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The Portuguese president has said he is confident Macau's handover will be a "success," and a spokesman for the Chinese government said President Jiang Zemin would head his country's delegation to the handover ceremony. Macau is where Portugal meets China, and with the handover ceremony, an exotic and historic tourism destination.

Macau lends itself to touring on foot and the island's tourism authority provides extensive ideas at its website http://www.macautourism.gov.mo Places suggested include:

Maritime Museum

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Macau owes its existence to the sea. It was first settled. Probably in the early 14th century, by fishermen from Fujian Province. They valued its protected harbor and proximity to the fishing grounds of the South China Sea.

Portuguese explorers arrived in the first half of the 1500s and founded the oldest European settlement on mainland Asia. The maritime traditions features in the museum are not restricted to Macau, but rather illustrate the importance of the sea to peoples throughout Southern China and Southeast Asia.

The building was custom-made more or less on the spot where the first Portuguese landed, to find a temple dedicated to Taoist goddess of the sea A-Ma. The place was called A-Ma Hau, "place of A-Ma", which became Macau.

Wine Museum

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The wine museum allows different opportunities for viewing a complete exhibition of vintage and new wines, reading and tasting. Wine is social and cultural expression of great significance in Portuguese tradition.

The 1,400 square-meter exhibition space displays 750 commercial and 300 collection wines, the oldest being an 1815 Madeira. The museum also has an exhibition, a miscellany of about 100 utensils connected with viniculture and wine production, as well as a set of Portuguese tiles, exact reproductions of the 18th century tiles decorating railway stations and public markets of the most important wine-growing regions.

Ruins of St Paul

14.jpg (7032 ??) When the Portuguese established Europe's first settlement on the China coasts in 1557, it was expected to be a bastion of Christianity as well as a trading post and they called it "City of the Name of God, Macau".

All that remains of one of the greatest of Macau's churches is its magnificent stone facade and grand staircase. Built in 1602, the church adjoins the Jesuit College of St Paul's, the first Western College in the Far East where missionaries such as Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall studied Chinese before serving at the Ming Court in Beijing as astronomers and mathematicians.

After the expulsion of the Jesuits, the college was used an army barracks and in 1835 a fire started in the kitchens and destroyed the college and the body of the church.