Expats Dream About China’s City of Sin

Jeremy Murray reviews Paul French’s “Destination Macao.”

By Jeremy MurraySeptember 20, 2025

• History

• Cultural Studies

PAUL FRENCH DELIVERS the third installment in his Destination series—Destination Macao (2025)—with a collection of transporting essays on the remarkable Chinese territory, Macau, which is only about half the size of Manhattan. The previous two books in the series are Destination Shanghai (2018) and Destination Peking (2021). As the series’ name implies, these books are mainly about the experiences of people who travel to these historical cities rather than those who call them home. Through these works, as well as his other impressive and popular histories, French has established himself as a leading writer on the expat experience in China.

French’s work introduces the reader to a wide range of subjects in immersive and rewarding prose, with a storyteller’s eye for mise-en-scène and a nose for the telling anecdote. Even his footnotes are worth reading for still more gems that illuminate a rich path of research. This is also apparent in his award-winning true crime book, Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (2013).

Today, Macau is a special administrative region (SAR), like Hong Kong, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but it was a Portuguese colony from the 16th century until its handover to the PRC in 1999, two years after the British relinquished Hong Kong. French deliberately chooses the antiquated “Macao” spelling instead of the more widely accepted “Macau,” similar to his choice of “Peking” instead of Beijing. This, he signals, is not a book about the current state of the PRC’s casino hub, but rather a book about the historical expat world in the Portuguese colony. (For the more recent Macau, see Tim Simpson’s 2023 book Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution.)

French’s Macao is a rich world to explore, and as in his other histories, he brings it to life as a historical backdrop that is immersive and evocative. While the experience and the voice of the locals are central to understanding any place and time such as Shanghai, Beijing, or Macau, French reminds us in these Destination books that there is also great value in considering the view of a historical visitor. A prolific expat will notice and remark on those aspects of life that a local might take for granted. The mode of defamiliarizing a place—an essential gesture that writers of fiction or poetry often reach for—is immediately available to the expat, and they need merely scoop up the “exotic” like gold in the streets (and hopefully settle into a café and put it on paper). Of course, the word “exotic” simply means “foreign,” which is an utterly relative idea; your “exotic” is just someone else’s home.

To use French’s phrase, these essays are more a “Macao of the mind” than a Macanese social or political history:

Macao is so often an abstraction, something imagined rather than actually known. Often it stands as a symbol; invariably, rightly or wrongly, as one for lassitude and vice. Macao is portrayed as an outpost, a backwater, a place largely forgotten, and so therefore a site where anything, often things usually deemed prohibited, immoral, or transgressive, can take place. A covert location where troublesome human desires and tastes can become overt. Where people can hide, seek refuge, start over. Macao as a dream, a humid fever dream.

The discursive or imaginary facets of a place are certainly valid approaches to cultural history. They intersect with “what really happened” in ways that bring to life the essential “why” and “how” of history, showing us the meaning people made of their worlds. Creative representations of a place—whether in film, poetry, novels, or impressionistic painting, all of which we find in this book—give us a rich and textured portrait of it through the eyes of its visitors. When we consider the alternative, or a world without these elements, we are left with only the “what-really-happened” of it all, the kind of diplomatic, military, and elite political histories that have long gone extinct outside of the archives. Even in the academy, the choice between these extremes has largely become a false one, since most scholarship combines elements of cultural, social, political, and other modes of history.

French’s chapters in Destination Macao are woven together to provide a cohesive portrait of Macau. The chapters can also be taken individually as profiles, capturing the essence of a historical moment or one person’s experience. Some of the figures are wealthy magnates or prolific novelists, while others are pirates, refugees, gangsters, overlooked authors, painters, and more.

