Page 65 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

51.
to sail up to Wnampoa aboard the cargo vessel.

After so long a time at sea, Americans found Macao a

lovely city and "a delightful surprise." They frequently com­

pared it to Naples with "the same beautiful bay studded with

green islands, the same gentle curving beach, the same rising

hills on either side, and the houses and buildings of every

description towering up the slope that stretches from the

pier." The write buildings of Macao were of European archi­
9
tecture, with churches and villas dotting the horizon.

Stretching from the center of the city out to the pier was the

Praya Grande, the major square in which foreigners strolled

for entertainment. Off the Praya Grande were the villas where

the foreign merchants' families lived. The entire city was

a foreign enclave on the edge of the Celestial Empire.

Macao had been a European colony since 1563, when the

Chinese granted the city in perpetuity to the Portugese.

Exactly how the Portugese first settled there is moot, but in

the 1530's they did build a settlement which they named

"Ciudad do name de Deos de Macao." After 1563 Portugal main­
tained strict control over the city, sending out a Royal

Governor to head the colony. The population of Portugese

Macao by the 1820's and 1830's included a large number of

Western women, as the Chinese forbade their presence at Canton.

9
Two good contemporary descriptions of Macao by
American travelers are in David Abeel, Journal of a Residence
in China, and the Neighboring Countries from 1829 to 1833
(New York, 1834), pp. 63-64, and Osmond Tiffany, jr., The
Canton Chinese or the American's Sojourn in the Celestial
Empire (Boston, 1849), pp. 17-18.