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The article argues that Macau constitutes a "multicultural face" of China, resulting from continuous historical encounters between the Portuguese and Chinese worlds, which produced a unique local culture irreducible to a single civilizational axis. The author contends that the relationships between language, culture, and multiculturalism—particularly the role of Portuguese as an identity marker and institutional feature—must be understood in light of reciprocal and cumulative processes of acculturation. Methodologically, the text employs a historical-cultural approach supported by bibliographic contextualization: it reconstructs key moments of Luso-Portuguese presence and interactions with the Qing authorities, and examines documentary and literary production (in Portuguese and in records associated with officials and travelers) as testimony to the cultural "encounters" that shaped material practices, imaginaries, and systems of knowledge. Among the main conclusions, it is highlighted that Macau emerged as a specific geographic-political space in Asia that persistently incorporated Latin characteristics and a blend of Western and Eastern references, visible in its architecture, gastronomy, customs, language, and religion. Thus, Macau's cultural plurality must be understood as the result of material and intellectual exchanges over the course of expansion, reflected in its cultural landscape and textual production.

This article critically examines the translation of the excerpt from Analects VII, 11 by Joaquim Guerra S.J., highlighting the “ingenuity” of his translation method and the way it dialogues with (and at times departs from) the mediation of James Legge. Based on a comparative analysis of the Confucian text in Chinese, the principal Neo-Confucian exegetical traditions (especially Zhu Xi) and contemporary reading paraphrases, the study identifies the recurrent dual interpretative line: (i) wealth would only be “pursuable” through the violation of moral principles; (ii) wealth would depend on a destiny unattainable by ethically and humanly oriented effort. Next, the author proceeds to a “translation in detail” of Guerra’s version, breaking down lexical choices and syntactic solutions for the period’s problematic vocabulary and for the articulation among “wealth,” “duty” and “destiny.” The conclusions argue that Guerra not only translates but reorganizes the ethical argument of the passage, drawing on semantic and philological resources to make explicit the normative restrictions already suggested by tradition, while at the same time correcting ambiguities inherited from earlier Western translations. The article thus demonstrates how linguistic competence and the lexicographic method constitute the foundation of a culturally situated reading of the Analects in Portuguese.

This article analyzes the editorial practice of Gervais Jassaud, focusing on limited-edition books that bring together Anglophone authors within the context of the transnational circulation of printed culture. The author argues that such collections should be read less as objects of "aesthetic curation" and more as cultural devices that produce encounters—selected, staged, and commercialized—between literary traditions and global heritage networks. Methodologically, the text draws on a critical-interpretive reading of paratexts and editorial statements (e.g., colophons, collection descriptions, and discursive framing devices of presentation), articulating them with the broader history of anthologies and with the "Oriental/Western" problematic that traverses representations of Macau and the Lusophone space. As a result, the article highlights recurrent strategies of legitimation: the aestheticization of the book as a means of cultural mediation, the construction of exceptionality through limitation and design, and the integration of Anglophone authors as a way to expand audiences and symbolic capitals. It concludes that Jassaud's limited editions function simultaneously as affective archives and as instruments of cultural translation, reinforcing—but also transforming—narrative hierarchies in the international circulation of books and images.

The article proposes rethinking Lusophony as a reconfigurable cultural and linguistic field, shifting the focus from territorialities and official authorities to "partially or non-official spaces" where practices of translation, pronunciation, and symbolic autonomy circulate. Starting from the question of what remains of the desire to expand the reach of a European language beyond its institutional limits, the author argues that the study of contemporary Luso-Asian literatures and mediations should avoid both the reproduction of "stock citations" from post-colonial theory and the neocolonial nostalgia associated with the center/periphery idea. The methodology is comparative and essayistic, grounded in examples of ethnolinguistic communities of Portuguese origin in migratory contexts (such as Southern New England) and in observations on Macau, where the co-official status of Portuguese coexists with the low centrality of its everyday use. It concludes that, in these interstices of officialdom, communities renew themselves by translating and communicating beyond political and geographic borders, transforming the linguistic landscape and offering open alternatives to the identities fixed by the twentieth century.

