As we look around the city these days, and indeed the world, it is clear that we are living in dramatic times. The scenario that has often been written about and featured in movies – a contagion that spreads from animals to humans and from which no one is safe – seems to be really happening.
Of course, it’s not the first time in recent memory that Macau has faced such a situation. In 2003-4 we had to tackle SARS, and then in 2009 there was H1N1. Both times the city survived relatively unscathed, despite the havoc that these viruses caused around the region.
And now we have the novel Corona virus, or COVID-19, as it has come to be known. So far, again, the city has largely managed to stave off the threat, but by no means has the danger been completely thwarted, and many extreme measures have had to be implemented, none the least of which was the unprecedented closure of all casinos – the lifeblood of the city’s economy.
But as we sit quarantined in our apartments, looking out the window at the uncharacteristically empty streets below, with only a few masked faces wandering around, we should take some comfort in knowing that over the centuries, this small city of ours has endured many disasters and upheavals, some arguably much more challenging than what we are currently going through today. And through it all, life has continued and the city has survived and even prospered, largely due to some good governance, the strength and perseverance of the local people, and perhaps a little bit of good luck as well.
Wind, floods and fire
One of the earliest recorded natural disasters in the city was the great typhoon of 1874. Early on the morning of September 22, fishing boats headed out into the bay to begin their daily work under a clear blue Autumn sky. But when they returned in the afternoon, they brought an ominous warning of ‘big winds!’ As the city slept that night, the barometer showed the air pressure dropping as the low-pressure system moved in.
“The minimum reported pressure was around 935 hectopascals,” notes Olavo Rasquinho, former secretary of the World Meteorological Organization Typhoon Committee in Macau. “For comparison, during Typhoon Hato in 2018, the minimum reported air pressure was 1945 hectopascals. The typhoon of 1874 was much stronger than Hato and the construction of the buildings was not as strong. It really was the greatest natural disaster to occur in Macau.”
The great storm hit at around 2am when the city was in darkness, and by all accounts it was terrible. Pedro Gastao Mesnier, a secretary of the Governor, recorded his account of the moment the storm struck, writing: “With indescribable violence, a howling blast swept the entire length of the Lantau Sea…. the sea rose in a hideous wave, and weighing itself down for an instant, precipitated precipitously over the entire eastern part of the city… the excess of furor can hardly be described, with which the wind and the sea rushed over this city as if they wanted to eliminate it from the surface of the earth. A constant, furious and roaring crash, composed of the most fearful voices that nature can release in its wrath…”
Macanese author C.A. Montalto de Jesus wrote that is was “As if nature too were bent on the downfall of Macao… Battered, flooded, Macao was at the same time assailed by pirates…” describing it as a “night of unspeakable horror and tribulation.”
The tides rose around 2.5 metres destroying all the buildings along the Praia Grande waterfront. Fires caused by overturned candles and kerosene lamps ravaged other parts of the city. Some fires may have even been deliberately lit by looters, and some locals reported being assailed and robbed by pirates as they ran through the darkened city seeking shelter. Thousands of buildings were destroyed and even the churches and cathedral suffered significant damage. Some 2,000 fishing vessels were wrecked and around 5,000 people lost their lives. The bodies of around 1,000 people were found on Taipa, and a further 500 in Coloane, mostly fisherman.
The destructive event resulted in a large proportion of the wealthier Macanese community deciding to leave Macau for the more protected harbour city of Hong Kong that had been colonized by the British in 1842. The Catholic population in Hong Kong quickly increased by around 700, mostly Macanese refugees. “The disastrous typhoon consummated the ruin of the Macanese,” wrote Montalto de Jesus. It would take Macau decades to fully recover from the destruction of property and significant loss of life from this devasting typhoon.
