Your search

This article analyzes the collection of objects intended for opium smoking held at the Museum of the Scientific and Cultural Centre of Macao (CCCM), seeking to contextualize their historical and cultural value within the scope of the collections that the CCCM preserves and promotes. Based on a descriptive and interpretive analysis of the museological ensemble — including typologies of containers, instruments, and materials — the author discusses how these pieces materialize practices associated with opium, while also revealing trajectories of circulation, taste, and appropriation linked to the Luso-Chinese context. Methodologically, the study combines a reading of catalogued materials, historical contextualization of opium consumption and trade in China and Macao, and reflection on the conditions of collecting and musealization that enable the transformation of utilitarian objects into heritage testimonies. The conclusions emphasize that the collection should not be read merely as an ethnographic curiosity or a record of illicit consumption, but rather as a material archive of cultural contacts and colonial mediations, wherein the function and symbolism of the objects are reconfigured within the museum. Thus, the collection becomes a critical device for understanding Macao as a space of plural encounters and for interrogating the forms of representing the past in contemporary collections.

The article analyzes the notion of "miscegenation" attributed to Benjamim Videira Pires, SJ, proposing that his work should be read less as a merely cultural synthesis and more as a pedagogical and hermeneutic endeavor of encounter between Christian and Confucian matrices in the context of Macau. The author argues that, for Pires, the Western–Chinese fusion operates through linguistic mediations and educational practices, in which translation, catechesis, and moral reflection function as devices of "transculturation." Methodologically, the study employs a critical-conceptual reading of the Jesuit's texts and their editorial and historiographical framing, articulating the philosophical and cultural categories mobilized throughout the reception of his thought. As findings, the article shows that "miscegenation" in Pires is expressed in a dual orientation: the valorization of dialogue between values and, simultaneously, the organization of a discourse of approximation that seeks to render differences communicable. It concludes that Benjamim Videira Pires's legacy contributes to understanding Macau as a space of continuous symbolic recomposition, where the bond between cultures is constructed through processes of teaching, translation, and ethical conciliation.

This article analyzes the cultural identity of Macao through the ideas of Benjamin Videira Pires, S.J., highlighting how the Jesuit interprets the territory's uniqueness as a space of mediation between Portuguese matrices and Chinese cultural dynamics. Based on an interpretive reading of the author's own texts and formulations, as well as a historical framing of the post-1949 political-institutional context, the study seeks to understand the extent to which cultural "flexibility"—conceived as resistance without rupture—becomes the explanatory axis of Videira Pires's thought. The argument emphasizes that, for the Jesuit, Macao's identity continuity is not founded on military imposition, but on the capacity for ethical and religious adaptation, preserving loyalties "to God and to the Fatherland" in an environment of international pressures and geopolitical transformations. Among the findings, the articulation between missionary legacy and educational projects stands out, along with the valorization of Jesuit networks and competencies associated with the Luso-Portuguese period, and the reading of social practices (such as the culture of "good manners" and other everyday expressions) as lived cultural heritage. The conclusion is that Macanese identity, in his thought, emerges as relative stability: a form of creative coexistence that resists historical catastrophe without losing cultural density.

The article analyzes the relationship between the work and perspective of Eça de Queiroz and the European imaginary regarding Chinese emigration to Macao, seeking to clarify how literary and historiographical discourses contributed to shaping perceptions of migratory flows between the second half of the nineteenth century and the period of consolidation of Portuguese rule. Aresta argues that Eça de Queiroz’s reception of Macao cannot be read as a simple “realist” mirror of Chinese mobility, but rather as an interpretive device that articulates observation, stereotypes, and debates on labor, commerce, and Asian “presences.” Methodologically, the study combines textual criticism with historical contextualization, confronting Eça de Queiroz’s references with eighteenth-century historical documentation and studies on the Portuguese and Asian presence in Macao and regional routes, including the role of missions and mercantile networks. It concludes that by intersecting literature and colonial sources, it becomes possible to identify continuities and ruptures between cultural narrative and material processes of migration and settlement, evidencing both the persistence of interpretive models and the limits of readings based on figures and typologies.