The article examines how "place-making" can be promoted (rather than merely preserved) within the context of accelerated urban growth in the Pearl River Delta, with a particular focus on Macau. Arguing for the thesis of the "power of the weak," the author contends that affective attachment to places emerges above all from subtle spatial cues, capable of reorganizing the experience of public space without imposing extensive or costly formal transformations. The research articulates frameworks of weak architecture and "urban acupuncture," integrating phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific approaches to understand perception, the encoding of environmental signals, and their translation into mobility, social interaction, and prolonged use of space. Methodologically, the work is grounded in a case study of an urban intervention in Hong Kong, complemented by examples from Taipei and Macau, drawing on in situ behavioral observations to map patterns of movement and modes of physical and social contact. The findings suggest that low-intensity solutions—unsystematic and contingency-driven—can generate participatory rehabilitation of the urban fabric, strengthening bonds with place and offering "therapies" applicable to Macau, provided they are calibrated to the everyday scale and to individual-environment relationships.

The article proposes a reading of Macau from the methodological framework of urban archaeology, understood as the investigation of the city as an “entity” and system, and not as a simple sum of discrete sites. It argues that the Macanese specificity—marked by a cultural duality between Portugal and China, reflected in the way the past is interpreted and valued—poses particular challenges to archaeological practice, due to the intense transformation of urban space, the multiple overlapping temporalities, and the public visibility of interventions. Methodologically, the author articulates subsurface archaeology with the archaeology of architecture, mobilizing the reading of construction processes, building alterations, and the historical reading of city blocks as instruments to understand the social dynamics inscribed in the territory. The analysis also contextualizes the late development of archaeology in Macau, associated with the absence of a regular framework in the initial period and the effect of transfers of knowledge and practices, highlighting the early campaigns linked to the territory. It concludes that urban archaeology constitutes a particularly suitable approach to face the heritage complexity of Macau, offering instruments to harmonize memory, management, and historical interpretation in contexts of asymmetrical cultural coexistence.

This article contends that Macao’s heritage should be understood as a cultural “genetic code”—that is, as the continuity of practices, traditions, and historical authorship that confer authenticity upon the urban legacy. The author argues that erroneous or oversimplified interpretations—often repeated in history books and on the internet—lead to factual distortion and the fabrication of “Disneyland-style” narratives, transforming buildings and places into mere products of the past, disconnected from the cultural dynamics that produced and continue to reproduce them. Methodologically, the text proposes a comparative and collaborative reading of history, articulating predominantly Chinese and Portuguese sources in order to reconstruct a “puzzle” of parallel and interconnected events. Based on this approach, it concludes that Macao’s uniqueness, as recognized by UNESCO, can only be fully explained by the Sino-Portuguese interweaving: not only in the construction of urban and architectural typologies, but also in the transfer of knowledge, technologies, and forms of social organization. Thus, heritage preservation depends on reinscribing living traditions into contemporary management and design, resisting the effects of globalization and accelerated urbanization.

The article examines the transition, following the fall of the Han dynasty, between the "crisis of the Classics" and the emergence of more autonomous cultural forms, articulating political decline with an artistic flourishing particularly visible in the domain of literary discourse. Arguing that the Confucian hegemony of canonical texts depended simultaneously on a shared ideology and imperial patronage, the author contends that the collapse of this framework eliminated incentives toward "orthodoxy," triggering both heterodox reactions and strategies of intellectual evasion. At this conjuncture, elites less dependent on the administration came to consolidate their own interests within the growth of large rural estates, while the private cultivation of the classics coexisted with their growing inadequacy to social reality. Methodologically, the text is situated within a contextual and comparative reading of ideas, supported by the analysis of an inaugural case from the second module of "Dimensions of the Canon": the Essay on Literary Creations and Poetic Discourse (Wenfu, 文賦), by Lu Ji (261–303), taken as a "test" for the proposed generalizations. The conclusions suggest that, although the authority of the classics was not formally abolished, their political-ideological function weakened, allowing artistic language—especially conversation and literature—to become a space of escape, creation, and conceptual reformulation, in a productive conflict between dogmatic ideal and historical experience.