A Violent Shock
While it is very rare to experience seismic events in Macau, small tremors are known to occur. And though there are limited records of past events, there exists a single correspondence that indicates a major earthquake was felt in November 1767. The letter, dated January 7, 1768, was written by Mr. Stephen De Vilme, writing from Canton (Guangzhou). In it, he describes an account relayed to him by a friend living in Macau at the time:
"Last night, at 50 minutes after nine o'clock, we were all surprised with a heavy shock of an earthquake, which continued above a minute. This shock was so great that the house rocked, and I was afraid we were all going down into the bowels of the earth. Another shock we felt five minutes after eleven o'clock, but not so great: and at three this morning another pretty great. In all we have had five shocks, but the first was the greatest. It came with a rolling, and a dreadful noise in the air; so that at first some people thought it to be the firing of guns, or thunder at some distance. At the first shock I could hardly hold my feet; but, thank God, no bad accident has happened; and I hope the Almighty will deliver us from any more of the frightful shocks. … The oldest people here say, they never remember to have felt so violent shock, and of so long continuance. The ships in the harbour hooked and whirled about, and those on board imagined at first that it had been a whirlwind."
Another earthquake was reported in August, 1905, with tremors being felt throughout the day over a nine-hour period. An interesting story soon spread around to explain the cause of the quake. Apparently a young fisherman brought home a catch of crabs for his mother to cook. When she did so, she noticed some strange markings on one of the crab’s backs. The village wiseman identified the crab as the ‘King of the Crabs’ and prophesied ‘a great calamity’ in retribution. Rumour spread that upon hearing of the fate of the their king, all the other crabs went down in their holes and began to shake the ground.
Saved by Balmis
As a busy port city, visited by many ships and crew, containing outbreaks of diseases has always required the city’s officials to be constantly vigilant.
“Macau was always characterized by resilience and can be compared to the bamboo cane that bends over during the storm but returns to its original position, overcoming crisis, storms and outbreaks,” comments Prof. Rogério Miguel Puga of Nova University in Lisbon, and who previously taught at the University of Macau between 2007-2009.
“The first Western hospital in Macau and China (Mercy Hospital, also known as Raphael’s Hospital) opened its doors in Macau in 1569, as well as a hospital for the poor and for lepers,” Prof. Rogério adds.
“Macau was actually considered quite a healthy place to visit in the early years, compared to other less developed ports in the region,” notes Tereza Sena, a lecturer at the Centre of Sino-Western Cultural Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic Institute. “Due to its warm climate and relatively high levels of organization, it was seen as a good place to come to rest and recuperate after long journeys and trade missions in India and China.”
However, like many cities in those days, it regularly had to deal with outbreaks of highly contagious and very deadly diseases like cholera, typhoid and smallpox. Fortunately, in 1805, Macau was visited by Dr Francisco Javier de Balmis, a Spanish physician and royal surgeon, who headed the now famous medical expedition to Spanish territories in the Americas to vaccinate the populations there against smallpox.
After a successful stay the Philippines, Dr Balmis’ next stop was Macau. He travelled on the Portuguese ship La Diligencia, arriving to Macau after an eight-day voyage. Given the time and distance, the only way to transport a live sample of the smallpox vaccine in those days was in a human carrier. Thus, as was common practice, the vaccine was transported to Macau by three Filipino boys, most likely orphans, who were provided to Balmis by a priest in Manila.
However, the vaccine almost never reached the shores of Macau, as the ship was hit by a fierce storm just as it arrived in the outer harbour on September 10. In her 2006 article on the subject published in Review of Culture, Prof. Isabel Morais quotes an excerpt of a letter written by Balmis: “In a few hours the frigate was dismantled and twenty men lost; there was none amongst us who did not expect to find a watery grave…my efforts centred on preserving the vaccine and begging for mercy from on high”.
Finally, six days later, Balmis and his boys were able to board a Chinese fishing boat and make it ashore in Macau, where he delivered the vaccine to the local Portuguese authorities and Catholic church leaders, who set about inoculating the local population from one of the deadliest diseases ever faced.
Prof. Morais notes in her article however, that there was a lot superstition and resistance in the local community at first, and initially no one volunteered to attend the inoculation sessions held at the Holy House of Mercy hospital. In order to convince people that the procedure was safe, the Chief Justice of the court, Miguel de Arriaga Brum da Silveira, formally summoned people to his own home to watch as he was vaccinated first.
The Curse of Cholera
Throughout the 1800’s, cholera was another major disease that city officials had to deal with.
“Until the 1930s, the population drank only water from local fountains and wells, and sometimes their polluted water caused temporary disease outbreaks. In the hot seasons, diarrhea, dysentery and fevers were common, and sometimes also cholera,” explains Prof. Rogério Miguel Puga.
