrian passage between the Senate's Square and the church of S. Domingos constitutes the renewal of an atmosphere and an urban contract that becomes one of the referential elements of Macau: the Mediterranean and timeless breeze, a climate that invites to the fruition of this matricial space of great part of the ancient part of the city.
The green kiosk, little frequented in winter, appears as if hidden ashamedly underneath a leafy tree, reminds me of my days at the City Council Cultural Department, when I suggested the concession of licenses so that the existing coffees and dairies could create esplanades in the square, offering the fruition of it to the passer-bys, still the street was not pedestrian. I remember that we staged the first ever show of urban animation around 1984. Marionettes, mimes and music. Just a simple stage on another layout that existed, respecting the square layout, for the square has always been exactly that: an open space.
I always understood that spaces such as these are for enjoyment, and any act of liberalization of the commerce alongside comes to the understanding that, after all, cultural gestures are not so transcendental nor complicated. It is just a matter of understanding what a city is.
All that is needed is that unnecessary formalisms are discarded from daily life. Please let the newspaper stands where they are, and the Chinese fortune-tellers. Just allow more esplanades where conviviality can reach greater intensity, for the square is for enjoyment of all.
It was great to see the noodles house elegantly decorated, organized with utmost traditional elegance. How glad I was to have discovered its new existence, minute and proudly Chinese, contiguity of affections and flavours that give the tone to the specific culture of this city. Slowly I can detect the birth of a trend towards the return to the origins, identities affirming themselves in the conviviality of the cultural differences.
Two surprises awaited me at Almeida Ribeiro: the superb management of an almost contiguous store to the Camilo Pessanha Street for a Cultural Club. But, sadly, the closing of the ancient Phillipino Tobacco shop, the last testimonial of an age displeased me. I would almost say that it would be worthy that within its anachronism, it would pay to have that old house kept open. There are units that date from the time of the Riviera Hotel that would need to be kept alive as living testimonials of a suspended time from the thread of a last memory.
I once more descended Almeida Ribeiro and turned left, leading myself to the Rua das Felicidades (Street of the Happiness) immersed myself in that gorgeous red, feeling the heat reflecting from the white walls. For moments I wished perhaps that, such as in St. Anthony's street are concentrated the majority of the antique shops, maybe some departments should come up with some proposals encouragement towards the rebirth of this ancient Chinese entertainment street. Perhaps it was just enough to mandatory include it in the tourist circuit so that its industrious population would instantaneously reconvert the old houses into restaurants or pensions or why not luxury inns, so that to the beautiful skin the core of the fruit could be added. Nothing like encouraging the creativity of the population, for it is part of the living tissue of the city. It would be better if a tough verification would be exerted on some self appointed tourist guides, for my ears have heard the most incredible stories told at the of the inevitable façade of St. Paul's ruins.
Still inhaling the memory of some stories of our Henrique de Senna Fernandes, tuning the ear to the wait of a moan of a bygone era, I returned to the Senate square and went up the sidewalk of the Calçada do Tronco Velho where the Noticias de Macau was. 

THE MAIN SQUARE
THE  DISCRETE KIOSK
 OCHRE IN THE ARCADES
THE NOODLES HOUSE
CULTURE CLUB
Reaching the top, I came back to feel the gentleness of Saint Augustine's small square. The old recouped Commercial School is now a bank. An ample pedonal passage where another kiosk lies closed, a tablet promising a cooling tea perhaps, waiting for better days, when somebody revives the Dom Pedro V Theatre.
Soon to follow I observed the likeable interior of the Casa Ricci, the patio generously offering itself as well as the freshness of the shade of a leafy tree.

Exactly to the side, in the house where as a child I played with the children of the Batalha family, works for its recovery are on the way of the now Sir Robert Ho-Tung Library, fact that I must salute.
The façade of the building is already recovered.
In this contiguity of absolute coherence I review the façade of the church of St. Augustin framed by light posts with vases of flowers hanging. And, exactly to the side, a gate opens itself to offer to my gaze, in tones of green, the main façade of the Theatre, also Macau Club. As many memories, since the marriages until the shows of where unique Adé bursted surprisingly from amidst the spectators, to initiate the show in the ancient Macanese dialect, a derivation of 17th. century Portuguese.

