When I was in Portugal for the first time in 1988, as an ICALP research fellow, a gentleman asked me: “Do you know why the Chinese emperor donated Macau to us Portuguese? Why we helped the Chinese expel the pirates.” “What? I lived in China for 37 years and I never heard about this donation. Who said that?” “It’s written in school books.”
“But it wasn’t like that at all”, I tried to explain to the gentleman. I came to Portugal directly from Macau, where I had worked at the Macau Cultural Institute (ICM) and Dr. Jorge Morbey, the then president of ICM, gave me the task of translating into Portuguese, History of Macaufor internal reading. The book, by Huang Hongzhao, was published in 1987 by The Commercial Pres (Hong Kong). At that time I didn’t have a computer, I translated with a typewriter and I learned that some Portuguese claimed that they needed land to dry their wet merchandise and, with a bribe to a local mandarin, they obtained this land and little by little they took up residence, paying rent…
After having spent around 20 years in Portugal since 1991, having seen so many Portuguese and Chinese scholars studying and writing about the Portuguese-Chinese relationship through Macau, I thought that the locals, especially the new generations, no longer believed in the story of “donation” and “pirates”. However, in the 2010s, when commenting on a text about Macau in a translation class in Lisbon aimed at Chinese university students on mobility, I remembered this “donation” and told it as a joke to the students. But, to my great astonishment, they said that a young collaborator of the Course had told them the same story. And now, a few days ago, I happened to read a booklet for the 4th year of a school, which reports: “This small territory, located in the south of China, was donated to us by the Chinese as a reward… our navigators in the fight against pirates.” My God! When can the Portuguese know any Chinese opinion on this Macau issue?
Finally, the Portuguese version of História Geral de Macau, written by Prof. Huang Qichen in Guangzhou and translated by Prof. Hu Jing in Tianjin, reviewed by Prof. Carlos Ascenso André in Coimbra. The Chinese work was nominated in 2021 for the 5th edition of the Chinese Government Award for Publications and won the 8th edition of the China Excellence Publication Award in 2023.
I found out about this translation project almost two years ago, through Dr. Zeferino, director of Caminho, because Hu Jing spoke to him about me. In fact, being a mobility student in Lisbon, she took Chinese/Portuguese and Portuguese/Chinese translation courses with me. According to her, it took five years to finish translating the book, with 600 pages.
The book tells the story of Macau from ancient times to 2019, especially from the Ming Dynasty to the present day. Cites a large number of historical documents from China and abroad, with all arguments and evidence well founded, without bias or imposition of ideas.
When I read that the Torre do Tumbo documents were also mentioned, I remembered that in 1988, on a visit to Dr. João Bigotte Chorão, my husband and I were invited by his wife Dr. Maria José Mexia to visit the Torre do Tombo where he worked, as there were many boxes of documents in Chinese there, and no one knew their contents. We then went to the Tower in its old premises and from the two boxes they showed us, we discovered that they were old documents from the local government of Macau, among which, one recorded the purchase and expense accounts. After the visit, I wrote a letter to Dr. Morbey and afterwards, he said he would send a technician to microfilm the documents. I only heard about this documentary collection again in 2016-2017, which, called “Chapas Cívicas”, became classified by UNESCO as a Memory of the World record and was exhibited in Beijing, in 2019, on the occasion of 40 years of diplomatic relations between the Portuguese Republic and the People’s Republic of China.
During the book launch, with a presentation by Prof. Jorge Santos Alvez, a Chinese listener, immediately sent a WeChat message to his group of friends: “Both China and Portugal have a rich historical record about Macau. For Portugal, it is also necessary to better understand the history of Macau from a Chinese perspective, especially its development after its return to China. In this sense, the publication of the Portuguese version of General History of Macau is of great value.”
Congratulations to the publisher, the author, the translator and the reviewer, for this great contribution they made to promoting mutual understanding between the Chinese and Portuguese.
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