Lisboa
Seventh in a series on Portuguese companies and investors in Asia — what they built, what survived, and what is still being built today.
The busiest square in Macau is named after a Portuguese governor, and most of the people crossing it will never know who he was.
Praça Ferreira do Amaral — 亞馬喇前地 in Chinese — is the traffic circle and bus terminus in front of the Casino Lisboa and the Grand Lisboa tower. Readers of the first post in this series have met the man before. João Maria Ferreira do Amaral was the governor who, in 1849, expelled the Chinese customs house and stopped paying the annual ground rent to the Qing authorities, and was killed for it that August at the Portas do Cerco.
What that post did not mention is the other thing Amaral did. He is also the founder of legal gambling in Macau. And it is fitting, in a way he could not have anticipated, that the square in front of the casinos carries his name.
A tax on a Chinese game
Amaral arrived in 1846 to govern a colony in trouble. Hong Kong had been ceded to Britain four years earlier and was taking Macau's trade. The territory needed revenue, and it needed it from something other than commerce.
His answer was to license the games the Chinese population was already playing. The first was the pacapio lottery, 白鴿票, a game that had grown out of pigeon racing in Guangdong. Amaral authorised it in 1846, at the request of Chinese businessmen, and it began operating in January 1847. After a trial year, the licence became annual: the first full-year pacapio licence was granted on 5 April 1848 to a Chinese businessman named Liu Pac. In 1849 Amaral went further and licensed the game of fantan, 番攤, which became the backbone of Macau gambling for more than a century.
The colony's own accounts show how quickly the idea paid. The Boletim do Governo da Província de Macau, Timor e Solor for 23 September 1848 recorded the government's revenue for the year from July 1847 to June 1848 as 46,581 taels. Of that, the pacapio monopoly contributed 2,534.4 taels — more than the government's pork and beef monopolies combined. In its very first year, a licence on a Chinese lottery was already outearning the meat trade.
Two things about that arrangement set the pattern for everything that followed.
The first is that Portugal never ran a table. From the very first licence, the operators were Chinese businessmen. The Portuguese administration's role was to decide who was allowed to operate, on what terms, and at what price.
The second is how quickly it became essential. By 1898, gambling licences were producing more than a fifth of Macau's public revenue; by 1910, more than two-fifths. A colonial government that had lost its trade had found a replacement, and the replacement was a licence fee on Chinese games.
The first monopoly
For ninety years the licences were issued piecemeal to many houses. In 1937, a decree-law consolidated them, and the whole business was handed to a single company under an exclusive concession: the Tai Hing Company, 泰興娛樂總公司, controlled by two local businessmen, Fu Tak Iam, 傅德蔭, and Kou Ho Neng, 高可寧.
Their flagship casino was in the Hotel Central on the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro — the same avenue as the Banco Nacional Ultramarino's Macau premises. The bank of issue and the gaming monopoly did business a short walk apart. Tai Hing is also credited with bringing baccarat to Macau, which would turn out to matter a great deal.
Tai Hing held the monopoly for roughly a quarter of a century. By most accounts it ran it conservatively. It was a business built to collect from the gamblers who were already in Macau, not to bring new ones in.
The tender of 1961
In February 1961, Governor Jaime Silvério Marques declared Macau a low-tax territory, named gaming and tourism as its two principal economic drivers, and designated it a permanent gaming zone. Later that year the concession went out to public tender.
The winning bid, reported at 3.167 million patacas, beat the Fu family by 17,000 patacas. The new concession began on 1 January 1962 and was held by a company registered as the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau — 澳門旅遊娛樂股份有限公司 — universally known as STDM.
The four partners behind it are worth naming, because between them they tell you exactly where the money came from.
Henry Fok, 霍英東, was STDM's largest shareholder. He was born in 1923 into a Tanka boat-dwelling family in Hong Kong, grew up poor, and made his fortune after the war in sand dredging, shipping and property.
Stanley Ho, 何鴻燊, from a prominent Hong Kong family, became the public face of STDM and eventually its controlling figure, but was initially regarded as a minor partner.
Teddy Yip, 葉德利, was Ho's brother-in-law — an Indonesian-born Chinese businessman educated in the Netherlands, who had founded the Macau Grand Prix in 1954.
And Yip Hon, 葉漢, was a professional gambler who had risen from croupier to pit boss. Ho put it simply later, recalling the bid: he said he had joined with some friends and made a bid for the casino, and that he brought in Yip Hon because he needed someone who knew that side of the business.
Hong Kong capital, Indonesian-Chinese capital, and Macau gaming expertise. Not a Portuguese investor among them.
What the licence bought
The terms of the 1962 concession are the most interesting part of the story, and the part most often skipped.
STDM won not only by bidding high but by promising to promote tourism and build infrastructure. The concession came with obligations that had nothing to do with gambling: to run a ferry service to Hong Kong, to keep the harbour dredged, and to build hotels.
