Macau’s cultural identity is as rich, ancient and complex as its people and the relations between them. The city has gone through several historic phases that conferred to it a sense of distinctiveness, grasped by the overlapping of cultures, new ethnicities and local specificities that are unique to Macau. However, the construction of this place’s identity, as well as the identity of its people, has been marked more by individual initiative and group strategies than by government intervention, in defining what Macau’s culture is or should be like. Unlike places such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, Macau’s cultural identity hasn’t been sustained and systematically promoted by government enterprise, either during the Portuguese or the Chinese administration, but rather by its people, through the way they see and understand the place they live in and manage to assert their belonging to this environment – an environment that has come to be what [...]
