Boom gay bar macau

II Macao Gold, hand in hand with opium, plays an extraordinary secret role through the Far East, and Hong Kong and Macao, the boom Portuguese possession only forty miles away, are the hub of the whole underground traffic. In England, except between bullion brokers, nobody ever talks about gold as a medium of exchange or as an important item among personal possessions.

Someone has been caught smuggling gold. So-and-so has been murdered for his gold macau. Someone else has been counterfeiting gold. The reason for this passionate awareness of the metal is the total mistrust all Orientals have for paper money and the profound belief that, without one's bar or beaten leaf of gold concealed somewhere on one's person or kept in a secret place at gay, one is a poor man.

Irresistibly attracted, I gravitated towards him, the internal Geiger-counter of a writer of thrillers ticking furiously. Richard Hughes and I took the S. Takshing, one of the three famous ferries that do the Macao run every day. These ferries are not the broken-down, smoke-billowing rattletraps engineered by whisky-sodden Scotsmen we see on the films, but commodious three-decker steamers run with workmanlike precision.

The three-hour trip through the islands and across Deep Bay, brown with the waters of the Pearl River that more or less marks the boundary between the leased territories and Communist China, was beautiful and uneventful. The communist gunboats have given up molesting Bar shipping and the wallowing sampans chugging with their single diesels homewards with the day's catch, the red flag streaming from the insect-wing sails, were the only sign that we were crossing communist waters.

At the northern extremity of Deep Bay lies Macao, a peninsula about one-tenth the size of the Isle of Wight that is the oldest European settlement in China. It was founded in and is chiefly famous for the first lighthouse built on the whole coast of China. It is also noted for the gigantic ruins of St Paul's Cathedral built in and burned down in ; and finally—save the mark!

So far as its premier citizen, Dr Lobo, is concerned, the most interesting features of Macao are that there is no income tax and no exchange control whatever, and that there is complete freedom of import and export of foreign currencies, and all forms of bullion.

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To take only the case of gold bar, it is, therefore, perfectly easy for anyone to arrive by ferry or seaplane or come across from Communist China, only fifty yards away across the river, buy any quantity of gold, from a ton down to a gold coin, and leave Macao quite openly with his booty. It is then up to the purchaser, and of no boom whatsoever to Dr Lobo or the chief of the Macao police, to smuggle his gold back into China, into neighbouring Hong Kong or, if he has a seaplane, fly off with it into the wide world.

These considerations make Macao one of the most interesting market-places in the world, macau one with many secrets. As we came into the roadstead, we were greeted by a scene of great splendour. The sun was setting and in its pathway lay a spectacular fleet of many hundreds of junks and sampans at anchor. This caused much excited chattering amongst our fellow-passengers and it was only on the next morning, when this fleet and other fleets from the outer islands were spread all over the sea, now under the rising sun, all heading for the mouth of the Pearl River, that we learnt the answer.

The Sea Fishing Co-operative of Communist China had ordered all fishermen to a great meeting at which new fishing laws were to be promulgated—matters such as that the smaller junks should fish home waters within a certain radius, while the larger junks and sampans would be confined to the more distant fishing grounds.

It all sounded very orderly and sensible, and very un-Chinese. The Portuguese Navy, represented by a small Kiplingesque gunboat with one gun behind a square shield surely a gatling! The whole town is like this, a jumble of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century highly ornamented European styles, gimcrack modern ferro-concrete, and spruce, hideous villas.

Half the streets are cobbled alleys and gay wide, empty modern highways at whose pretentious crossings an occasional rickshaw waits for the otiose traffic lights to change to green. In short, the place is as picturesque as, and deader than, a beautiful graveyard. There we met 'Our Man in Macao' and drank warm gins and tonics under a banyan tree while I enlightened myself about the four Mr Bigs—who, with the Portuguese Government in the background, control pretty well everything that goes on in this enigmatic territory.