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This article examines, within the scope of collecting and museum heritage, the circulation and recontextualization of Chinese cultural practices through artefacts associated with cricket fighting in the early twentieth century. The author argues that the "singing crickets" held in the collection of the Museum of the Macao Scientific and Cultural Centre are not merely ethnographic objects, but artefacts of material memories that condense a broader tradition—hua niao yu chong (flowers, birds, fish, and insects)—and its transformation into performative arts, particularly within the historical context of cages and the continuous "concert." Methodologically, the research articulates historical and cultural reading (sources on the prestige of crickets and the emergence of fights as organized entertainment) with collection analysis: identification of the artefacts, attention to their functions and possible acquisition circuits, and interpretation of their role in the museum's exhibition policies in Macao. As its main conclusions, the article demonstrates that the museum artefacts function as mediating devices between China and the Lusophone world, preserving knowledge of capture, care, and sonic appreciation, while also producing new heritage narratives that reconstruct, for the present, the "memories of fights" associated with everyday life and urban taste at the turn of the century.

The article "Poetry in Macau (Creative Writing)" proposes an essayistic reflection, of a literary matrix, on how the Portuguese presence in Macau materializes not only in buildings and institutions, but also in poetic spaces and urban imaginaries. Starting from narrative itineraries through the city initiated in 2013, the author focuses on places such as the Jardim de São Francisco—associated with the transition between religious orders, barracks, and urban transformations—to discuss the fragility and persistence of Luso-Iberian cultural memory in the "Far East". The argument articulates local history, symbolic interpretation, and intertextual reading, resorting to the contrast between ordering practices (religious and military) and the lyrical dimension represented by poetry, with particular emphasis on Camões and, allusively, figures such as Camilo Pessanha. Methodologically, the text operates as creative writing with a critical function: wandering, descriptive detail, and the biographical problematization of the figure of the poet function as tools to think about exclusions, displacements, and cultural survivals. It concludes that poetry acts as a force of sustenance and reorganization of meaning, converting urban and political losses into symbolic continuity, albeit always "reduced to minimal expression".

The article argues that the image of Macau as the “Land of the Lotus Flower” (Lianhua Di) operates as a historical and cultural metaphor of hospitality for diasporic subjects, especially for Chinese “displaced returnees” who found lasting shelter in the city. Drawing on the trajectory of Liang Piyun 梁披雲 (1907–2010)—intellectual, educator, social activist, and also poet and calligrapher—the author reads the experience of errance and repositioning as a process of “regeneration” in the Macanese space. Methodologically, the text articulates historical-biographical analysis with intertextual reading: it mobilizes classical poems attributed to Liang’s practice and sensibility, as well as literary and toponymic references that relate Macau to the lotus (cartography, place names, and visual traditions). The protagonist’s contributions are examined in educational networks extending across Quanzhou and Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as in efforts to preserve Chinese calligraphy as a cultural legacy between Hong Kong and Macau. It is concluded that Macau functions simultaneously as a “port of refuge” and as a symbolic device of reinsertion, allowing the diaspora to find rootedness and local recognition.

In this essay, Clara Sarmento argues that Intercultural Studies should be understood as a communicational and political movement situated at the intersection between knowledge production and social regulation. Drawing on the notion of "interculturality" as encounter, transit, and mediation—from colonialism to contemporary digital heteroglossia—the author contends that the current intercultural journey is global and accelerated by technologies, rendering insufficient any approach that reduces the "inter" to a "us/them" opposition. The proposed analysis intersects the reconceptualization of identity according to contexts of migration, deterritorialization, and virtuality with Homi Bhabha's idea of the "third space," wherein hybridism and cultural translation operate as politically subversive forms capable of deactivating conservative binaries (such as theory/practice). Methodologically, the text adopts an interdisciplinary and self-reflexive dialogue, critically reading the normative practices of academia and the editorial and economic pressures that shape stereotypes and research outcomes. It concludes that, although globality reconfigures regimes of power, researchers tend to respond through strategies, innovations, and subversions, often situated in "border zones" and peripheral thresholds that, paradoxically, prove central to cultural and scientific experience.

