On Asian Streets and Public Space

AVENUE PRAIA GRANDE

AVENUE PRAIA GRANDE CHEN YU + HENG CHYE KIANG A RECORD OF PORTUGUESE AMBITION AND NOSTALGIA AVENUE PRAIA GRANDE 01. INTRODUCTION Its bay is perfect crescent. Around this runs a broad boulevard, called the Praya Grande, shadowed with fine old arching banyan trees. At each horn the Portuguese flag waves over a little fort. Behind the town, green wooded hills rise like an amphitheatre, and among the houses a picturesque old buildings sticks (sic) up here and there – the Cathedral, the barracks, the military hospital, the older Fort Monte. The whitewashed houses with their green blinds and wide shady porticoes and verandas, from which dark eyes look idly down upon you as you pass, recall many a little Italian and Spanish town. [1] Hence wrote Henry Norman of the Praia Grande and its surroundings in 1894 in his manuscript The Peoples and Politics of the Far East after his nearly four years of travel and studies in the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, Siberia, China, Japan, Korea, Siam and Malaya. By the end of the 19th century, posing at the south fringe of Macau, the wide curving Avenida da Praia Grande, according to Hurley, “extending along the shore of the bay of that name” was “about three quarters of a mile in length by some 100 feet wide”. [2] Along it grew mansions, forts and public buildings, including the governor of Macau’s palace. It was without doubt Macau’s most beautiful street. A handbook of Macao published in 1926 portrays the bay in a lyrical tone – “Perhaps the most delighted and romantic scene A RECORD OF PORTUGUESE AMBITION AND NOSTALGIA FIG 01 MAP OF THE PENINSULA OF MACAO, 1865–6 01 - The Street: Transformation and Modernity 4 ON ASIAN STREETS AND PUBLIC SPACE in Macao is the full moon shining across the waters of the Praya Grande Bay, its silvery rays flooding the sparkling waters, and Chinese fishing craft serenely gliding across the scene” (Fig 01). [3] This paper traces the birth of Avenida da Praia Grande (Nan Wan Jie in Chinese, Avenue Praia Grande in English) and attempts to understand how various factors influenced the genesis of the avenue, leaving behind imprints on its streetscape. Although it had grand public and private buildings, the Avenue Praia Grande was not a political centre like the Leal Senado (City Hall). And even though it was crowned with an ecclesiastical establishment, the Avenue Praia Grande was similarly not a religious centre like the Cathedral. And despite facing the outer sea, the Avenue Praia Grande was not a commercial centre like the Inner Harbour to its north. However, the Avenue of the Great Beach was the locus where the contest of a multitude of forces took place and reflected the struggle for survival of the little Portuguese enclave in China during the last four centuries. 02. THE BEGINNING In 1987 when Coates published his book A Macao Narrative, he described the city and Praia Grande during the so-called Golden Age of Macao of between 1557 and 1641 in this manner: Around the bay of the outer harbour, the Praia Grande was lined with well-built stone houses. Approached from the open sea, this long crescent of buildings, with squat towers and low domes of classical churches rising behind them, so gave the place the appearance of a Mediterranean city that it was difficult to imagine oneself in China. [4] Similarly Jonathan Porter in his 1996 publication Macau: The Imaginary City also imagined a flourishing Praia Grande landscape during the same period: The wealth of the city’s inhabitants was reflected in the enthusiastic new architecture. A construction boom was under way, and the growing population of Portuguese and Portuguese Asian traders and merchants built fine residences above the Praia Grande and the inner harbour and against the hills. [5] The construction boom along the Praia Grande during the Golden Age of Macau that Coates and Porter imagined probably did not take place at all. For one thing, the Praia Grande was on the edge of the original Portuguese settlement and away from the churches “rising behind them”.The only church not affiliated to a fort and close to the Praia Grande was Santa Clara’s Convent, completed no earlier than 1633. [6]Another church standing at the north end of old Praia Grande was St. Francisco’s monastery founded in 1579. It was later changed into a chapel attached...