macau

On the highspeed ferry from Hong Kong to Macau, the five-foot girl selling drinks changed her line from Mandarin to English each time she passed my row of seats. Eager for a tip, she went that extra mile to look after the minority. For, as far as I could tell, there was only one non-Chinese passenger on the boat: me.

Wanting to reward her efforts, I soon found myself sipping green tea. Macau started to appear on the horizon, hidden behind a foggy haze at first but getting clearer every minute. Above me, helicopters were overtaking my boat all the time.

Macau is an odd place. After a 442-year rule by the Portuguese, you can't help but notice the Mediterranean influence in architecture. But still, I remained the only European in sight. Economically, though, Macau is super-hot rather than odd. The latest growth figures were a staggering 48%. No other country on earth boasts such tremendous growth.

China has made Macau a Special Administrative Region, granting it special rights for a period of 50 years. This tiny country of 500,000 will become China's gambling den--at least that is the will of the bureaucrats in Beijing. It's a bit like a cowboy town back in the Wild West of America. No surprise that it didn't take long for American gambling entrepreneurs to provide all the support they could. Now, on a Thursday afternoon at 2 p.m., the Macau Sands casino resort was heaving. So busy was the place that I no longer doubted reports that on weekends literally thousands of people queue to get to one of the tables. The day the Sands opened in October, a stampede nearly caused several deaths.

As everyone knows, gambling is a popular pastime in Asian cultures. Consider the fact that there are 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians, not to mention Indonesians, Malaysians, Taiwanese, Thai, Singaporeans, and Japanese... Macau lies within a five-hour flight of half the world's population. No wonder then that anyone who's anyone in gambling wants a piece of the action.