High stakes and different rewards

rule.

HOW Macao works is simple. It steals people from Hong Kong. The

world's largest jetfoil fleet zaps across the Pearl River delta all day

and all night, pulling out passengers from the quayside immigration

point (Hong Kong to Macao is abroad) and delivering them to the dozy

sixteenth-century Portuguese colony with a population the size of

Edinburgh.

Hong Kong doesn't notice. It has six million people and another nine

million per year passing through. It has Chris Patten and tower blocks

up to 78 storeys and an airport where the incoming starboard wingtip all

but wrenches the dim sum from the chopsticks of families dining on their

balconies. For history it has the Opium Wars and Jardine Mathieson.

Macao has Prince Henry the Navigator and, recently, Stanley Ho. When

Macao comes to get you, you are ready to go.

Just don't expect a romantic journey. The jetfoil, a functional indoor

boat with a trolley service of Coke and Mars Bars, covers the 40 miles

in 50 minutes and is packed with preoccupied Chinese. This is a business

service. The business is gambling.

In Hong Kong casinos are illegal. In Macao they account for half the

revenue. The Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macao, the deceptively

frivolous name for Stanley Ho's all-encompassing business group, owns

all of the casinos, shares of the major hotels, slabs of the ongoing

development and the tireless pillaging jetfleet which brings in people

of all ages and incomes including housewives who can slot in a day's fan

tan and be home in time to cook dinner.

As soon as you step ashore and see the magenta and ochre-panelled

upstart skyscrapers, the breathtakingly garish cylindrical Hotel Lisboa

that houses Mr Ho's flagship casino, its fanciful architecture

incorporating Chinese charms to keep money in, and the Jai-alai Palace,

where Basque pelota players are flown in to bet on, you know you are

somewhere seriously different. New tower blocks stride along the

waterfront and then just stop. Behind is a wooded slope with a

lighthouse. In the other direction stately painted Iberian mansions

stretch back from the quayside Rua de Praia Grande where the pink-washed

Government House faces on to pavement benches and mature blossom-heavy

trees in whose shade rickshaw drivers doze in their own back seats.

But Macao has wakened and begun to stretch. A Hyatt hotel went up in

just 45 days, and in January 1996 the colony will have its own

substantial international airport. From offshore Taipa Island where it

is being constructed with mainland Chinese labour and a Chinese

contribution to the capital investment (Air Macao, a Stanley Ho

enterprise, will run the short-haul service), an elegant twin-arced

serpentine steel bridge, opened this year, carries a four-lane highway

straight to the republic's frontier. Land reclamation is giving the

waterfront two new freshwater lakes to lighten the impact of the new

building.

Yet it remains a walking-sized city of courtly proportions, tropical

lethargy, poetic nostalgia -- the Camoens garden commemorates Portugal's

sixteenth-century national poet who lived here for a time -- and that

glamorous ghostly duality that seems to haunt distant Portuguese

possessions. Macao's ambience resembles that of Fort Cochin where the

exotic Christian architecture of Vasco da Gama's burial place accords

with its Indian setting much as the monuments of the 1576 Diocese of

Macao, created arrogantly to include all China and Japan, are enhanced

by the Chinese framework.

From the fifteenth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, whose dragon

and thistle menu design refers to the group's Scottish Jardine origins,

my window looks obliquely from bridgescape and poolscape on to the disc

of a coolie hat in whose shade an old man perches on a rock dangling a

fishing-rod in the South China Sea from first light until the chalky

dust of cocktail hour colours him out of the picture.

At 7am the South China Morning Post squeezes under the door, heavy

with business supplements. The figure US$55 trillion leaps out, the

estimated cost of China becoming fully developed. Chaps in gold braid

and shorts are pictured saluting the exit voyage of Britain's three

patrol vessels as the Victoria Basin is handed over to the Hong Kong

Government. Meanwhile my bedside table offers a jogging map on a cord

which invites me to ''Take the scenic Guia Hill run! Just slip this

handy map around your neck and it'll serve as your guide''. The lobby

teems with Asian and Western businessmen as well as tourists, and a

soothing voice from home comes through the babble -- Alan Hepburn from

Gourock is resident manager here.