French begins at the start of Portuguese settlement in Macau, documenting its earliest days in which colonial administrators and Catholic priests left their mark. Macau was to be a toehold of the Portuguese Empire in the Pacific, in particular its trade relations with the Ming (1368–1644) and then the Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Since Portugal had been the first to make such a territorial claim, coming to terms of trade and settlement with both dynasties, other foreign merchants were able to make use of Macau. But the southern speck of land was never an ideal harbor, in contrast to the deeper waters of Hong Kong, which would eclipse Macau in economic and political importance after the British Empire took Hong Kong from the Qing in 1842 in the aftermath of the First Opium War. This was the beginning of ceaseless comparisons that Macau would have to endure, always contrasted with its wealthier, more industrious, and more powerful neighbor, Hong Kong. The Macau harbor naturally accumulated silt from the Pearl River, making it impossible to navigate for larger ships. This brought sleepier days, as with the silting of the Zwin channel near Bruges in the 1500s. But in both the Belgian and Chinese cities, the resulting loss in trade saw a gain in picturesque historical preservation.

In the sprawling chapters, French tours us through what seems to be the first expat bar in China, “Mr. Markwick’s English Tavern,” and introduces us to a world of piracy that is far from the stereotypes of the Barbary Coast or the Caribbean. In Macau, the legendary swashbucklers are more likely starving “standby pirates,” or fishers who may engage in acts of piracy due to extreme poverty and seasonal opportunities. French recounts deadly encounters with pirates and their “pirate queen” that are gritty, clumsy, and disturbing, capturing desperate acts across the chasm between the inhabitants of the Chinese coast and the visiting tourists and merchants. We also learn of the rising British Empire’s consideration of simply seizing Macau in the early 1800s, and then a Japanese attempt to buy Macau in the lead-up to its 1937 invasion of mainland China. In depicting this wrangling over Macau, French is at his finest in first showing how it reflected the global nature of European rivalries, and later revealing Macau’s importance as a potential (but unrealized) staging point for major civilian and military air transport. He explains the complex neutral status of Macau during World War II:

The fuel situation went from bad to worse in January 1945 when the United States claimed that neutral Macao was drawing up plans to sell aviation fuel to Japan. Aircraft from the carrier USS Enterprise bombed and strafed the hangar of the Macao Naval Aviation Centre, targeting the fuel dump, which exploded, killing five civilians.

For some, like merchant-smuggler Stanley Ho Hung-sun, “Macao was paradise during the war.” In the histories of Hong Kong and Macau, few figures loom larger than Ho, and French recounts the billionaire’s rise during World War II, as well as accounts of other powerful merchants and titans of Macau: “They sailed under false flags, flags of neutral nations (mostly Spain) or, as Stanley Ho perhaps did in the waters around Macao, ran up whichever flag was most convenient and likely to allow them to avoid confrontation and gain safe passage.” French cites one rumor that claimed Ho even had a Jolly Roger in his trunk of many national flags, all of them ready to run up for the desired effect.

Alongside the stories of billionaires, French narrates the quiet life of a talented architect and artist who captured the essence of Macau in the 1940s: the Russian painter George Smirnoff. In addition to his teaching, Smirnoff left a legacy of adoring watercolor paintings that immortalized both the buildings and the people of Macau. This chapter, which I enjoyed alongside this video from Macau’s Municipal Affairs Bureau, provides a sad and nostalgic but also lush and charming portrait of a troubled period for Macau.

Among the many reasons to dive into French’s Destination Macao is his introduction to the Macanese novelist and journalist Deolinda da Conceição (1914–57). In French’s chapter, Conceição, a teacher and translator, takes her place among the brilliant and prominent writers, including Ding Ling and Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), who brought women’s voices to the forefront of Chinese literature from this period.

In his essay on boxer and gangster Paul Lojnikoff, French uncovers one of the more dangerous figures in Macau’s history. His telling of the manner in which Lojnikoff arrived in the hands of Macau authorities in 1956 is fascinating, as it illuminates the complex dynamics of relations between the PRC and Macau during the Cold War through the case of a stateless criminal who was prepared to throw himself into the harbor to escape his fate in Communist China. Here again, French’s description moves us through and well beyond any charming patina on the criminal side of Macau. Lojnikoff and his gangster associates, for example, were not above blackmailing members of the anti-Japanese resistance movement in the Philippines to make money.