Giorgio Sinedino's article presents a preliminary discussion of Lu Ji's 陸機 (261–303) *Wenfu* 文賦 (Essay on Literary Creation and Poetic Discourse), arguing that the text operates a decisive shift in the way literature was conceived in China during the Six Dynasties period. The analysis argues that, although Lu Ji mobilizes conventions inherited from earlier traditions—above all compositional procedures and generic expectations—his essay displaces the interpretive focus from ethical-political determinism toward a theory of creation centered on individual sensibility and poetic achievement. Methodologically, the author organizes the *Wenfu*'s argument into four movements (introduction, conception of the work, compositional execution, and epilogue), articulating concepts such as the correspondence between intention and object, the relationship between emotion and verbal elaboration, and criteria for evaluating a composition (expressive yield, variation, rhythm, and the management of “defects”). Based on readings of the preface and of the passages of theoretical formulation, the article concludes that Lu Ji grounds literature as process: it begins in withdrawal and contemplation, evolves through an intensification of sensibility, and culminates in the formal adequacy between language and inner experience, simultaneously reaffirming an aesthetic orthodoxy and the autonomy of art.

The article proposes a critical-literary reading of three apologues in verse by the Macanese writer José Baptista de Miranda e Lima, discussing how these texts mobilize allegory and moralization to articulate, within the colonial space of Macau, a reflection on language, power, and cultural formation. Through a biographical recontextualization of the author—including the tensions among political affiliations attributed by different historians—the study argues that the apologues are not merely edifying exercises, but rather narrative devices capable of negotiating the classical heritage of Portuguese humanism and the local conditions of knowledge circulation. Methodologically, the author combines immanent analysis of poetic discourse with a historical-cultural reading and intertextual comparison with traditions of the apologue and moral satire. As main results, the article highlights the centrality of didactic imagery and the construction of human typologies to produce effects of prudence and discipline, as well as the persistence of rhetorical strategies of transposition (moral conversation, indirect censorship, allegorization of conduct). It concludes that, in Miranda e Lima, the moral "lesson" also operates as a commentary on the social order and on the limits of the utterable, revealing the Macanese specificity of a conservative and historical literary Portugal, without losing the complexity of the genre's games of meaning.

The article proposes a reinterpretation of the work of Manuel Vicente (MV) in Macau through the lens of "architecture in divagation": a practice that refuses redemptive synthesis and transforms narrative, interstice, and detail into formal drivers. Drawing on the architect's experience in the city, beginning in 1962, the text argues that his output should not be read merely as a transfer of modern repertoires but as a response to a hybrid urban and cultural logic, in which Macau's hybridity functions as a "second skin" for the project. Methodologically, the analysis proceeds through an architectural and contextual reading of the principal works—with particular emphasis on housing complexes such as Fai Chi Kei and STDM, and structuring programs such as the Historical Archive and the TDM complex—articulating geometric patterns, strategies of interstitiality, and figure-ground relationships. It concludes that, rather than performing a programmatic "fusion," MV constructs small inhabited machines that intensify the dense life of the local fabric, mobilizing geometry as a system of connections and circuits. Finally, the article observes that Macau's contemporary transformations tend to absorb, eclipse, or integrate these structures, rendering MV's architectural heritage an interstitial heritage in permanent reconfiguration.

The article analyzes the relationship between the municipal ensemble of Macau — from the Council Houses and the Prison to the Leal Senado space — proposing a historical-spatial trajectory of reciprocities between administration, justice, and representation of power. The author argues that, as in the late-medieval and Renaissance Portuguese model, the council palace articulated governmental functions with urban devices of visibility, in which arcades, balconies, emblems, and proximity to the square operated as a political technology of "seeing and being seen." Methodologically, the text combines a historical framing of the urbanism and architecture of power with a typological and comparative reading of constructive solutions associated with municipal centrality, mobilizing metropolitan examples and references to adaptations in overseas contexts. The analysis concludes that, in Macau, the continuity and transformation of these elements produced an "image of power" compatible with the local ordering, integrating the prison and the civic-administrative space into the same system of social affirmation and territorial control. Thus, the Leal Senado emerges as a stage of consolidation of a reciprocal logic between jurisdiction and urban prestige, in which architecture materializes compromises between municipal autonomy and central authority.

