Macau History and Society illuminates the early Portuguese maritime exploration along China's south coast, political and economic development in Macau, and current social problems. The book makes significant contributions to a political sociology of Macau, emphasizing how different civilizations and cultures interacted with one another, and explores how a new Macau identity can be constructed. Democratization has been a never-ending process in Macau since the 1500's. Macau's experience indicates that sovereignty has been shared rather than exclusive. Although civilizations and cultures do clash, they also cooperate. But the Macau model is deeply flawed - Hao contends that Macau needs to build a new multicultural identity, and a cosmopolitan political and economic identity.

"Macao's Ruins of St. Paul (correct name Church of Madre de Deus) is the only example of Baroque art and architecture in China. This beautifully illustrated book explores anew the now vanished but once renowned Church, as well as the Jesuit university college of which it was part. Both Church and College were destroyed by fire in 1835. From the perspective of the history of art they have remained poorly explored. The author remedies this by imaginatively reconstructing their ground plans, architecture and decoration in the light of new information in original documents that he has found in archives and libraries in Europe and Macao. In his re-creation of the buildings, he illustrates and draws on the evidence of selected Jesuit buildings in Italy, Portugal, Spain and Portuguese India and considers the historical Counter-Reformation environment that eventually led to the College of Madre de Deus in China. The most recent art-historical findings on the Mannerist and Baroque art of the Jesuits in Europe and Iberian colonies are also taken into account. The author, who first identified the surviving façade of the Church as a retable-façadeƯƯƯƯ, an unusual type of Iberian and Latin American church façade resembling an altarpiece, brings his argument to its logical conclusion by relating it to the Church's plan and decoration. An extremely important aspect of the art promoted by the Jesuits, centring on the cult of passive martyrdom, is also candidly discussed. This book will enable the general public to better appreciate the Ruins and provides much of interest and value to scholars, students, architects, art museums and cultural organizations."--Publisher's website.

Macao, 40 miles west of Hong Kong, became a place of Portuguese residence between 1555–57. In this short, lively and affectionate book, Austin Coates explains how and why the Portuguese came to the Far East, and how they peacefully settled in Macao with tacit Chinese goodwill. Macao's golden age, from 1557 to the disastrous collapse of 1641, is vividly reconstructed. There follows the cuckoo-in-the-nest situation of the late eighteenth century when the British in Macao were a law unto themselves, until the foundation of Hong Kong and the opening of Shanghai gave wider scope for their energies. Portugal’s subsequent struggle to obtain full sovereignty in Macao, and the extraordinary outcome in 1975, brings this account to a close. Special tribute is paid to the risks Macao gallantly undertook in harbouring Hong Kong's starving and destitute during World War II.

The story of the British acquisition of Hong Kong is intricately related to that of the Portuguese enclave of Macao. The British acquired Hong Kong in 1841, following 200 years of European endeavours to induce China to engage in foreign trade. As a residential base of European trade, Portuguese Macao enabled the West to maintain continuous relations with China from 1557 onwards. Opening with a vivid description of the first English voyage to China in 1637. Macao and the Britishtraces the ensuing course of Anglo-Chinese relations, during which time Macao skillfully – and without fortifications – escaped domination by the British and Chinese. The account covers the opening of regular trade by the East India Company in 1770, including the 'country' trade between India and China and Britain's first embassies to Peking, and relates the bedeviling effect of the opium trade. The story culminates in the resulting war from which Britain won, as part of its concessions, the obscure island of Hong Kong. Among those who feature in this lucid and lively account are the merchant princes Jardine and Matheson, the missionary Robert Morrison, the artist George Chinnery, and Captain Charles Elliot, Hong Kong’s maligned founder. Austin Coates (1922–97), a former senior British civil servant in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Sarawak, left government service at age forty to pursue a professional writing career. Widely regarded as the most distinguished English-language author in Hong Kong, Coates remained a long-time Hong Kong resident, later dividing his time between Hong Kong and Portugal, where he died. Macao and the British is a companion to his other two books on Macao, A Macao Narrative and the historical novel City of Broken Promises. Both these books and his other novel, The Road, are also available in the Echoes series from Hong Kong University Press. "Macao history at its most readable. It … should be immediately snapped up by anyone who has been unlucky enough to have missed it up to now." – South China Morning Post "This study vividly introduces the general reader to historic Macau, once 'the outpost of all Europe in China' and foothold to East India Company officials and private merchants trading in Canton." – Clive Willis, Emeritus Professor of Portuguese Studies, University of Manchester and author of China and Macau "Macao and the British 1637–1842: Prelude to Hong Kong (1988), published originally in 1964 as Prelude to Hong Kong, was the first work on Macau by Austin Coates (1922–1997). It is the first comprehensive survey ever to be written on the English presence, the Anglo-Chinese-Portuguese relations in Macau, and the Portuguese settlement's strategic importance for the British China Trade." – Rogerio Puga, Assistant Professor of History, University of Macau

In the past twenty years, work on the local culture of central Hunan has been one of the most exciting sources for rethinking the nature and variety of Chinese local society. At the heart of this society is a kind of statuary found nowhere else in China--sculpted images of local people, primarily religious specialists of a wide range, but also parents and ancestors who, according to Confucian orthodoxy, should be represented by tablets, not statues. While the consecration ceremonies of these statues include rites that are common to all China, they are embedded in unique local ritual traditions. Based on two decades of international collaborative research, Alain Arrault focuses on some 4,000 of these statues and studies them on the basis of consecration certificates inserted in the statues, the earliest of which date to the sixteenth century.