Macau, to its understandable chagrin, often seems an afterthought: to Hong Kong which overtook it, to Canton when it came to China trade, to Manila and the eponymous galleons when it came to being an entrepôt of global status, in the history of Western colonialism and imperialism in East Asia generally and today when it comes to business and tourism. But perhaps Macau owes its continuing uniqueness to just this. It always was, and remains, a distinct anomaly.

Macau is raconteur par excellence Paul French’s latest “destination” in a series that includes Shanghai and Beijing. The book is structured as a series of thematic historical vignettes of 15-20 pages each: on pirates, whether the Japanese actually tried to purchase Macau in the 1930s, the territory’s changing political and physical geography, the various painters, writers, refugees, actors and filmmakers that passed through. Several of the usual suspects—the 19th-century painter George Chinnery and American expat Harriett Low, World War II-era British Consul John Reeves—hardly appear, if at all. Stanley Ho and his activities during the War is perhaps the only account that might be familiar, although Robert J Antony’s Outlaws of the Sea: Maritime Piracy in Modern China cover the pirates in detail.

That Macau is rather hard to pin down is evident from French’s use of “Macao” in the title (a decision which takes the better part of a page to explain). “Macau” is the now official spelling (and the one that appears on the 1922 map he reproduces); “Macao” was more common in English and has a certain nostalgia about it. This decision reflects French’s approach to the city: it is telling that he opens with a quote from WH Auden. He is unapologetic: his book, he writes,

does not aim to tell those stories of Macao that have, in my opinion, been told before in greater depth. It is by design some aspects of Macao’s history and representation that have caught my attention and intrigued me enough to delve a little further. I should perhaps note that I am, like Auden, English, and so what jumps out to my non-Chinese, non-Macanese, non-Portuguese eye is, I think, sometimes different than what has often previously attracted Chinese and Portuguese writers on Macao.

One has to think that the term “Destination” in the title was chosen deliberately: French’s Macau is a place one goes to rather than, on the whole, being a place one is from. He has a soft spot for ruffians, rogues and celebrities, scandals and anecdotes, the anomalies and what-ifs of history. He is as interested in the way Macau was portrayed—the Macau of the mind, as it were—as the reality. The chapters on movie history, as are those on pulp-y writers who have now largely sunk into obscurity, are entertaining, detailed and opinionated. It is all heavily researched: the book is replete with very readable footnotes. French’s erudition is as refreshing (and fizzy) as a chilled glass of vinho verde.

That being said, probably the best chapter is one that eschews pirates, spies and movie stars and covers the under-appreciated mid-20th century Macanese writer Deolinda da Conceição. He places her firmly in the context of both “the many interesting, and often highly perceptive, European and American expatriate women writers who spent time in interwar Greater China and wrote novels and short stories set in the societies they encountered” as well as “her Chinese female contemporaries who dealt with feminist subjects in various ways”: he draws comparisons with Eileen Chang, Ding Xing and several others.

The important common thread between these women writers in Greater China was a similar form of feminist understanding. A notion of the plight of women in general, and the specificity of their situation and in the extremes of wartime, runs through all their work. Though of European heritage and writing in Portuguese, da Conceição shares many attributes with her Chinese contemporaries – her upbringing in Asia; an early and dedicated commitment to feminism; her adoption of the short story format; the primacy of (European, Eurasian, and Chinese) female characters in her work; and a life of movement between various Greater Chinese cities – Macao, Shanghai, and Hong Kong in her case.

One senses here something approaching a discovery, or at least a rediscovery. Buy the book for the fun, but read it for the cultural essays.

Destination Macao is rather like a box of chocolates: not so much that you never know what you’re going to get, but rather in the sense no box can contain all possible bonbons. The best selection always leaves something out.

So one might ask what other stories might have been included in a different box: Bartolomeu Vaz Landeiro, the turn of the 17th-century “King of the Portuguese” who reportedly went around Macau with a bodyguard of eighty; the 1880 visit of the first Brazilian delegation to China (and the Camões Tercentenary); the travelling opera companies that would somehow manage to perform full operas at Teatro Dom Pedro V back in the 1860s; perhaps Lawrence Osborne’s more recent fiction.

Macau is worth a return visit.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.