The article analyzes the poetic transcreation of the *Yi Jing* 易經 by writer and artist Fernanda Dias, arguing that her translation aims not merely to convey doctrinal content but to recreate, in the Portuguese language, the very imagetic logic and dynamics of the "Book of Changes." Drawing on the etymology of the characters *yi* 易 ("chameleon," as a figure of change between yang 陽 and yin 陰, sun and moon) and *jing* 經 ("silk thread" and "path," associated with impermanence, transmutation, and the path inscribed in the journey itself), the author contends that the title functions as an invitation to contemplation and performative reading of the classic. Methodologically, the reflection articulates a textual and cultural analysis of translation operations—especially "transcreation"—with a historical contextualization of Sinology in the Portuguese language and the influences of earlier versions (such as those by Father Joaquim Guerra and the Taoist Wu Jyh Cherng). It concludes that Dias's proposal establishes a bridge between Macao and Lusophone intellectual diasporas, converting the symbolic grammar of the *Yi Jing* into poetic procedures: synthesis, mutation, and transmutation, where verbal form and imagery reproduce the grammar of becoming.

The article analyzes the transformation of Shanghai’s alleyway houses (lilong), arguing that their heritagization has often privileged architectural materiality over the forms of community life that give them meaning. The authors propose a reorientation of the debate between the “death” and “life” of these housing complexes, contending that their physical disappearance does not necessarily imply the end of social networks, although their reconfiguration results from urban policies, market logics, and preservation norms that do not always recognize the relational spatiality of everyday life. Methodologically, the text articulates a historical-cultural reading of Shanghai’s urbanism—marked by colonial legacies and accelerated cycles of modernization since the late 19th century and, above all, from the late 20th century onward—with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying contemporary conservation practices. The main conclusions argue that effective preservation requires understanding the “blurred functions” between public and domestic spaces and the diversity of uses produced by orientations, access points, and internal circulation. Thus, safeguarding should be conceived as maintaining social ecologies and modes of cohabitation, not merely as the formal conservation of built typologies.

The article by Paulo Franchetti proposes and justifies a publication strategy for the poems of Camilo Pessanha, arguing that a "critical edition" in the usual sense — that is, oriented toward the fixation of a canonical text and the reconstruction of the "most secure" version — is not adequate for the Pessanha case. Rather than enclosing the work in a definitive form or organizing the poems by thematic/formal criteria, the author advocates a "radical" approach in the botanical sense: privileging the historical description of the poems, tracing both authorial elaboration (dating, identification of earliest versions where possible, and inventory of successive alterations up to the last provably authorial version) and their public history (copies by third parties and dispersed publications, culminating in volume editions). Methodologically, Franchetti takes as his point of reference the frozen moment of the last provably authorial form, so as to allow the reader to traverse, on the basis of extensively documented information, the "paths" of textual transformation. The article acknowledges, however, interpretive limits: in some cases, the authority of a "clean" version is strained by later publications by the author himself, and in certain texts one cannot reliably discern where the process of correction came to an end. It is concluded that the purpose of publication is to offer the reader the maximum amount of data so that he or she may choose the most pertinent "textual moment," without any pretension of neutralizing the plurality of versions.

The article discusses the origin of the Chinese phonetic alphabet, understanding it not merely as a transcription tool but as a historical result of processes of intercultural contact between China and European actors. Starting from the context of the first Western contacts in the Yuan dynasty and, above all, the religious missions of the late Ming dynasty, the author argues that methodological divergences in the way of interacting with Chinese society hindered the acceptance of Western initiatives and delayed the construction of effective linguistic mediations. Methodologically, the text combines a historical-cultural review of contact policies and the acquisition of linguistic knowledge with a linguistic reflection of a historical-descriptive orientation, seeking to explain how learning and adaptation practices influenced the consolidation of romanized systems and phonetic notation. The narrative highlights, in particular, the contrast between frustrated attempts and the gradual success associated with Michele Ruggieri and, subsequently, Matteo Ricci, whose respect for customs and strategies of rapprochement favored the circulation of knowledge and local trust. As a contribution, the author formulates questions for the study of linguistic change and its consequences, connecting these historical trajectories to the genesis and problematization of romanization (and its phonetic equivalents) in the teaching and research of Mandarin.