Giorgio Sinedino’s article proposes a recontextualization of Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之 (344?–406?) as a “poet-painter” embedded in the sociocultural milieu of the literati elite of the Jin dynasty. The contribution is pioneering in assembling and translating into Portuguese a structured set of materials on the painter: (1) the complete biography from the *Jin shu* 晉書 (*Book of Jin*), (2) an ancient catalogue of works, and (3) essays and critical judgments attributed to Gu, as well as statements by Xie He 謝赫 and Yao Zui 姚最 that fueled a prolonged historiographical debate. Methodologically, the author conducts a comparative selection of sources from different chronologies and genres (dynastic chronicle, catalogues of “famous paintings,” and anecdotal anthologies), emphasizing that Gu’s representation varies according to the moral, literary, and institutional framework of each work. As its main conclusion, Sinedino argues that painting in the Chinese tradition does not function as an autonomous art but rather as an ancillary practice to literary ideology and the value system of the “Literary Garden,” which is why Gu emerges less as a “professional painter” and more as a versatile literatus, legitimized by his social insertion and cultural utility.

The article proposes a historical-aesthetic reflection on the relationship between painting and poetry in the Chinese experience, taking as its axis the expression "詩畫一心" ("poetry and painting, one heart") and the case of Gu Kaizhi (4th–5th centuries) as a point of observation of the artistic "canon." From a contextual reading of epigraphs and commentaries—with particular emphasis on the famous formulation attributed to Su Shi regarding Wang Wei's painting "Lantian, mist and rain"—the author argues that the communion between the arts is explained not merely by literary themes transposed into the image, but by a functional equivalence at the level of intentionality, emotional state, and regimes of appreciation. Methodologically, the text articulates exegesis of literate sources, reconstruction of the traditional hierarchies of the "arts," and a suggestive comparison with a classical Western text, in order to illuminate the particular status of Chinese artistic practice as an integrated system. Among the main results, it is highlighted that "painting that poeticizes" and "poetry that paints" operate as cognitive categories for understanding "hybrid" works (painter-poet/calligrapher-poet) and for reassessing the formation and social function of the artist within a culture centered on poetic writing.

The article analyzes the representation of women in Macau’s history and fiction, arguing that local literature—particularly novels and short stories—can offer alternative models of public and semi-public figuration, distinct from the male protagonists consecrated by Macanese narrative. The author proposes a comparative reading that intersects the historical plausibility of characters with the presence of social, geographical, and anthropological mediations in the construction of the plot. The central argument is that, although female characters frequently appear as “almost real”—with common names and insertion into historically plausible societies—the contrast remains open between Macau’s historical richness and the lesser production of historical novels in Portuguese that recover pre-colonial facts and identities through fiction. Methodologically, the text articulates gender studies and literary analysis, examining particularly the work of Deolinda da Conceição and Henrique de Senna Fernandes, considered relevant for understanding the gallery of situations experienced by women of the Chinese community and the historical-social density conferred upon their narrative worlds. It concludes that, even when not materializing as a “historical novel” in the strict sense, literature evidences close relations with history, functioning as a sociological resource to reconstitute female experiences in Macau, especially during the early twentieth century.

The article "Pega Azul: A Bird in the East and West" by Rui Rocha examines the blue magpie as a symbolic figure capable of crossing cultural, religious, and aesthetic boundaries between the East and the West. Based on the assumption that birds have historically functioned as mediators between earth and sky, divine messengers, and models for interpreting the world, the text proposes to trace the meanings attributed to this bird in different traditions and to weave them into an intercultural reading. Methodologically, the author mobilizes a comparative approach grounded in symbolic repertoires and historical-cultural references, articulating descriptions of mythologies and representations with the identification of semantic continuities and reconfigurations over time. The main conclusions highlight that, although the blue magpie may be recognized in specific records as a concrete species, its persistence in the cultural imagination primarily stems from the recurrence of attributes associated with flight, color, and the "messenger" character of birds. Thus, the bird's "passage" between cultural universes is not merely a circulation of motifs but a reinterpretation of meanings, in which East and West engage in dialogue through shared categories and contextual differences.

