What has done it? The answer is simple: gambling. Macau has become the world's largest city for gambling, shooting past Las Vegas about four years ago.
We did not hit the casinos, preferring instead to do cultural history - a magnificent theatre, the Protestant cemetery, the town hall, etc - but my excuse is that we weren't there very long. Walking through the early 20th-century parts of Macau, I was reminded of parts of Shanghai, that other European implant, though this time on mainland China.
You see, Shanghai was the main base for European trade with China it was much more important in the 1920s than Hong Kong and you feel as you walk along the Bund that you are in a European city. Or at least you are surrounded by European-style buildings. And now Shanghai has become the richest place on the mainland, with a slightly higher GDP per head than Beijing. As always with these statistics, it depends on how you measure things, but I recently saw some data that suggested Shanghai had the same GDP per head as Italy.
The moral, surely, is that a combination of European heritage and legal/financial structure with Chinese resources and drive generates wealth at astonishing speed and scale. Tourism is part of it, of course. If you have a little window of time on your next visit to Hong Kong, head over to Macau to see another example of the China boom.
- INDEPENDENT
