Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque

Chapter 7. Walling the City

118 Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque Walling the City Chapter 7 119 7. Walling the City 65. Walls along the Praya Grande Beginning from the A-Ma temple, the Portuguese built forts along the Praya Grande, the Inner Harbour, and on the hills of Macao. The photograph shows walls and a bastion, and looks up beyond the old Bela Vista hotel towards the Penha Hill, site of a fort, and to the Penha Church. The walls are now integrated into Macao’s nineteenthand twentieth-century architecture. Exploration of them starts behind the ruins of St Paul’s College, with the hill, fifty-seven metres above sea level, which supports the Mount Fortress (Nossa Senhora do Monte: now housing the Museum of Macao). Early settlers in Macao lived around this hill, and in the space between it and the southwest part of Macao. Mount Fortress (see photograph 106) was built in 1617 by Jesuits (Father Jeronimo Rho and Francisco Lopes Carrasco) using the existing city walls as a partial foundation: walls to the north ran from there down to the Inner Harbour as a defence against the north. Walls began to be built to enframe the city from 1569 onwards, made of ‘chunambo’, or ‘taipa’ (Portuguese): earth, straw and lime and shells with wooden strips placed between them for cohesion. Jorge Graça says that chunambo gets stronger with time, and would not crack under fire from cannonballs , but would absorb them. After the Dutch invasion of 1622, walls and defences became more serious. The Jesuits’ fortress was taken over by 120 Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque the governor, Dom Francisco de Mascarenhas, in 1623. He improved it, making it a fortress, to serve as a residence for governors (until the 1740s) and soldiers (the latter until 1965). Viewed from above, it appears trapezoidal. Each of the four corners has a bastion, and in plan and appearance it looks like a European castle, one intended, with its huge cistern, to withstand siege for two years, and with cannon focused on the west, south and east. It was not so much against China but against the Dutch, at war with Portugal (then under Spanish rule): the Dutch tried taking Macao in 1604, 1607, 1622 and 1627. The Dutch seaborne empire had begun growing after 1581, when the States of Holland formally renounced allegiance to Philip II of Spain (who had annexed Portugal in 1580), and compelled Spain to a peace in 1648, with the Treaty of Münster. This was eight years after Portugal had gained its separate status again. By then, according to Charles Boxer, ‘the Dutch were indisputably the greatest trading nation in the word, with commercial outposts and fortified “factories” scattered from Archangel to Recife and from New Amsterdam to Nagasaki’. 1 (In Japan, the Dutch were the only European traders allowed after 1639, ending the ‘Christian century’ when Portugal had been the favoured partner). The photograph shows a fragment of the city wall near the Na Tcha temple, with an entrance. 66. City walls 121 7. Walling the City 122 Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque 67. View from temple: towards the mainland We look through a rough opening, in reverse direction to photograph 52, towards apartments which are technically outside the walls, in the ‘suburbs’ (what was called, historically, the ‘Chinese bazaar’), with a glimpse of a motorbike, with a cross on a house incongruously behind it. Two religions confront each other from either side of the wall, just as the Na Tcha temple has, between it and the wall, a further shrine to a minor god. There are Chinese urns, one for burning paper-money, the other a tripod for planting lighted joss-sticks, with lions’ legs (a lion’s head, in colour, appears on the urn itself). They have pushed their way into the open space, creating something heterotopic in this area. 2 The two greens, the three cameras just visible, the hipped roof versus the flat roofs, the blue writing against the red inscriptions, and the sense of apartments behind the walls looking down on events inside the walls are reminders of how spaces change their looks by chance. The tourists in black from the mainland, dispersed in the square in front of the temple, looking at different direction, contribute to the heterotopic atmosphere where no protection seems needed. Jorge Graça discusses some fourteen fortresses built in the seventeenth century, some demolished...