The article analyzes the social role of women associated with the “Portuguese of Shanghai” group between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, framing it within the Macao–Shanghai migratory flow and, more broadly, the Macanese diaspora. The central premise is that, although migrations were sustained by social networks, in the Luso-Shanghainese community female agency assumed decisive functions both in consolidating family networks and in everyday integration processes. Methodologically, the study articulates a diachronic reading of community establishment with the operationalization of the concept of social network and “social role” to observe how women contributed to the economic, cultural, and social reproduction of the group. Two dimensions are privileged: marriage, understood as a mechanism for connecting with other national and cultural communities, and professional activity, mobilized as an indicator of how the “Portuguese women of Shanghai” negotiated their insertion into the host society. It concludes that the female presence, bearing a cultural framework of origin, accompanied and accelerated adaptive processes that allowed the Portuguese community to hybridize with the Shanghai context, turning the domestic and workplace spheres into strategic nodes of migratory and integration networks.

The article examines the figure of Jules Itier (1802-1877) as a cultural and technical mediator between the invention of photography in the Franco-European sphere and its reception in Macao. The author argues that the presence of a "French daguerreotypist" in the territory should not be understood merely as a biographical episode, but rather as part of broader dynamics involving the circulation of knowledge, commercial networks, and visual projects linked to European interest in the Orient. Methodologically, the text draws upon historical frameworks of photographic technology, reconstructing the genealogy of the daguerreotype (from the camera obscura to the fixation process on metal plates), and articulates this trajectory with the contextualization of Macao as a node of Sino-European relations in the nineteenth century. The investigation highlights how the characteristics of the daguerreotype—singular positive image, high definition, and difficulty of reproduction—conditioned the practices, value, and uses of portraiture and the representation of space. In conclusion, the article proposes that Itier contributed to consolidating in Macao a modernized visual culture, in which photography functions simultaneously as an instrument of observation, a form of prestige, and a technology of cultural translation.

The article reassesses, based on new evidence, the traditional attribution to the Italian Jesuit Carlo Spinola (1564–1622) of the original design of the Church of St. Paul in Macau. The investigation starts from the recognition that, since 1628, the connection between Spinola and the design of the temple has been treated as a settled matter, relying mainly on a single biographical piece preserved in the work of Spinola’s Jesuit cousin, Fabio Ambrosio: the reference to Spinola as a “good mathematician” and author of the “design of the new Church dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.” Frison argues, however, that such a passage seems to derive from an unknown source, as it finds no correspondence in Spinola’s writings and is not confirmed in the Portuguese account of the martyrdom, attributed to Bento Fernandes. Methodologically, the author undertakes a critical and contextual reading of the narrative and administrative sources associated with the foundational period, shifting the focus from the alleged biographical testimony to documents concerning the destruction of the old church by fire. By reconstructing the chronology and circumstances of the fire and the subsequent constructive intervention, the article argues that the available evidence does not support Spinola’s design authorship in the way historiography has consecrated, instead proposing a reinterpretation of the effective role of other agents in the building’s configuration.

The article proposes a comparative reading of female figurations in the works of Deolinda da Conceição (Cheong-Sam: A Cabaia), Maria Ondra Braga (“A China fica ao lado” and “A morta”), and Fernanda Dias (“Sai Kuá” and “Jogos urbanos”), taking as its interpretive axis the “arduous paths” of exile and emancipation, above all in Macanese and Chinese contexts. The author argues that, between the 1940s and the 1990s, the literature of these fiction writers transforms the female condition into a historical index: women emerge simultaneously as subjects of displaced experience—marked by war, poverty, and systems of superstition and prejudice—and as agents of the reconfiguration of identities, relationships, and survival strategies. Methodologically, the study employs a diachronic approach and a textual analysis centered on characters, motifs, and recurring images, organized in chronological sequence to observe changes in female status and agency. It concludes that exile operates as an ambivalent catalyst: it intensifies forms of oppression and violence, but also opens space for paths of autonomy, cultural learning, and redefinition of the “self” and the “other.” Thus, the narratives reveal how emancipation is negotiated through painful ruptures, in which memory, the body, and displacement become literary devices of resistance.

