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The article argues that Henrique de Senna Fernandes’ picaresque literature constitutes a privileged cultural archive for capturing the “factual” of old Macao, as it transforms characters and situations into mechanisms for reconstructing daily life, social tensions, and interactions between communities. Starting from the premise that literary texts are simultaneously aesthetic narratives and historical documents, the author proposes a contextualized reading of two works by the writer: *A Trança Feiticeira* (set in the 1930s) and *Amor e Dedinhos de Pé* (inspired by oral accounts from childhood). The methodology is based on an articulation between literary analysis and historical-cultural framing, considering the functioning of picaresque figures as “living documents” capable of reflecting power relations, mobility, and identity change in the 1930s–1950s. It concludes that, in the novels, the heroes’ trajectories reveal the interweaving of the Chinese, Portuguese, and Macanese communities, allowing for the observation of moments of decline and/or socioeconomic rise. Fiction, in turn, functions as a nostalgic and critical mediation in the face of transformations in the territory under Portuguese administration, contributing to safeguarding a threatened cultural memory.

This article examines how food functions as a vehicle for nostalgia and cultural preservation in Henrique de Senna Fernandes’s fiction, focusing on the role of cuisine in *A Trança Feiticeira*. Building from broader accounts of Macanese culinary history, the study situates “Cozinhaçã” as a frontier cuisine shaped by Portuguese adaptation and successive influences from Malay, Indian, African, and Chinese traditions. Methodologically, the article reads Senna Fernandes’s culinary references as textual markers of identity work: dishes, ingredients, and eating practices are treated not merely as atmospheric detail, but as narrative devices that stage memory, belonging, and the fragility of cultural continuity. The argument is that culinary discourse in the novel performs a dual task. On the one hand, it maps Macao’s historical position within oceanic and diasporic networks, using food to demonstrate mixture and reinvention. On the other, it mourns the loss—or threatened disappearance—of specific “home-town” recipes by linking them to family life, religious occasions, and communal gatherings. The article concludes that in Senna Fernandes’s writing, cuisine becomes an archive of sensory heritage, transforming everyday eating into a literary strategy for maintaining cultural uniqueness amid rapid social and political change.

This article examines how the fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes constructs "lives" and modes of living in the territory of Macao under historical and political tensions, articulating politicization, patriarchy, expectations of "progress," and post-colonial problematics. Starting from the author's singular position as a "son of the land" (born in 1923 into a Macanese family with plural roots), the text argues that his writing—though often anchored in first-person short stories and novellas recalled from the post-war period—functions as a cultural chronicle of the almost-past, capable of revealing social continuities and epochal fractures. The methodology combines intrinsic literary reading with historical-cultural contextualization: the study observes configurations of power in gender relations, the narrative regimes of transmission (stories told, collected, and retold), and the manner in which certain images of modernization coexist with persistent hierarchies. It concludes that, by representing life in Macao before and after decisive turning points (the Japanese occupation, the instability of the 1960s, the 1974 Revolution, and the transition period), Senna Fernandes not only preserves local memory; he also exposes, through fictional means, the way in which politics and patriarchy organize everyday life, producing an implicit—and often ambivalent—critique of colonial narratives and the promises of development that succeeded them.

The article analyzes the work of the Luso-Chinese sculptor Raúl Maria Xavier (1894–1964) in order to understand how his “Oriental” experience—particularly the visual and cultural learning acquired in Macau and through contact with the art of mainland China and Japan—translates into a sculptural aesthetic mobilized within the context of the Portuguese Estado Novo. Starting from a biographical and historical framework—marked by his training in Lisbon, a period of study in Italy, and professional trajectories between colony and metropolis—the study argues that the presence of a “Spirit of the Orient” does not operate as peripheral exoticism, but rather as a formal and symbolic resource incorporated into artistic languages recognized by the official culture of the period. Methodologically, the text is structured as a contribution to an interpretive catalog: it reconstructs trajectories, maps works and typologies (portraits, civil and military statuary, allegories, and religious figuration), and relates institutional reception (exhibitions, missions, decorations, and teaching positions) to strategies of aesthetic legitimation. The conclusion is that Raúl Xavier, despite his subsequent historiographical marginalization, constitutes a singular and little-studied case of Luso-Asian circulation of artistic repertoires, revealing how hybrid identities and visual grammars of European matrix are articulated in the art of the Estado Novo.