In recounting the Macau connections of French novelist Maurice Dekobra, Hollywood filmmaker Josef von Sternberg, and Dutch American travel writer Hendrik de Leeuw, among others, French takes us behind the curtain of what is perhaps the peak of depictions of Macau as dangerous, exotic, and sinful. He provides rich context to show how this “Macao of the mind” is made and amplified for sensationalism. For example:

It is clear though that De Leeuw comes across […] as obsessed with race and miscegenation, constantly referring to black and racially mixed people in derogatory ways, to the Portuguese as somehow morally inferior to northern Europeans, and suggesting they are all weaker morally than white Americans. Presumably this played well to his predominant readership—segregation-era America. What is undisputed is that it played firmly into the principal narrative around Macao at the time.

In some ways, there is an inevitability to the arrival of Ian Fleming at the end of French’s book. The creator of James Bond and veteran of British military intelligence was not the first to see the adventurous appeal of Macau as a “thrilling city” of sin. Two decades before Fleming’s 1959 visit, De Leeuw had also thrilled his readers with the allure of the place. Like De Leeuw and Fleming, French explores sensational topics in “exotic” destinations for his books. But while these earlier authors aimed to sell books based at least in part on the exploitation of late imperialist supremacy, French turns his focus on these expats’ lives and voices to reveal a more complex history. French scratches the glossy surface and finds, bluntly stated, irredeemable criminality, including the sexual exploitation of minors. It is impossible to sustain a sense of the “exotic” based on French’s account of the imprisonment and brutalization of women and girls in Macau, born of the most extreme inequalities of wealth and power, and the legacy of racist imperialism. French may hook some readers with intriguing destinations, mysterious events, and fascinating people, but what he ultimately provides is far more insightful and edifying than it is voyeuristic.

Anthropologist Laura Nader advised her fellow scholars to “study up,” or direct their focus not only at the colonized but also at the colonizers, not only at the oppressed but also at the oppressors, and thus to understand the logic, the systems, and the workings of oppression in action, not merely its crushing results. While French wears his theory lightly, in his choice to direct his attention at the ogling De Leeuw and the cool Fleming as they traipse through Macau, we are rewarded with an understanding of the inner sordid generation of a pulpy and “exotic” narrative.

Today, Macau still holds a special niche in the world of expat life and the intersection of China and the European imperial past. The 2015 novel The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne, which French enthusiastically reviewed for LARB, has been adapted into a new film starring Colin Farrell and Fala Chen and directed by Edward Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) won several Oscars before he captured a cultural moment with the papal succession drama Conclave (2024). French’s essays in Destination Macao provide a fitting primer and companion for Osborne’s novel and Berger’s film, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival last month.

Another of French’s recent expat-in-China books considers a single expat, Wallis Simpson, who had a brief stay in China from 1924 to 1925—Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson. Simpson is known best as the throne-wrecker who ensnared the Duke of Windsor, Prince Edward, briefly King Edward VIII. The couple also gained infamy due to speculation that they were sympathetic to the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II.

In French’s examination of Simpson, and the creation of a so-called “China Dossier” about her “lotus year,” we are reminded of the fiercely patriotic espionage of Fleming’s James Bond, not to mention the misogyny. According to French and other careful historians, the dossier was packed with salacious fabrications and rumors about Simpson compiled to tarnish her reputation and possibly scuttle any nuptials that might have paired a divorced American woman with a royal. As for the authors of the kompromat dossier, French notes that “we can perhaps look to the British Special Intelligence Service outpost in Shanghai and China at the time as a strong potential source.” French’s diligent research uncovers no evidence that Simpson engaged in any of the exotic harlotry cooked up by the imaginative boys on His Majesty’s Secret Service. On the contrary, French suggests that Simpson was herself possibly a document courier for the US State Department or the Office of Naval Intelligence.