STDM delivered. It pioneered hydrofoil travel between Hong Kong and Macau, cutting what had been an overnight crossing to about an hour. It opened the Estoril Hotel in late 1962. In 1970 it opened the Hotel Lisboa, whose casino became the most famous in Asia.
Read that list again as a colonial administrator would have. Portugal had no money to dredge Macau's silting harbour, no money to build a modern ferry link to its only real market, and no money to build hotels. So it wrote those public works into a gaming licence and let the licensee pay for them out of the tables.
The harbour clause is the detail I find most remarkable. As recently as 2020, STDM's successor was reported to pay a gaming tax of 38% rather than the 39% levied on its competitors, in exchange for maintaining the harbour, including dredging. An obligation written by a Portuguese colonial government in 1961 was still being priced into Macau's tax rates more than twenty years after the Portuguese left.
Forty years and three months
STDM's monopoly ran from 1 January 1962 to 31 March 2002 — forty years and three months.
Over those four decades it did something Tai Hing never had: it turned Macau into a destination. In 1975 and 1976, under Yip Hon's direction, it shifted decisively towards baccarat and built a network of gaming promoters who brought high-stakes players in from Hong Kong and beyond.
It was the Macao SAR, not Portugal, that ended the monopoly. On 8 February 2002 the government awarded three concessions, later expanded to six. American resort companies arrived. Reclaimed land between Taipa and Coloane became Cotai.
The scale that followed is hard to take in. In 2006, Macau's gaming revenue reached 55.88 billion patacas — around US$6.95 billion — and overtook the Las Vegas Strip. By 2024 it stood at 226.8 billion patacas, over three times what the whole of Las Vegas takes in. Among the six current concessionaires is Melco — the company that, as readers of the previous post will recall, was founded in 1910 to supply Macau with electricity.
Who made the money
Here is the heart of it, and the reason this instalment belongs in a series about Portuguese investors in Asia.
Portugal wrote the most valuable licence in the history of its Asian presence. It set the terms, ran the tender, and collected the tax. And it put in essentially no capital, took no equity, and ran no tables. The fortunes it made possible went to a Tanka boatman's son from Hong Kong, a Hong Kong family, an Indonesian-Chinese racing driver and a professional gambler — and later to casino groups from Nevada.
What Portugal received was revenue for the Macau administration, and a territory that paid for its own harbour, ferries and hotels. That is not nothing. But it is a fee, not a fortune.
The fiscal arc is the most telling part. Amaral's licences produced a fifth of Macau's revenue by 1898 and two-fifths by 1910. In 2025, gaming taxes brought the Macao SAR government 94.9 billion patacas — around 83% of all its tax revenue. The People's Republic did not invent Macau's dependence on gaming. It inherited, intact, a fiscal model a Portuguese governor started in 1847.
This is the thread that has run through the whole series: the captaincy of the Japan voyage, the perpetual mining title in Goa, the utility franchises. Portugal's most durable product in Asia was a legal instrument that let somebody else do business. The gaming concession is simply the largest example — so large that it has outgrown everything else Portugal left behind put together.
Lisboa
And then there is the name.
In Chinese, the Hotel Lisboa is 葡京, Pou Ging in Cantonese — literally "the Portuguese capital." The tower beside it is 新葡京, the Grand Lisboa, "the new Portuguese capital."
For a great many people across Asia, the most familiar Portuguese word they know is probably Lisboa. And they know it as the name of a casino, owned by a Hong Kong family, standing on a square named after a governor who was killed for refusing to pay rent to China, in a city that is now part of China.
It would be hard to design a better summary of the Portuguese commercial presence in Asia if you tried.
O que sobrou — what is still there
Praça Ferreira do Amaral, 亞馬喇前地, in front of the Lisboa — a governor's name on a bus terminus, most of whose passengers are heading for the casinos he made possible.
The pacapio lottery, 白鴿票, which Amaral authorised in 1846 and which has run without interruption for more than 175 years. It is still sold in Macau.
The Hotel Lisboa and the Grand Lisboa, 葡京 and 新葡京 — Portugal's capital, in Chinese, in lights.
The Hotel Central on the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, where Tai Hing ran its casino, a few doors from the bank that opened this series.
The concession model itself, now governing six operators under ten-year terms that began in 2023 — renewed by a different state, under a different legal system, on the same principle Amaral applied to Liu Pac in 1848.
Next
Every company in the last three instalments made its money in Asia by holding a right that a Portuguese administration had granted. The electricity, the water, the telephones and the tables were all, in the end, licences.
The next instalment is about a Portuguese company that went to Asia without one. No concession, no monopoly, no colonial privilege — just a factory, a product, and customers who had to be won. It arrived in Macau in 1986, when there were only thirteen years of Portuguese administration left, and it is still there.
Next in the series: Hovione, and the firecracker factory in Taipa.
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