Jonathan Porter

Jonathan Porter's history of Macau, Macau: The Imaginary City, is much less sensational than Stella Dong's chronicle of Shanghai, perhaps because Porter is an academic historian in a way that Dong is not, but also, maybe, because Macau, as Porter makes clear, has, for the last 300 or so years, been a pretty sleepy place. Macau's sleepiness, its position out of the mainstream of history, are exactly what make it charming, and it still is charming (I've just returned from a visit), though Porter was much more pessimistic about Macau's future in his book's conclusion (it was published in 1996) than, we now know, was warranted. I wonder if the Portuguese antique shop owner who, Porter reports, was so worried about the colony's reversion to Chinese control that he was preparing to flee, regrets his decision.… (plus d'informations)