The article investigates the trajectory and reception of Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage as a literary figure between Macao and the Chinese sphere, arguing that the poet's biography and poetry become a privileged vantage point for understanding the modes of Luso-Oriental cultural circulation in the "Pearl River Delta." Departing from the historical centrality of Macao as an Atlantic-maritime port of contact with China—in dialogue with other canonical presences (Camões, Camilo Pessanha and, more recently, the modernist poetry of Eugénio de Andrade)—the study reinterprets Bocage's voyage through Portuguese India (Goa and Damão) and his subsequent arrival in Macao, confronting aspirations of fame and fortune with the evidence of imperial decadence and the moral economies of colonial daily life. Methodologically, the text articulates an intertextual reading of poems attributed to the author, anchored in biographical data and in the historical-cultural contextualization of the spaces through which Bocage passed, with attention to the social conditions that shape his satirical and licentious language. It concludes that Macao functions, in Bocage's work and literary image, as a setting of transit and observation, where the experience of the Orient "East of the East" is translated into a writing that combines desire, frustration, and critique, contributing to the fixation of enduring representations of Macao in Portuguese literature.

Aureliano Barata's article reconstructs the trajectory of the Jesuit priest Benjamim António Videira Pires (1916–1999), interpreting him as a key figure in the articulation between education, historiography, and the cultural memory of Macao over nearly half a century. The central argument maintains that the author's work, marked by missionary experience and pedagogical labor, decisively contributed to understanding the territory's historical complexity and to valorizing the persistence of Western cultural legacies, despite adverse political circumstances. To support this interpretation, the text employs a biographical and historical-contextual approach, situating the honoree's formation and activity within the transformations of republican Portugal, the regional repercussions of early twentieth-century conflicts, as well as the local impact of religious expulsions and the reorganization of education. Complementarily, Barata articulates the reconstruction of his personal itinerary with an assessment of Videira Pires's intellectual output, highlighting the need to gather and republish dispersed works, including articles published in religious and patriotic periodicals. The article concludes that, at a celebratory moment of the centenary, a more systematic valorization of his work is imperative, given its continued relevance for academic research and the future projection of Macao's historiographical legacy.

The article proposes a reassessment of the “first corpus” of Macau’s literature, arguing that its categorization has historically been marked by external criteria—above all, binarisms between historical document and “belles-lettres production”—which obscure aesthetic continuities and local cultural dynamics. The authors analyze how different practices of writing, editing, and circulation (in colonial and multicultural contexts) shaped the way certain texts were incorporated, excluded, or hierarchized within narratives about Macanese literature. Methodologically, the research combines bibliographic reconstructions and critical examination of the classificatory framework in which literature is discussed, articulating textual evidence with considerations of cultural institutions and transmission networks. In particular, the study illuminates the role of Tang Xianzu (汤显袓) by showing how the reception and mediation of the author/work become an interpretive operator for Macau: the translation, adaptation, and appropriation of references from Chinese theatre and dramaturgy function as a device for legitimizing and reorganizing the canon. It concludes that a more flexible categorical approach—capable of integrating performances, mediations, and hybrid practices—enhances the understanding of the foundations of early Macau literature and of how it was constituted in the encounter between traditions and regimes of valorization.

This article proposes a reading of *As Metades do Meu Dragão*, by Manuel Tavares de Pinho, articulating the motif of "uprootedness" with the notion of "root" as a symbolic operation: not as a fixed origin, but as an intimate construction arising from displacement. From a critical-literary framework, the author argues that the text is organized as a mirror of states of mind, converting what might be perceived as fragmentary or "rough" into the substance of the poetic act. In dialogue with discussions on Orientalism, cultural mediations, and processes of symbolic transfer between history and language, it is argued that the work mobilizes Luso-Oriental configurations not merely as a thematic backdrop, but as a mechanism of transfiguration: the Orient emerges less as a fully known alterity and more as a support for self-representation and for the dramatization of identity tensions. Methodologically, the article combines close reading of the novel's discourse and imagery with theoretical contextualization (including debates on the representation of the "Other" and strategies of aestheticization of historical experience). It concludes that *As Metades do Meu Dragão* offers a poetics of the in-between place, in which division ("halves") and the loss of root function as conditions for the production of meaning, memory, and cultural belonging.