I went down slope that leads to the Central Street where still subsists the house of Moosa & Co. Ltd., as the tablet states, whose son used to come to walk the dog at St. Augustine's.
If much changed, much subsists, and it comforting and interesting that all the effort of recovery of these elements of heritage, as more will be seen ahead, has come to be developed by the Government of Special the Administrative Region of Macau.
ST. AUGUSTINE'S SQUARE
D. PEDRO V THEATER
Images of memory  HO-TUNG LIBRARY

Memory constitutes the collective reference that, in the peacefulness and comfort of a leafy shade, invites a dive in the source, so that the relaunching of the city can be, instead of a dubious development, the contemporary exercise of a collective identity.
THE PATIO OF CASA RICCI ST. AUGUSTINE CHURCH ENTRANCE OF THE THEATER
2. Recovery and fruition

It is part of the human condition to be happy with a compliment and irritated with a comment.
However to the citizen, the right to think, to disagree or to suggest is untouchable. It is not politics, though the right would be the same even if it were. But it is mere exercise of citizenship, an inestimable right that I most cherish.
The visit had the taste of briefness, so that in the following day I decided to head to the Lilau little square, place where I lived three years of my childhood.
I contoured the church of S. Lourenço and headed myself towards Barra, for the long cobbled street of Padre António where I know of colour almost all the houses that already had been.

Almost at Lilau, I reviewed a set of greyish houses that I know well. A wooden partition left my divided heart between the hope of being the beginning of a recovery and not the building's . Behind, dreadful architectural monsters observed avidly.
Here I am now at the Lilau. The trees still are there, but the old food tent which sold toasts made in an coal oven is now a memory. The place is now pedonal also, and the new kiosk lies there in vain, closed also. A lesson on not to impose. At the background a new plaque offers two pipes of the old Lilau fountain, for those who to want to fulfil the ritual of drinking the water of Lilau, therefore remaining forever attached to Macau.

I gaze at the ochre colored houses and although recouped, they seem empty. In one of them lived D. Belarmina Marques and her sister who was married to one gentleman named Albuquerque.
The square seems deceased, a deserted place almost. I don't know why. It used to be noisy and full of children.
To the left of the new stone wall I notice another recouped house. When I was a kid there were an accumulation of room additions hanging from the façade. Now it makes more sense in its restored white and ocre, inhabited, the door heading directly to the little square. A strange light is all over the placet, intervening with the photograph.
I look at the slope that led to the family house, of José Vicente Jorge, enormously large house of more than 14 rooms in which I lived, after the death of my mother, in a rented independent area that was larger than an average apartment now.
It is not there anymore, nor the garden nor the large garage or the gate. One hideous speculator built a greedy monster apartments building totally out of context.
But well more humble and resistant it is the house of the Remédios family who had a son of my age. It seats on a rock, the steps coarsely excavated in, subsiste still, to remember to me that perhaps George Chinnery has drawn it.
I remained for long time, looking at my own childhood memories. Also there is one of the houses of the Senna Fernandes family, there where Gaby lived. There it is the registration of the year of construction:1898.

Still I went to the "House of the Mandarin": the Cheang Ka Chi.
It was closed for renovation. Good I said to myself. The huge house could be a Museum or a traditional luxury restaurant or, still, a luxury traditional Chinese inn.
WHAT FUTURE FOR THIS PAST?
THE  LILAU
SILENT TESTIMONIALS
A STRANGE LIGHT And why not a typically Macanese hotel?

Even with the traditional Jesus of Prague and St. Anthony on top of the drawer. Diversify, but put to use. Put these places for rent and tender .
Still so much in a city where land is scarce and the real estate developers are waiting like wolves...
ST. LOURENÇO CHURCH

THE REMÉDIOS HOUSE

CASA SENNA FERNANDES