Of course the source of this palpable pace change is China. With two

extra years until handover -- December 20, 1999 is the date -- and a far

less confrontational relationship than Hong Kong has with its landlord,

Macao is preparing itself to be simultaneously a rival gateway to the

Jade Republic, a playground for the world's most committed nation of

gamblers, and a first-choice stopover for long-haul travellers instead

of an add-on from Hong Kong.

Mainland China is highly visible from all over the promontory which

projects in a clenched-fist, pointing-finger shape from the frontier at

its wrist. Massive building works are going on there too. In a

ground-breaking initiative three very different neighbours, Hong Kong,

Macao, and the Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton), are getting together

to market themselves as ''A new destination concept -- the Pearl River

Delta''.

Meanwhile in the heart of Macao all is Latin, low-rise, and tranquil.

From the glorious baroque faade of the 1594 Jesuit church of St Paul a

broad staircase descends to the steep winding streets of the old town

where the houses are painted in edible colours -- spinach, prawn,

saffron -- and the latticed stone balconies are crammed with plants.

Many dealers come to this district, to where antiques from mainland

China find their way at bargain prices.

Fronting a black and white cobbled square, the elegant Leal Senado

building with its blue glazed interior and coats of arms is now the home

of the city council. The A Ma Temple, sacred to the goddess for whom

Macao was named, dates from before the Portuguese arrival in 1517, when

Macao became the first and for many years only European settlement and

trading post in Asia.

For utter relaxation you have merely to cross to the offshore islands.

Taipa, with its duck farms and firecracker factories, university,

racetrack, tiny Dickensian lanes and sprawling hillside Chinese

cemetery, attracts many film makers. The south shore conservation area

of old Portuguese mansion houses painted lime green and shaded by giant

banyan trees featured in Around the World in Eighty Days.

The further island, Coloane, connected by bridge to Taipa, remains

antique and secluded. Its main village, rural, slumbrous, utterly

Chinese, houses a boatyard for the building of junks and looks across at

a Chinese island only yards away. A leprosarium, a Buddhist temple, and

a Portuguese chapel have now been joined by the Poussada de Coloane at

the Bamboo Beach where Hong Kong expats vacation, and lately by the

luxurious Westin Resort.

Classic Cantonese and atmospheric Portuguese restaurants abound in

mainland Macao, but Macanese cooking, where Portuguese tradition adapts

itself to local ingredients and spices, is unique. In the Hotel Bela

Vista, an exquisite old Portuguese mansion on the Colina de Penha,

lately refurbished by the Mandarin hotel group with the Macao Government

and, of course, Stanley Ho, you dine on a veranda overlooking steep

cobblestone terraces and the South China Sea. With only eight bedrooms

and antique furnishings (the Macao Suite has a balustraded Noel Coward

balcony running along two sides), the atmosphere is of a private house

party and some very high-powered people come here to relax, Hong Kong's

Governor among them.

In 1975 Portugal's new elected left-wing government offered the colony

back to China. China declined. It wasn't ready yet. The lack of urgency

is reflected in a relaxed attitude to the prospect of Chinese rule,

enhanced, it must be said, by the knowledge that the small population

has, with some exceptions, the right of Portuguese citizenship. With

this in mind some of Hong Kong's more affluent and nervous citizens are

said to be buying property in Macao.

I hope they respect its good vibes. After a look round the Lisboa

Casino milling with casual jean-clad Chinese -- Macao casinos have no

entry fee -- I walked back alone after midnight through the empty

streets of the development area and never felt the need to look over my

shoulder.

FACTFILE

* Cathay Pacific flies to Hong Kong from Heathrow and Manchester.

Jetfoil connection to Macao operates 14 hours. Austravel

(0171-734-77550) can arrange stopovers on Australia/New Zealand trips.

Mandarin Oriental group including Hotel Bela Vista: 0171 537 2988. Macao

Tourist Information Bureau: 0171 224 339. Currency is the Pataca,

loosely pegged to the Hong Kong dollar, which is also accepted.