Celina Veiga de Oliveira’s article revisits, within a biographical and historiographical context, the significance of the posthumous work of Benjamim Videira Pires, S.J., particularly A Embaixada Mártir (1988), interpreting it as an expression of Christianity “in circumstance” within the Luso-Asian space. The author proposes that the career of the Jesuit—educator, missionary, historian, and sinologist—should be read in light of the tension between religious conviction and historical, political, and cultural constraints. Methodologically, the analysis combines an intellectual framework (drawing on Ortega y Gasset’s concept of “circumstance”) with a thematic exegesis of the central chapters of the monograph concerning the dispatch, in 1640, of an embassy from the Senate of Macau to Japan, one year after the closure of ports to Macau’s ships, highlighting the episodes that culminated in the deaths of 61 Catholics and the construction of the testimonial process (“The Thirteen Witnesses,” “The Informative Process”). It concludes that A Embaixada Mártir offers an apologetic reading of the Portuguese legacy in the East, but also a historical narrative that demonstrates how Christianity, in seeking cultural mediations and transnational ties, confronts and is shaped by the reconfiguration of commercial geopolitics and religious repression.

The article examines how the reformist and Sino-merchant intellectual Zheng Guanying 鄭觀應 (1842–1921), often celebrated as a "Son of Macao," constructed his vision of modern China from translocal experiences spanning Xiamen/Xiangshan (his native region), Shanghai, and the Macao territory itself. The analysis sustains the argument that the designation "Son of Macao" does not arise from an administrative bond (Zheng had not belonged to the circuit of imperial examinations that led to officialdom), but rather from a hybrid cultural and urban circuit: his formation in the cosmopolitan environments of Shanghai and his periodic returns to Macao, where he composed the work *Shengshi Weiyan* 盛世危言. Methodologically, the text mobilizes biographical reading and historical-cultural contextualization, articulating personal itineraries, linguistic practices (including the learning of English), and written production with the materiality of Zheng's domestic heritage. It concludes that the so-called "Mandarin’s House," today heritage-listed and restored, functions as an interpretive device for integrating family memory, socioeconomic mobility, and imaginaries of reform, explaining why Macao transforms into an identity and intellectual emblem in Zheng's thought.

The article analyzes the artisanal dimension of Tomás Pereira (Santos da Costa Pereira), a Portuguese Jesuit active in Beijing during the reign of Kangxi (1673-1708), with a particular focus on his production of “curious things” — especially clocks, musical instruments, and other mechanical artifacts. The authors base themselves essentially on a documentary corpus attributed to Pereira, articulating it with contemporary references about his knowledge and with the circulation of skills between missionary and courtly contexts. The methodology combines paleographic and historiographic reading of sources, reconstructing the place of the European craftsman in the technical ecosystem of the Qing court, as well as the modes of legitimation of his work. It concludes that Pereira's reputation as a craftsman results from effective mechanical competence and an ability to translate technical knowledge into devices appreciated by imperial recipients. The production of musical instruments and measuring mechanisms is treated not merely as curiosity or a mere effect of exoticism, but as a practice embedded in networks of commission, evaluation, and ritual and cultural use. Thus, the article repositions Pereira as a technical and cultural mediator, offering new elements for understanding the governance of knowledge in the court of Kangxi and the role of Jesuit intermediaries in the material history of China.

The article analyzes the relations between poetry and diplomacy in the writing of two contemporary Portuguese authors—José Augusto Seabra and Luís Filipe Castro Mendes—proposing that the visibility of the Orient in their work results not from a simple exoticism, but from a cultural mediation sustained by long genealogies of Luso-Asian presence. Drawing on the idea of "Portuguese literary Orientalism" (in dialogue with the notion of Orientalism formulated by Edward Said), the text argues that the intertextuality organizing the representation of China and India functions as an aesthetic and ideological inheritance: the Orient becomes legible only when reinscribed through canonical figures (notably Camilo Pessanha, but also other lineages linked to the Orient). Methodologically, the essay privileges comparative reading and close reading of specific poems ("The Ten Thousand Mountains" and "Homage to Pessanha"), articulating them with contexts of textual circulation and with the persistence, in the postcolonial era, of forms of institutionalization of oriental experience by the state apparatus (diplomacy, public functions, and intertextual networks). It concludes that Seabra and Castro Mendes update a "homage" that, more than reconstituting geographies, reactivates a literary grammar of the Portuguese tradition in order to imagine the Orient as a space of inheritance, loss, and transformation.