The article analyzes the socio-historical representation of Macau in Bocage's sonnet “Um governo sem mando, um bispo tal” (c. 1789), arguing that the poet's stay in the enclave sustains a “hyperbolizing carnivalization” of the eighteenth-century context. The investigation mobilizes an intertextual and historical reading of the poem, articulating the historicity summoned by the text with the extratextual referents to which it alludes, in order to discuss how history functions simultaneously as motif, discursive strategy, and ideological horizon. Rather than treating the sonnet as a mere reflection of a given reality, the study seeks to show how poetic writing operates a satirical fabulation: it exaggerates features of government and power and transforms institutional figures—in particular the episcopal figure—into devices of critique and dramatization of Bocage's “possible world.” The text concludes that the carnivalesque hyperbolization aims not only at composing local color, but also reorganizes, in a literary key, political tensions and social perceptions of the late eighteenth century, offering the contemporary reader a subjective, yet politically oriented, repository of eighteenth-century Macau.

This article examines the building of the Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco (EPM), commonly referred to as the Portuguese School of Macau, designed by Raúl Chorão Ramalho following the dissolution of the GCU and within a context of shifting urban design toward private practice. Based on this case, the author proposes understanding the school not merely as a landmark modernist work, but as a form of “design activism” capable of adding layers to architectural intention, articulating aesthetic, pedagogical, and urban formulations with the contemporary management of heritage. Methodologically, the text mobilises architectural analysis and historical-institutional readings, relating the building to debates within European modernism and to cultural reassessments of the “Orient” in twentieth-century architectural culture. The conclusions highlight the gradual construction of a “layered” urban presence, visible in the transition from public space to the main block, as well as the building’s ability to transform light, open plan, natural ventilation, and proportion into a coherent system of collective order. Finally, the article argues that the survival of the EPM as a post-classical monument depends precisely on this poetics of adaptation and legibility: an architecture that remains active by being reinterpreted and reappropriated within the city.

The article examines the figure of Wenceslau de Moraes at the intersection of literary production and Portuguese foreign service in Asia, arguing that his work functioned as cultural mediation and, simultaneously, as an instrument of symbolic support for the foreign policies of the Portuguese state. To sustain this thesis, the author mobilizes a historical-literary approach anchored in the nineteenth-century context, marked by the acceleration of trade routes, tourism, and new recording technologies (such as photography), which redefined Western interests in the “Orient.” It then briefly reconstructs aspects of the writer-official’s life and career, situating his missions and institutional ties within the framework of Portuguese presence in the region. Based on a characterization of works such as *Traços do Extremo Oriente*, *Paisagens da China e do Japão*, and *Dai-Nippon*, the text identifies narrative procedures oriented toward ocular observation and the elaboration of cultural “landscapes” intended for the Western reader. It concludes that Moraes offered the Lusophone public a discourse of rapprochement with the Asian world, combining aesthetic sensibilities with content of diplomatic interest, thereby reinforcing the relevance of his writing as a practice of knowledge and international projection.

Starting from the premise that Macau’s urban transformation—intensified by contemporary dynamics of technology, spectacle, and scale—produces a scenario of an uncertain future, this article argues that understanding the city’s present heritage requires a situated listening to the memories, experiences, and movements of its agents. The proposal is methodologically developed as an essay-constellation: it mobilizes excerpts from nine interviews conducted between June 2013 and November 2014 with architects, researchers, and university professors, privileging an “internal” reading of the tensions between rupture and continuity, between aesthetic hybridism and structural uncertainty. By articulating remembrance and forgetting, the text interprets the coexistence of styles and the interplay of dream and reality as traits of the territory’s urban and social configuration. Among the main conclusions, it stands out that the “revivification” of past architectures functions less as nostalgia and more as a strategy of negotiation with the city’s current needs—simultaneously creating disciplinary frictions and cultural, political, and social reconfigurations. Thus, the nine voices do not merely describe recent changes; they produce an interpretative cartography of contemporary Macau as a context of existentiality marked by unpredictability.