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.… (meer)