The article proposes a historiographical reconstruction of the Lisbon–Macau Air Raid (1924), placing particular emphasis on the connections between Portugal and Macau and, above all, on the problem of its oblivion and the consequent need to recover sources and documentary mediations. The analysis situates the event within the dynamics of international aviation’s assertion in the early twentieth century and the process of aeronautical institutionalisation under the First Republic, articulating the undertaking with a political-cultural programme of imperial projection “through the air”. Methodologically, the text draws on interpretive synthesis and the mobilisation of testimonies and historiographical materials associated with the preparation, execution, and social reception of the raid, including discourses produced by the protagonists after the journey. Among the main results, the raid is interpreted as a dual mission—both patrimonial and competitive within the aeronautical field—alongside Macau’s role as a space of reception and symbolic legitimation for the aviators. The conclusion is that the epic feat is not limited to the technical dimension of the crossing, but involves ecosystems of sociability, propaganda, and the political conditions of the republican regime, whose documentary evidence deserves to be systematised in order to consolidate a more complete history of Luso-Macanese relations.

This article examines how the sandalwood trade between Timor and Macao, within the framework of Portuguese and Dutch expansion in the eastern archipelago throughout the “long” seventeenth century, reconfigured and simultaneously disrupted long-distance Asian networks of trade and tribute. It is argued that the Timorese case allows us to overcome competing civilizational frameworks—the Chinese “Nanyang” and the Portuguese “Estado da Índia”—by demonstrating that the viability of European incursions depended on regional constraints and local mediations, including Chinese mercantile networks reactivated through the presence of groups based in Macao. Methodologically, the study articulates a historiographical synthesis with a critical reading of the circulation of cartographic and cosmographic information, contrasting European narratives of “discovery” with evidence of Asian integration: European attention to Timor, the role of intermediaries and intra-colonial conflicts (with Makassar, the VOC, and the Timorese polity of Wehale), and the centrality of the sandalwood trade. It concludes that, although Portugal structured its own narrative of knowledge and possession, the Timor–Macao articulation suggests an Asian “discovery” of the “Great South” (terra Australis incognita) preceding European formalizations, exemplified by the Luso-Malaccan cosmography of Manuel Godinho de Erédia and the concept of nusa Antara (“land between”).

The article by Giorgio Sinedino presents an annotated translation of the first “discourse” (*xu*) of the first scroll of Zhang Yanyuan’s *Record of Famous Paintings of All Ages* (*Lidai Minghua Ji*), a foundational work of pictorial criticism from the Tang dynasty. The central contribution lies in framing Zhang’s thesis that painting should be understood as a dimension of the Confucian “canon”: not a mere craft or artisanship, but a form of knowledge capable of participating in moral and political indoctrination, supporting the ordering of social relations, and, by extension, occupying a place equivalent to that of the *Six Classics*. Methodologically, the work combines a full translation of selections from the first scroll with editorial commentaries that guide the reader toward the presuppositions of the Chinese argument, pointing out possible distortions, biases, and singularities of perspective. Zhang’s ideas are interpreted less as an autonomous theoretical innovation and more as a representative synthesis of the intellectual consensus among Confucian circles favorable to painting. As a result, the publication offers not only an initial textual and terminological access to the work, but also a key to understanding the social and historical function of painting in its early stages, within a context of political fragmentation and reconfiguration of the prestige of the arts among literate elites.

Giorgio Sinedino's article presents an annotated Portuguese translation of Ji Kang's 嵇康 essay (聲不哀樂論, "There is neither sadness nor joy in sounds"), situating it within the intellectual debate of the Wei and Jin dynasties and, in particular, within the ethos of Xuanxue (玄學, "Study of the Mystery"). The central contribution of the text is the Jiangkan defense that music, as a sonic phenomenon conditioned by a natural order (Heaven-Earth and the dynamics of the Five Elements), does not carry in itself fixed emotional determinations: "sadness/joy" are not inherent properties of sounds, but vary according to the relationship between meaning, practice, and naming, and not by any supposed mechanical correspondence with the political state. Methodologically, Sinedino combines philological translation with an interpretive apparatus, elucidating terms, rhetorical disputes, and intertexts from the canon and the tradition of controversies over music and morality. The annotations highlight how the text's dialogue counterposes a Confucian thesis—according to which sounds reflect and produce values and affections—with the thesis of an essential invariance of sound, without this implying total libertinism: Ji Kang operates with argumentative authority, reformulating criteria of orthodoxy. It is concluded that the work constitutes a sophisticated critique of the political-moral naturalization of music and offers a model of interpretive freedom for the appreciator.

