“The Past Is Present”: The Construction of Macau's Historical Legacy

Abstract

Macau, the first permanent European settlement on the China coast founded 450 years ago, exhibits in its monuments, commemorative statues, architecture and museums the changing encounter between Europe and China. Such tangible cultural forms reflect the construction of Macau’s historical meaning in the vision of their creators. First a vehicle of the Christian evangelical enterprise in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Macau became an extension of the heroic Portuguese national colonial epic in the nineteenth century, and finally was re-envisioned as the legacy of an open-ended process of multicultural exchange, a city where East meets West in a discourse of mutual tolerance and understanding. In this process the past comes to be experienced as the present.

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