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The Old Asia Hand, an Australian like so many of them, leaned back in his chair, took a swig of Tsingtao beer, and said “Ah, Macau! Now there’s a place I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my days in!”

We were sitting on a ferry between Hong Kong and one of its outlying islands. It was August and very hot. The view reminded me, fresh from Britain, of the Western Isles of Scotland, but with a tower-block city in place of Oban and all lying under a southern sky. Rocky islands rose almost sheer from the blue water while away to the north shimmered the mountains of China. People on occasion have said some rough things about Hong Kong, but two things about it are most remarkable - that it exists at all, and its extraordinarily spectacular location.

“Yes, I think if I had my way I could hole up there for quite a while. All those dark-haired lovelies, all that flowery softness! Macau ...”
He looked dreamily into the wake of the boat and fell silent. But I wouldn’t let him go that easily. “You mean it’s quiet, peaceful ...?”
“Not quite that - those gamblers can set up a hell of a party when they’ve won something. No, it’s not so much quiet as easy-going.”

So next day I took a powerful jetfoil and within 55 minutes was at the jetty of the minute territory that clings limpet-like to the coast of southern China, and that the Portuguese had held for so long. “Macau has been waiting for you for 400 years,” read a poster. And though Hong Kong had been a tonic and in many ways a revelation, with Macau it was simply a case of love at first sight.

I checked into the hotel at dusk. On the radio a child was singing an Ave Maria in Cantonese to the accompaniment of a piano and bird song. The first star was out over the bay and the neon had begun flickering in pink and yellow over the laughably ornate Lisboa Hotel. I knew at once what the Old Asia Hand had meant and began immediately imagining ways I might manage to stay here forever.

That evening, the central square seemed like an earthly paradise. As the fountain spewed orange and green, children watched by their admiring parents tottered and laughed as their older brothers and sisters let off explosive screws of paper. I drank a ginger and mango milkshake in a haven advertised by a neon cow and ambled down the Street of Happiness where I drank a snake potion to the cheers of laughing Chinese.

Macau is a place to dream of and to dream in, but I wasn’t as ignorant of its attractions as I’d led my Australian friend to believe. I’d been doing my reading, and as I wandered the streets next morning first-hand impressions kept bouncing off the preconceptions I had formed.

First I struggled in the immense heat up to the summit of Monte Fortress, passed along the way by a lorryload of drum-beating, cymbal-clashing festival celebrants. At the top, amid the cannons and butterflies, everything was laid out before me. The Macau roads shone glittering in the sunlight, and from behind the islands of Taipa and Coloane emerged a white-sailed junk, like a prima donna making her entrance at the opera.

Here it was that Martha Mierop, in “City of Broken Promises”, had watched the ship that bore her name sail out into the wide oceans of the world. The whole of Macau was still reminiscent of that wonderful book on which Austin Coates had lavished such loving care.

“You know,” he’d said to me in Hong Kong just before I left, “every detail of that novel was checked, and not only against the written records. These are notoriously scanty. I well remember Jack Braga, the historian, saying ‘If only I could find one bill of lading, just one ... !’ Well, Charles Boxer found one - one, I may say - in Lisbon. In just the same way there was for centuries no written treaty between Portugal and China over Macau, so too the local traders chose to make all commercial arrangements verbally and in person.

“So I had to question the oldest inhabitants. And I found a wealth of information! I discovered, for instance, that the stairs in the old Portuguese houses were uncarpeted, and as a result you could hear a booted European coming up to the first floor where the Portuguese lived, but not a slippered Chinese! This later became crucial to an important incident in the book.”

I descended next, via St Paul’s Ruins, to the Leal Senado Square that I’d seen the night before. It was here that Peter Mundy, an English merchant, recorded in his diary (published as “The Travels of Peter Mundy” by the Hakluyt Society of London) that he saw violent equestrian games in which the Portuguese dressed up as Moors and Christians to re-enact ferocious battles of old, albeit in ritualised form. This was in 1637. These confrontations must have had particular significance for the small community of Europeans, some 300 at the time, occupying a mere 3.4 square kilometres of land backing onto the almost limitless expanse of the Celestial Empire.

When the young English writers Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood visited the territory in 1938 there was a menacing statue of one Colonel Mesquita standing in the square. He was a hot-blooded citizen who had, after the assassination and decapitation of Macau’s governor in 1849, stormed and seized the Chinese fort on the far side of the Barrier Gate. It’s small wonder, then, that a group of Red Guards, surging into Macau on one occasion during the Cultural Revolution, pulled the statue down and almost succeeded in setting fire to the library. The illuminated fountain, such a popular venue for the evening stroll, seemed an eminently suitable and noncommittal object to have taken its place.

Exactly when Auden and Isherwood visited Macau remains a mystery. It must have been during their stay in Hong Kong between 16th and 28th of February. Although the travel diary that forms the bulk of the book on their travels, “Journey to a War”, is headed ‘Hong Kong - Macau’, their account is quite clear about their itinerary. They went from Hong Kong overland to Shanghai, and from there took a liner via Japan to Vancouver, and thence via New York back to London.

The only evidence of their visit is Auden’s poem on Macau, the one that begins

A weed from Catholic Europe, it took root
Between the yellow mountains and the sea,
Bore these gay stone houses like a fruit
And grew on China imperceptibly.