The article proposes a critical reading of *A Cabaia* (1956), by Deolinda da Conceição, mobilizing the concept of “insubmissão” (insubordination) as an interpretive key to the female figure in the Luso-Asian context of Macao and the Portuguese diaspora in China. The author argues that the novel/short-story cycle of the *cheongsam* (the “cabaia/cheong-sam”) is not limited to the representation of an adornment or urban fashion; rather, it thematizes the tension between conformity and resistance: the delicacy of the garment is read as an ambiguous language that can both encode social discipline and enable dissimulation, agency, and contestation. Methodologically, the text articulates a close reading of the textile motif and bodily images with a historical-cultural framework, considering the press, the circulation of people and knowledge, and Deolinda’s social position in the cultural field of Macao. Weaving together intellectual biography and textual analysis, the article concludes that “silk” symbolizes a regime of submission that is often naturalized; conversely, the narrative reconfigures this regime by exposing fissures in the patriarchal and colonial order, advocating for the possibility of a feminine modernity constructed through aesthetic choices, everyday negotiations, and symbolic critique.

The article presents a full translation, accompanied by notes and commentary, of the "three prefaces" of Zhong Rong's *Classification of Poets* (*Shipin*), framing them as a critical device that, beyond organizing authors, establishes a historiographical model of Chinese poetry between the Han dynasty and the Southern Liang. The investigation supports the thesis that these prefaces articulate (i) formal principles of compilation—chronological ordering and evaluative restriction to deceased authors—and (ii) a theory of poetic language that relativizes the value of "use of facts" and documentary erudition in favor of direct observation and the expression of feeling and nature. Methodologically, the work proposes a continuous reading of the three texts, recognizing structural coherents and incongruities, and reorganizes the traditional sequence to privilege the argumentative progression of Preface II. In its conclusions, the article highlights that, although the work arises from sociopolitical circumstances marked by the author's marginalization, its contribution proved enduring: the progressively acquired authority of the *Classification* derives, above all, from its historical vision and the way it links aesthetic criteria to cultural and institutional contexts.

The article analyzes women in Macau, distinguishing the historical categories of "Portuguese women" and "Macanese women" in order to understand how the Luso-Asian colonial society in the territory was constituted from the sixteenth century onward. Starting from the assumption that the Portuguese female presence did not initially accompany the settlement of men and that the scarcity of European wives reoriented social and sexual practices, the author examines historiographical sources that describe the city's demographic formation, maritime circulation, and the mechanisms for acquiring women and children (abduction, purchase, negotiation, and "ransom"), frequently linked to commerce. The methodology combines critical reading of documentation and interpretive synthesis concerning royal policies, diplomatic tensions, and ecclesiastical interventions, situating Macau within the broader context of restrictions on the enslavement of Chinese women and the competition among local, ecclesiastical, and imperial powers. The study concludes that the construction of Macanese female identities and statuses resulted less from European family reproduction and more from sustained relations among Portuguese men, Eurasian women, and networks of servitude, producing miscegenation, moral controversies, and legal readjustments. Thus, "Macanese" emerges as a cultural and social category shaped by the port economy and by the dynamics of cohabitation and dependency.

The article analyzes the Chinese "coolie trade" through the Port of Macau, framing it within the Atlantic and Asian role of the Luso enclave and the imperial policies that conditioned emigration. The authors argue that Macau functioned not only as a logistical stopover, but as a political and commercial mechanism that allowed circumventing restrictions imposed by the Qing governance on the departure of workers, resorting to recruitment and transport networks, often mediated by British and also Portuguese interests. Methodologically, the text articulates a long-term historical contextualization (with antecedents in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including routes to Penang, Singapore, Trinidad, and other locations) with the reconstruction of the central period 1851–1874, mobilizing information compiled by previous research and confronting it with documentary elements relating to recruitment dynamics and maritime trajectories. Among the main conclusions, the magnitude and continuity of the migratory flow channeled by Macau stand out, the flexibility of its port connections in the face of different destinations and powers, and the persistence of recruitment practices that, by operating on the border between legality and clandestinity, consolidated Macau's status as a crucial platform for Chinese contract labor in the 19th-century colonial system.