The article interrogates the relationship between "individual expression" and the idea of "possible freedom," arguing that freedom is not a natural given but a social construction mediated by practices and rules. Departing from a comparative reading of the Greco "agonistic spirit"—associated with the formation of the individual through educational, political, and military competitions—the author highlights that individuality emerges when formal criteria and adjudicating mechanisms exist that render the contest intelligible and relatively impartial. From this framework, the text shifts to the Chinese experience of the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (竹林七賢)," taking the group as a historical-cultural case for reflecting on how the refusal of dominant norms can coexist with alternative forms of normativity. Methodologically, the work operates through historical-conceptual analysis and a contextualized reading of intellectual and performative practices attributed to the literary tradition associated with the group. It concludes that the freedom attributed to the sages is "viable" only because it is anchored in shared grammars of action—reinterpreted rules of the game—that allow individual expression without entirely dissolving the communal horizon.

The article discusses how to think about the specificity of Chinese painting without reducing it to categories produced by the European aesthetic tradition. Starting from the centrality of the concept of mimesis in the West—especially in the readings of Plato and Aristotle—the author argues that such a framework tends to transform Chinese art into mere “representation” and, therefore, into an object of evaluation according to a Western historical-philosophical schema. In contrast, it is proposed that the decisive conceptual distinction for interpreting certain Chinese pictorial practices lies in the opposition between mimetic imitation and the notion of *qixiang* (“climate/atmosphere,” as a mode of the world’s presence), understood as a principle of aesthetic configuration and correlative apprehension among work, observer, and vital process. Methodologically, the text operates a comparative historical-conceptual reading: it revisits classical debates on representation, identifies implications of this framework for the reception of Chinese art, and reconstructs the place of *qixiang* as an explanatory category. It concludes that properly discriminating Chinese pictorial arts requires shifting the focus from the reproduction of appearances to the articulation of a meaningful “atmosphere,” thereby reducing both Orientalism and simplifier universalism.

The article argues that religion constitutes one of the structuring axes of Macanese society, functioning as "intangible heritage" of the territory and as a cultural language that articulates plurality, sociability, and associations over more than 450 years. Drawing on a historical-ethnographic anthropological approach, the author mobilizes comparative evidence (including fieldwork in family households and analysis of previous research) and resorts to documentary observations and conceptual discussions on the difficulties of translating "religion" into Chinese categories (for example, the tensions between religion and culture and the limitations of self-reporting). Methodologically, the text employs a questionnaire administered to 100 Chinese residents of Macau, supported by research in over 200 families, to sustain the centrality of associations as a cultural marker, as well as to problematize the apparently low "religiosity" expressed by part of the interviewees. Among the main conclusions, the historical "peaceful and harmonious" coexistence between religious systems and community practices stands out, along with the persistent presence of temples and churches as spaces of collective memory, and the role of religious and charitable associations in social organization. The article further proposes that Chinese religion in Macau may have roots in earlier fishing groups (such as the Tanka), while Catholicism, although less numerous among the Chinese, continues to perform relevant religious, cultural, and social functions.

This text presents a critical-biographical evocation of Benjamim Videira Pires, S.J. (1916–1999), articulating institutional memory and historiographic reconstruction of his trajectory as a missionary, pedagogue, historian, and writer. The author argues that Videira Pires’ uniqueness lies in the confluence of cultural action and civic commitment in Macau during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as in his ability to interpret the “circumstance” of Christianity in dialogue with local reality and, simultaneously, to inscribe Macanese identity within a broader framework of the encounter of cultures. Methodologically, the article mobilizes the author’s personal testimony and biographical framework sources gathered by the International Institute of Macau, drawing on the biography included in the collection “Missionários para o Século XXI” and the book *P. Benjamim Videira Pires, Meu Irmão* (2011). As a result, the text contextualizes a set of recently commissioned studies and discusses the need to consolidate and broaden the circulation of Videira Pires’ works, including the republication of emblematic titles and the compilation of texts scattered across newspapers and magazines. It thus concludes by asserting the urgency of preserving and reassessing his legacy as a lasting reference for the historiography and culture of Macau.