This article analyzes Tang Xianzu's *The Peony Pavilion* (Mudan Ting) as a literary device that reconfigures Confucian ethical-political norms through female desire, taking the dream–death–rebirth cycle as its narrative axis. The author argues that the work, although often classified as a romantic drama, also operates as a critique of the expectations of "filial obedience" and the social regulation of the body, by granting the protagonist Du Liniang an affective agency that challenges the moral pedagogy conveyed by the *Classic of Poetry*. Methodologically, the reading combines cultural contextualization with a symbolic hermeneutics of the central names and images (Peony, Plum Tree, and Spring Fragrance), treated as dense signs that condense categories of gender, youth, eroticism, fertility, and the life cycle. The analysis further articulates the temporal dimension of the plot (political crises and military conscription) with the persistence of love as a force capable of suspending the boundary between life and death. It concludes that, by staging the legitimacy of the amorous impulse and its transformative efficacy, the play articulates a plural vision of the human—often read in dialogue with Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—and offers a model of final reconciliation that nonetheless emerges from a fundamental transgression.

This article investigates how the unpublished poem “Macao” (1950), by Austin Coates, mobilizes the imaginary of the Portuguese “discoveries” to represent intercultural encounter in Macau. Starting from Coates’ relevance to Anglophone historiography and literature on the enclave, the author contextualizes the text through biographical data and the recurrence, in the writer’s interviews and works, of themes such as contact with “other realities” and fascination with the Portuguese presence in the East. Methodologically, the study is based on a textual and thematic analysis of the poem, subsequently articulated with a comparative procedure that brings “Macao” closer to *Os Lusíadas*, understood as a structuring intertext for the construction of images, values, and narratives of cultural mediation. The analysis demonstrates that the poem reconfigures the epic of the navigations as a device for reading the Macanese territory: the idea of discovery ceases to operate solely as a myth of conquest and comes to function as a key to thinking about circulation, cultural translation, and the historical Sino-Portuguese coexistence. It is concluded that, by inscribing Macau within a Luso-epic grammar, Coates produces a vision that is simultaneously celebratory and ambivalent, in which “interculturality” appears less as a rupture and more as prolonged cultural sedimentation.

The article argues that “Macao” functions, in Western and Hong Kong imaginations, as a liminal space where the marginal becomes magical: a shadow zone that simultaneously threatens and seduces, particularly in narratives that mobilize the “capitalist casino,” the circulation of images, and the economy of desire. The author maintains that although Macao plays a “decisive” role in contemporary logics of gambling and profit, it remains paradoxically “absent” from everyday life and narrative framing, transformed into a setting or cipher for other cultural experiences. Methodologically, the text undertakes a critical-intertextual reading of media representations—above all cinema and literature—articulating them with theoretical notions of Orientalist imagery, extraterritoriality, and cultural ambivalence (including the figuration of “dark writing” as writing in the shadows). Among the cases discussed, notable are cinematic and satirical reinterpretations of Macao by authors and directors from diverse horizons (for example, Josef von Sternberg, Timothy Mo, and Johnnie To), who at times re-enact noir and detective exoticisms, and at others reconfigure the underworld in a mode of action. It concludes that such “imagined Macaos” redirect the place into a global grammar of fantasy and risk, where local people and routines are erased, while the city persists as a metaphor and device for the circulation of capital and images.

The article analyzes the birth year of José Vicente Jorge, first-born son of Câncio José Jorge and Aureliana Maria Guterres, which occurred in Macau in the parish of São Lourenço on 27 December 1872. Based on the fragility of the local press—marked by the closure and suspension of critical newspapers and by the dependence on a Gazeta de Macau e Timor, then edited by the governor's secretary—the author argues that the widely repeated date lacks rigorous documentary verification. The methodology is based on a historiographic reading and on the critical reconstruction of the media and political context of Macau between 1868 and 1872, articulating it with the identification of possible registration routes (births, baptisms, and obituaries) and with the analysis of local governance, particularly the transition to the Viscount of São Januário. As a result, it is concluded that the problem of the "year of birth" should be treated as a limit case of incomplete circulation of sources, in which the credibility of the datum depends less on genealogical memories and more on the confrontation with available documentation and with the material conditions of news production.

The article presents the Author Index of issues 33 to 36 of the *Review of Culture* (Revista Macau), systematically organizing the contributions published in the “RC International” section. The editorial proposal focuses on making retrievable, through bibliographic and authorial references, the studies that address central themes for the history and culture of Macau and related spaces in Asia and the Lusophone world. The methodology is essentially documentary and bibliographic: the survey and indexing of authors, in correspondence with their respective titles and the identification of the issue number, month of publication, and pagination. The selection highlights plural approaches — from Atlantic and Asian circulation (including relations between Portugal, China, and Macau) to analyses of epidemics, port projects, and republican movements; from studies of cartography and trade to investigations of missions, identities, and sociocultural dynamics, often in dialogue with European and Chinese sources. As results, the index consolidates a reference tool that favors thematic and authorial navigation, allowing the reader to map research networks and guide access to specific works within the 2009–2010 set, contributing to the preservation and intelligibility of the journal's collection.