This article investigates the commercial interactions between Western merchants and Cantonese retail traders within the context of Sino-European trade from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, arguing that the "logic of exchange" depended both on the strategies of foreign merchants and—decisively—on the agency of the shopkeepers of Canton. Rather than treating purchasing as a mere offshoot of imperial policies and the structures of the chartered trading companies (EIC, VOC, DAC, SOIC), the author shifts the focus to the everyday practices of intermediation, commodity selection, negotiation, and the circulation of information carried out in the urban space of Canton, particularly after the centralization of foreign trade in the port/city from 1757 onward. Methodologically, the analysis is anchored in documentary archival sources and historiographical references, articulating European records (including documentation and correspondence associated with trade) with evidence on contracts, logistical routines, and narratives of transactions. As results, the study demonstrates that "local vendors" functioned as commercial nodes connecting global maritime networks to regional supply chains, enabling the regularity of orders and sustaining the continuity of trade. It concludes that shopkeepers contributed to transforming the act of buying ("trading with traders") into a social technology of trust, opportunity, and cultural adaptation.

This article analyzes the so-called "Hume Scroll" (1772), a rare visual record of the landscape of the port and the factories of Canton, in order to reinterpret the relationships between licensed foreign trade and the activity of Chinese junks bound for Southeast Asia. The central argument posits that the “foreign factories” did not function as separate and isolated spaces within the Chinese maritime economy, but rather as shared residential-commercial and operational hubs, administered by different institutional branches (Waiyang Hang and Bengang Hang) which, in practice, interacted more than traditional historiographical narratives assumed. Methodologically, the study combines dating based on architectural and biographical evidence (aligning constructive elements with Hume’s chronology) with a systematic identification of the buildings and their possible occupants, comparing the iconography with recent discoveries and administrative documentation. The author also critiques "top-down" approaches that derive historical models primarily from gazetteers, edicts, and memorials, without verifying the actual implementation of policies. As main results, the article demonstrates that the scroll enables the visualization of connections between firms of different administrations and highlights the coexistence of foreign and Chinese operations within the same port infrastructure. It concludes that understanding the transformations of the wharf and quotidian interactions is decisive for reconstructing how trade actually operated in Canton.

The article analyzes the teaching of the English language in Goa and Macao throughout the nineteenth century, arguing that the consolidation of English as a vehicular language was less linked to a supposed uniformity of colonial practices and more to the articulation between migratory needs, administrative strategies, and local social reconfigurations. Based on a situated comparison between the contexts of British governance and Portuguese dynamics in territories of the Asian space, the study maintains that the demand for qualification for emigration—to British India and, above all, to the "Treaty Ports"—functioned as a driver for the institutional legitimation of English in public and private schooling. Methodologically, the article proceeds through historical framing and comparative reading, first reconstructing the institutionalization of English as the preferred medium in the British Indian education system, through a combination of state participation and the opening of public positions to local figures. It then recapitulates the posteriority and similarity of this process in Hong Kong, assessing its effects on the trajectory of Macao. It concludes that education, in its language policies and mechanisms of professional recognition, operated as an instrument of "agency" for regional economic and financial routes, simultaneously producing local opportunities and conditioning flows of skills associated with mobility.

The article analyzes the poetic journey of Fernanda Dias, arguing that her work mobilizes her own "myths" and operations of metamorphosis to reconfigure the identity of the lyrical subject, converting passion into a redemptive poetic gesture. The author maintains that, despite the diversity of registers and the visitation of movements in contemporary poetry, there is an internal coherence organized along two chronological axes: the initial enamorment and, subsequently, the "invention of Sherazhade." Based on a close reading of the texts (with emphasis on the poetry of *Horas de Papel* and recurring motifs), the study identifies the initiatory character of the gaze — marked by a sensory exultation and by a recognition that transforms the "foreign" space into an intimate place — as well as the constitution of a strongly asymmetrical amorous actantial pair, which opposes a Western feminine voice to an Eastern masculine "other," associated with knowledge, rituals, and cultural practices. It concludes that Fernanda Dias's writing functions as cultural mediation and as a mourning ritual: language mythifies experience, attenuates loss through literary parallels (for example, with the Chinese tradition), and produces metamorphoses of the subject, avoiding Orientalist readings while simultaneously resisting anti-Orientalism.