One of the most well-known cases was that of Mary Morton Morrison, the wife Dr. Robert Morrison, a protestant missionary and translator working for the East India Company. Her death from cholera in 1821, prompted Robert Morrison to negotiate the purchase of a plot of land for her burial, which is the still the site of the Protestant Cemetery today.
Another prominent person to succumb to the disease was Portuguese Governor Pedro Alexandrino da Cunha, who died in 1850 after serving only 38 days in the post. Reports indicate that he ate an ice-cream made from contaminated water and died the next day.
It’s hard to know for sure how many people died of cholera in Macau throughout the 19th century, but there were frequent outbreaks and the number is likely to be in the thousands. The disease attacked victims suddenly and the effects were felt rapidly, including severe pains in the heart and stomach, headaches and fevers, diarrhoea and vomiting. It was usually fatal.
A respected British physician working in Asia at the time, Dr Levington, wrote about the disease: “I saw similar cases at Macao, in China; entire families would retire perfectly well at night, were suddenly attacked by the disease before morning, and, perhaps, all dead before the next day noon.”
“Water quality was a big concern for the administration, and over time officials prevented people from gathering their own water in the hills. Late in the 1800’s they began treating the water from certain wells and fountains, and distributed it in bottles. Only in 1938 was piped water established in the city,” explains Tereza Sena.
A number of other measures were taken to try to ensure the safety of the local population, as trading vessels from around the world docked in the ports to offload their goods.
In his report on cholera cases in Macau in 1902, the Surgeon-General of the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, John W. Kerr wrote: “Eleven steamers were inspected during the week, 1,088 individuals were bathed at the disinfecting station, and 1,511 bundles of clothing and bedding were disinfected by steam. There were 32 rejections because of fever. Since April 1, we have taken the temperatures of all steerage passengers.”
Macau was also hit by a serious strain of the influenza virus, commonly referred to as the Spanish Flu – one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in history – in 1918. According to records, the contagion came in two waves. During the first wave in 1918, the government constructed a pavilion for the isolation and treatment of epidemic diseases at Colina de D. Maria. When the second wave hit a year later, the government built a second isolation unit at the San Januário Hospital at a cost of $13,438.39. The Chinese Maritime Customs Report published in 1921 stated: “In June 1918 Macao [near Lappa] was visited by the universal influenza, which has claimed so many victims in Europe. 270 cases, with 120 deaths, were reported by the end of the year, the disease dying out again in the spring.”
A Plague on the City
In the mid-19th century, China was hit by the third pandemic of the bubonic plague (the same disease that killed millions of people in Europe in the mid-1300’s). The plague spread around Asia killing 10 million people in India alone. In 1888, a Portuguese ship arrived in Macau from India, flying an ominous yellow flag to indicate that there were sick people on board.
“At first, local authorities would not allow them to disembark, however later, barracks were built near the outer harbour area in order to isolate the crew,” states Tereza Sena. “This is one of the first examples of attempts to isolate sick people arriving by ship in a specific area to prevent the spread of disease. In 1928, a special hospital was constructed just to isolate sick crews and was initially used to contain a meningitis crisis.”
Fortunately, unlike in today’s world of modern transportation, diseases were not able to spread so quickly around the region, as reported in an article in The New York Medical Journal on January 23, 1897: “The malignant plague is the slowest-traveling of all epidemic diseases – it took ten months to extend from Hong Kong to Macao, a distance of thirty miles.”
Nonetheless, the plague did eventually arrive in Macau in 1895, carried in the fleas of rats that arrived on ships. It is estimated that around 1,200 people died of the disease between April and July of that year. On June 1, 1897, the Assistant Surgeon of the U.S. Marine-Hospital Service, S.D. Brookes reported that “18-20 cases a day occur at Macao, the Portuguese colony, having a population of 50,000”.
The famous Portuguese poet, Camilo Pessanha arrived in Macau during the early stages of the outbreak and recorded his impressions of the city’s preparations in a letter to his father. He described religious processions of the local people of the Macau, both Portuguese Catholics and Chinese trying to ward of the disease. For four nights, he observed around 6,000 local Chinese processing through the streets with lamps and gongs in an attempt to scare the disease away. Pessanha noted that with all the noise they were making, the plague would certainly not want to come to Macau!