To Auden, Macau represented the happiness that can come from withdrawal from the mainstream of the world’s affairs.

Rococo images of saint and saviour
Promise the gamblers fortunes when they die;
Brothels by the churches testify
That faith can pardon natural behaviour.

The admiration for this kind of Ruritanian backwater, as Macau must indeed have been in the 1930s, presaged a whole cult of comic-opera fantasy locations that Auden began to cultivate in later life, putting together arbitrarily selected styles, religions, landscapes and culinary traditions to make an impossible but ‘perfect’ retreat. Not that either writer had been much interested in seeking out retreats at that time, but it wasn’t going to be long before Auden at least started moving in that direction.

English writers haven’t stopped being interested in Macau, and it was only in the weeks immediately before my arrival that I’d finished reading Timothy Mo’s “An Insular Possession”. Focusing on the foundation of Hong Kong, the ‘possession’ referred to in the title, it contains many scenes set in the Macau of the 1830s, and several characters based on historical people - the painter Harry O’Rourke (Irishman George Chinnery) and the American diarist Alice Remington (Harriet Low), for example.

Written entirely in the prolix style of some mid-19th century novels and newspapers, the book loses something in dramatic intensity through its fidelity to this particular kind of period texture. Nevertheless, it has some marvellous set pieces, and the opening invocation to the Pearl River, and the closing meditation on history by the aged Sinologist Gideon Chase, are beautifully crafted.

It was with a mind suffused with memories of Mo’s book that I wended my way, up narrow streets still dedicated to particular traditional crafts, to the Camoes Gardens. These were originally the private grounds of a merchant’s magnificent house that by then had become the Macau Museum. It was during the period when the property was rented out to a senior British East India Company merchant in the late 18th century that the French scientist La Perouse visited and, among the rocks near the grotto, conducted experiments on the earth’s magnetism.

The Gardens contain a famous statue to Louis de Camoes, the great Portuguese poet and author of the “Luciads”, the epic poem celebrating the Portuguese maritime expansion. Today the place epitomises the easy-going tenor of Macanese life, and as I sat there among the Chinese-chess players and bird-walkers, I wondered why so many of the books I had consulted on Macau had been written, not by Portuguese, but by Englishmen. It was then that the very first book to have brought Macau to my attention came again to mind.

This was Maurice Collis’s “Foreign Mud”, a superbly wise account of the origins of the Anglo-Chinese War of 1839-42. The book begins with a description of Macau in 1836, already the “old tarnished place,” its atmosphere “less that of a port than a museum”, that George Chinnery so loved to draw. His description is actually based on an account by one C.T.Downing, an English doctor, who related details of his visit in a book “The Fan-Qui in China in 1836-7”.

But the passage of Collis’s book which I’d been most struck by was one in which he summed up the charm Macau held for a certain type of Englishman. I had a copy of the book with me and, as I sat there among the giant rocks, I looked up the relevant chapter again. It reads:
“So great was the fascination which Macau exercised over some ... that when the time came for them to retire to England, they could not bear to leave their houses on the ridge and stayed on for the rest of their lives. But it is well known that many places in the East have this power of overcoming in British hearts nostalgia for home. All over the South Seas and Oceania, Burma, Siam and China you find Englishmen growing old who yet cannot tear themselves away from an unhurried life of soft wind, rich sunsets, sweet scents and black-haired beauties, and would rather be buried in a palm-grove within sound of the surf ... than face English cold, English haste and English women.”

Noting the slight on my countrymen and -women, I nevertheless read on fascinated. “Yet such men cannot altogether escape nostalgia. The day the boat comes in with mails and newspapers is a great day; and there are moments when they would give their bliss ... to be able to order an English dinner or perhaps to look again on a field of buttercups. But such moments pass, the pain of them is half-sweet; like memories of lost love, they but enrich the present.”

As in succeeding days I discovered the sunny quiet of the Church of Sao Lorenzo with its palms, the antique world of the Inner Harbour, the aloof calm of the Guia lighthouse and the lonely splendour of Hac Sa beach, I began to understand more completely just what it was that had so continuously drawn Englishmen, over four centuries, to Macau. It was now pulling not only the Old Asia Hand, but at my heartstrings as well.

What do you do when you realise you are one of a pattern, undergoing a process that many have undergone before you? Do you allow your sense of independence to feel insulted? Do you pack your bags at once and leave on the next jetfoil?

I got up and walked down the steps between the vibrant jacaranda blossoms and florid rose beds. I crossed the little square and went into the Old Protestant Cemetery, where so many of the English merchants of old are buried. The only other person there was a Chinese child watering the geraniums.

Yet everything was in perfect trim - the etched gravestones newly touched up, the grass cut, the magnolias in resplendent flower. I was reminded, among Macau’s Catholic splendours, of other worlds and other virtues. It was so plain, so lovingly kept. I was touched by the beauty of its simplicity and its quiet order. It was movingly decent.

I left, walked a little, took a left, then a right, then another left, bought a paper, ordered a coffee and, spreading the paper wide over the table, began looking down its columns, slowly but earnestly, for a room.

Read more travel writing by Bradley Winterton