The article analyzes the "questions currently pending between Portugal and China" that motivated, on April 3, 1911, the creation of the Commission Appointed to Study Luso-Chinese Problems. Based on the assumption that the centenary of that act refers to a moment of simultaneous turning point in both countries — the end of the monarchical and imperial regimes and the birth of their respective republics — the author seeks to explain how the political choices of the Portuguese First Republic conditioned the continuity of the diplomatic negotiations initiated after the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). Methodologically, the text articulates historical contextualization with an examination of governmental decisions and the institutional logic behind the commission, emphasizing the relationship between republican nationalist discourse and overseas priorities. It concludes that, despite the rhetoric of safeguarding the overseas territories as the nation's "heritage," praxis reveals specificities inherent to the Macao question that cannot be reduced to abstract principles. Two central axes are identified as structuring problems of the Luso-Chinese dialogue: the opium issue and the definition/regularization of Macao's borders.

Amadeu Carvalho Homem's article revisits the childhood and formative years of Joaquim Teófilo Fernandes Braga (Teófilo Braga), evoking his configuration as a Republican man of letters against the backdrop of the Azorean context in which his first intellectual socialisation unfolded. It is argued that the trajectory of the future symbolic founder of the Republic cannot be read solely as the result of late individual choices, but rather as a continuity and transformation of early experiences marked by family losses, emotional instability, and a local environment of intense cultural life, grounded in patronage, poetic traditions, and networks of journalistic and scholastic production. Methodologically, the text reconstructs a biographical itinerary supported by an examination of historical circumstances (Miguelism, deportation, the move to Ponta Delgada) and by an analysis of episodes and writing trajectories: the beginnings of his teaching career, his contestatory attitude at the lyceum, his publications in Micaelense periodicals, the material precariousness of his productions, and the composition of *Folhas Verdes* (1859). It is concluded that Teófilo Braga was shaped by a peripheral cultural "laboratory," where scholastic discipline coexisted with literary experimentation and the forthright assertion of intellectual ambitions, preparing the ground for his subsequent role in Republican culture.

The article argues that the establishment of republican regimes in Portugal and China exposed the exhaustion of monarchical logics of power and their difficulties in driving an economic modernization capable of sustaining industrialization, the rational intensification of agriculture, and integration into global markets. Starting from a historiographical framework that situates recurrent causes of Portuguese "backwardness" in the second half of the nineteenth century, the author proposes an integrated reading of exogenous and endogenous dimensions. Methodologically, it draws on interpretive syntheses and economic-productive data—namely the Industrial Surveys of 1881 and 1890—to characterize the pattern of development and structural constraints on growth. Among the central conclusions, it stands out that the Portuguese economy did not experience an industrial revolution on the "classic" English scale: industrialization was incipient, concentrated, and dependent on first-wave sectors, with weak transformation of productive structures and a persistent predominance of labor and wealth in agriculture. The text further articulates causes such as the primary-export orientation reinforced by treaties with England, peripheralization vis-à-vis industrialized Europe, the weight of aristocratic attitudes toward investment, monetary and credit limitations, deficiencies in taxation and education, and the persistence of landholding structures and regimes of exploitation that delayed monetization and productivity.

The article by Fernando Mendonça Fava analyzes the political role of João Tamagnini de Sousa Barbosa (1883–?), a Macanese military engineer, within the context of the First Portuguese Republic (1910–1926), highlighting his dimension as a "homo politicus" as a key interpretive tool for understanding the relations between colonies, the State, and the republican regime. Drawing on a historical-biographical approach anchored in parliamentary sources and epistolary documentation (including a letter from Sun Yat-sen to Governor José Carlos da Maia in 1916), the text reconstructs trajectories, ideological alignments, and governance practices, articulating local and overseas experience with the national debates sparked by the war and institutional reorganization. The central argument maintains that Tamagnini reconciled a constitutional republican stance with a rejection of anti-clerical radicalism, advocating for amnesties and a policy of reconciliation aimed at consolidating the regime. As a deputy for Mozambique (from 1916 onwards), he intervened in the critique of the Ministry of Colonies and in the attempt to make bureaucracies more flexible, proposing measures oriented toward economic and administrative development. Concurrently, in Parliament, he took part in the defense of contested republican figures, notably the Governor of Macau, Carlos da Maia, revealing the political relevance of Macau as a space for the circulation of republican networks and legitimacies in the early twentieth century.