It was around this time that the temple of Na Tcha was built near the old city walls and next to the Ruins of St. Paul’s. Na Tcha is the child god of war, and the temple was built to try put an end to the plague.
“Unfortunately, there was great stigmatization of the sick – the Chinese often considered them to be demonized by spirits, and for a time, the Catholics believed they were being punished for their sins,” explains Tereza.
The plague returned again from 1900-1915, and it was at this time that the local authorities came up with a clever plan to stop the rats from infecting the local water supply, by installing a special turn-pipe connection.
Between attempts at limiting the arrival of boats, isolating the sick, sterilizing infected areas and vaccinating the local population when possible, the small but busy port city of Macau was able to survive all of the many outbreaks with relatively few fatalities compared to other larger countries, methods that are not dissimilar to what we see being implemented today, more than a century later.
Dark Days of WW2
Throughout the Second World War, Portugal, and by extension, Macau, remained precariously neutral. Macau thus became a refuge to thousands of people from China and Hong Kong fleeing the Japanese army. More than 10,000 British and Americans came to Macau from Hong Kong, after the city fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day in 1941, along with over a hundred thousand more Chinese from the mainland. According to historian Geoffrey Gunn in his book Wartime Macau – Under the Japanese Shadow, the city’s population rose from 120,000 in 1936 to 400,000 by 1940. This massive influx of people, of a variety of nationalities and social classes, placed great stress on the small city, with many people suffering from a lack of shelter and clothing, and also disease, malnutrition and even starvation.
“The refugees from Hong Kong had support in Macau from the British Council distributing food, and many others were Macanese returning from Hong Kong, so had they had the Macanese support network and the Catholic church support network,” notes Prof. Paul Spooner from the University of Macau. “But the refugees coming from China had no network of support.”
The refugee population from China were certainly the most vulnerable and as Gunn explains, for anyone living in Macau at that time “survival depended upon their social class and the ability to rely upon family and other connections.”
“At that time, if you had money or relationships, you could eat. But if you didn’t you would very likely die,” adds Prof. Spooner. “The Japanese army confiscated the rice throughout much of southeast Asia for their troops, and many transportation routes were blockaded and destroyed.”
Gunn notes in his book that “virtually an island surrounded by Japanese land and naval forces… Macau was utterly beholden to Japanese permissions for all its external needs”.
One refugee at the time was former Hong Kong businessman, teacher and journalist, Jose (Jack) Braga, who kept a note book of his experiences. Throughout it, he noted the continuously rising price of rice in the markets, and the resulting shortages. He describes shops “hiding rice” and “black market” prices doubling over a short period of time. Detailing the chaotic situation in the city, he also once wrote: “Crowd of beggars grabbed a police lorry full of rice” and “Seven men and two women arrested in Macao accused of cannibalism”.
“There was no meat, but there were reports of eating human flesh,” explains Prof. Spooner. “People would buy meat in the markets, possibly thinking it was pork. In his memoirs, John Reeves, the British council at that time describes buying meat, but later coming to the realization that what he was eating was probably not pork. Monsignor Manuel Texeira briefly spoke about this situation too.”
Even with the challenges being faced in the city today, it’s difficult to imagine just how desperate and grim the situation was in Macau during the war.
“They had cholera and starvation in the city, so there were bodies lying around in the streets. Everyday a truck would go by and pick up the bodies lying in the streets,” comments Prof. Spooner.
He also details a rarely reported story that he came across in his research referring to an ominously named “Pit of 10,000 Souls”.
“Cremating people required fuel, and was an expensive process. There was no wood around because many of the buildings had been stripped for cooking wood, so there was no fuel,” he describes. “Therefore, they would take the bodies to Taipa on ferries and put them in a big pit. I suspect they would fill the pit with lime, and that pit was called the ‘Pit of 10,000 Souls’”.
Against this grim background, Macau was also infiltrated by spies and agents from Japan, China, England and America, all running clandestine operations to gather intelligence on each other, and even resorting to violence to cover their tracks. Yet despite all this drama and human suffering, Gunn notes that remarkably, “all administrative functions, services and departments…were in operation” and “various social and sporting activities also continued”, creating a stark contrast to what life was like for locals in the occupied city of Hong Kong just a few miles away.
