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In the past decade or so, Macau has launched a series of enormous public works and land-reclamation projects. These include a US$11.8 billion airport built in 1995, and Cotai – a reclaimed area almost the size of Taipa with a six-lane highway. But the most ambitious project by far is the proposed 29km-long, US$5.47 billion, six-lane cross-delta bridge linking Macau and Zhuhai with Hong Kong via Tai O on Lantau Island. The construction is expected to commence in 2010. The Y-shaped bridge would reduce the present four-hour journey by car between Zhuhai and Hong Kong to 20 minutes. Other projects include an ocean theme park in northwestern Taipa and a new campus for the University of Macau on Zhuhai’s Hengqin Island, Macau’s future concession.

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ARTS

Painting

Macau can lay claim to having spawned or influenced a number of artists. Their work is on display in the Gallery of Historical Pictures of the Macau Museum of Art ( Click here).

The most important Western artist to have lived in Macau was George Chinnery (see the boxed text, below). Other influential European painters who spent time in Macau include the Scottish physician Thomas Watson (1815–60), who was a student of Chinnery and lived in Macau from 1845 to 1856; Frenchman Auguste Borget (1808–77), who spent some 10 months in 1838 and 1839 painting Macau’s waterfront and churches; and watercolourist Marciano António Baptista (1856–1930), who was born in Macau.

Guan Qiaochang (1825–60), another of Chinnery’s pupils, was a Chinese artist who painted in the Western style and worked under the name Lamqua. His oil portraits of mandarins and other Chinese worthies are particularly fine.

Two of the best galleries for viewing contemporary Macau and other art are Tap Seac Gallery ( Click here) and Ox Warehouse ( Click here). The emerging art hubs in St Lazarus District ( Click here) are also worth a visit.

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GEORGE CHINNERY: CHRONICLER OF MACAU

Though George Chinnery may enjoy little more than footnote status in the history of world art, as a chronicler of his own world (colonial Macau) and his times (the early 19th century) he is without peer. In the absence of photography, taipans (‘big bosses’ of large companies) and mandarins turned to trade art (commissioned portraiture), and Chinnery was the master of the genre. Today he is known less for his formal portraits and paintings of factory buildings and clipper ships than for his landscapes and sometimes fragmentary sketches of everyday life.

Chinnery was born in London in 1774 and studied at the Royal Academy of Arts before turning his hand to portrait painting in Dublin. He sailed for India in 1802 and spent the next 23 years in Madras and Calcutta, where he earned substantial sums (up to UK£500 a month) as a popular portrait painter to British colonial society and spent most of it on his opium addiction. He fled to Macau in 1825 to escape spiralling debts, Calcutta’s ‘cranky formality’ and his wife (whom he described as ‘the ugliest woman I ever saw in my life’), and took up residence at 8 Rua de Inácio Baptista ( Map), just south of the Church of St Lawrence. He lived at this address until his death from stroke in 1852.

Although Chinnery is sometimes ‘claimed’ by Hong Kong (the Mandarin Oriental hotel even has a bar named after him), he visited the colony only once, during the hot summer of 1846. Although he was unwell and did not like it very much, he managed to execute some vivid sketches of the place.

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Architecture

Portuguese architectural styles reflect a variety of forms, from Romanesque and Gothic through to baroque and neoclassical, and these are best seen in Macau’s churches. Two excellent examples are the Chapel of St Joseph Seminary ( Click here), completed in 1758, and the Church of St Dominic ( Click here), a 17th-century replacement of a chapel built in the 1590s.

Civic buildings worth close inspection are the Leal Senado ( Click here), erected in 1784 but