Starting from the commemoration of the centenary of the 1911 Revolution, Guo Weidong's article interrogates "who or what was behind" the fall of the Qing dynasty, shifting the focus from explanations centered solely on external factors to an analysis of the internal collapse of the imperial regime itself. It is argued that the downfall was not merely a fall brought about by revolution, but a process of gradual self-disintegration, in which the political, military, and social mechanisms of Qing power were already in deep crisis before the Wuchang Uprising. Methodologically, the author proposes a critical reading of the dominant historiographical interpretations—the "orthodox view of Sun Yat-sen" and the thesis of a revolution determined primarily by class and ethnic conflicts—confronting them with concrete evidence and with the organizational and relational trajectory of revolutionary agents. The article further maintains that the "accidental" character of the Wuchang Uprising in fact functioned as the trigger of a "historical inevitability" previously installed. As a case study, Sun Yat-sen's connection with Macao is discussed, highlighting the role of local networks in the formation and implementation of revolutionary structures, as well as the internal tensions that affected the movement's cohesion. It concludes that the fall of the Qing results from the interaction between internal structural weaknesses and external organizational dynamics, in which the collapse of the system precedes and conditions revolutionary success.

The article investigates the historiography and social functioning of "floating brothels" in the Pearl River Delta between 1750 and 1930, contrasting two key contexts: the vessels of Whampoa, known to foreigners as "lob lob boats," and the "flower boats" (or barcos floridos) of Canton. The main thesis argues that, although frequently described in Western sources as places of "debauchery," these institutions were instead mechanisms integrated into the port economy and into relations among merchants, sailors, and local authorities. Methodologically, the author undertakes a critical reinterpretation of historical sources and contemporary representations, articulating differences in clientele, regulation, and operating practices. It is argued that in Whampoa, the floating brothels served both foreigners and Asians, functioning as part of the "riverine landscape" and, at the same time, as indirect instruments for managing the foreign presence, with mediation and oversight by the mandarins. In Canton, by contrast, the "flower boats" supposedly served mostly Chinese men, maintaining an exclusivity that depended on their functional connection to a broader ecosystem of floating services. It is concluded that these boats should be understood as sociopolitical and economic institutions, and not merely as spaces of depravity.

Paul B. Spooner's article reassesses the role of Song Ailing (宋藹齡) in the political history of Republican China, arguing that her relevance—frequently obscured or conflated with that of Song Qingling (宋慶齡)—has been distorted by secondary literature. The author contends that Song Ailing was a key figure between 1909 and 1914 as a confidential secretary within the Tongmenghui (同盟會) network and in close proximity to Sun Yat Sen, preceding her subsequent consolidation at the heart of the KMT (Kuomintang) through her marriage to H. H. Kung (孔祥熙), which placed her in a central position linked to the Chongqing administration and the government's financial responsibilities. Methodologically, Spooner undertakes a critical review of the principal historiographical and journalistic publications, identifying explicit errors—including the undue conflation of the two sisters' trajectories and the lack of specificity (or controversy) concerning marriage dates. The conclusions emphasize that the chronological sequence of the marriages of Song Ailing and Song Qingling, tied to the reorganization of republican power, had structuring effects on alliances and networks that would culminate in the rise of Chiang Kai-shek and, consequently, in the strengthening of the Song clan's political-financial relations in the ensuing decades.

The article argues that the historiography of the Xinhai Revolution and the political trajectory of Sun Yat Sen has neglected a crucial intermediary: the connections between the revolutionary strategy of the Second International and Chinese republican projects in the period preceding the founding of the Third International. Proceeding from the assumption that political and intellectual contact existed between European socialists and Chinese revolutionaries before March 1919, Spooner reconstructs this link through the geopolitical backdrop of the dispute over Manchuria (Qing, Tsarist Russia, and Japan) and the repercussions of the Russian revolutions, in which militants linked to the Second International were deeply involved. It then relates Sun’s shift toward a political philosophy with elements from the socialist world—particularly after the fundraising trip of 1904–1905—with explicit references to his affiliation and with contemporary descriptions of “socializing” tendencies associated with the post-1912 period. Methodologically, the text articulates documentary evidence from period publications and compilations (such as yearbooks and works on the history of socialism) with the Marxist theoretical framework on the sequence between bourgeois revolutions and socialist revolutions. The conclusions suggest that, rather than a late and exclusively Comintern transition, Sun’s trajectory and the formulation of reformist/revolutionary programs engaged early on with internationalist debates on revolution, legality, and armed struggle.

We analyze the writings of Br. Jacinto de Deus (1612-1681), whose output was extensive, including literature on spirituality, a mirror for princes, and the work Vergel de plantas e flores (Garden of plants and flowers), in which is narrated the history of the Franciscans in the Portuguese Asian Empire, as an effort at preserving the memory of the Observant Franciscans (Capuchin), after achieving institutional autonomy in relation to the Province of Portugal.