Rogério Miguel Puga

(A World of Euphemism: Representations of Macao in the Work of Austin Coates: City of Broken Promises as Historical Novel and Female Bildungsroman (Lisbon: FCT and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009)

Abstract
Although the first depiction of Macao in English literature dates from the
16th century, it appeared more widely in English novels after Hong Kong was founded in 1841. The little studied works of Austin Coates (1922-1997) allow an analysis within the field of Anglo-Portuguese studies. More particularly, his work focuses on the enclave’s image through the unpublished poem “Macao” (1950) and the novel City of Broken Promises (1967), which I would classify as both a historical novel and a female Bildungsroman. The realistic images of the City of the Holy Name of God of
Macao shown in these works, and in English literature in general, are similar to extratextual references that the informed reader will recognise as specific to that historical location. This will be demonstrated through analysis of documents from the East India Company (1600-1793) and countless travel reports, used to study the fictionalisation of Anglo-Portuguese relations and the English presence in Southern China in the
17th and 18th centuries, and the relations interrelating History and Literature in the work of Austin Coates. The aim of this work is to study the history of the British presence in Macao (1635‑1793) and the representation of Macao in the literary work of Coates by comparing it with his historiographic studies on the territory, cross-referencing Portuguese, English and Chinese sources and adopting a multidisciplinary approach
(embracing Literary Studies, History, Anthropology, Urban Studies and Sociolinguistics), as required by the hybrid nature of the text as a historical novel. The portrayal of the historical city in City of Broken Promises is achieved by using literary themes and strategies such as: the (fictional) diary of Thomas Van Mierop, the description of the context of the action (historical and symbolic time and space) and of the process of the personal development (Bildung) of Martha da Silva Van Mierop, a historical
character who is portrayed in the novel; the place-names; the historical figures; the archival sources; the use of intertextuality; the ethno-historical and exotic aspect of the urban chronotope; the female condition and experience and the relationships involving class, gender and ethnicity. This study also considers the reception of the novel in Macao and in the Anglophone space in general. The structure of the historical city is linked to the process of Martha’s development, as the domestic and public spheres open up throughout the process of the character’s socialisation. The personal, local and national history and the young woman’s memory and development combine to produce a description of 18th century Macao, a city that is in turn depicted as timeless in the poem “Macao”.
While the poem refers to the Portuguese discoveries and the Luso-Chinese nature of the enclave, City of Broken Promises appears as an innovative novel in that it represents the period when the supercargoes from the East India Company were in Macao during the time between the Cantonese trading seasons in the second half of the 18th century. The former is the first English fictional narrative that deals with the British presence in the Portuguese-ruled territory. The study of this theme allows us to contextualise the realistic portrayal of the city in Anglophone literature and especially in Coates’ work, where the enclave is depicted both as a historical and symbolic place for the long-established links between the Portuguese, Chinese and British in the Far East.

For more than four centuries, Macau was the centre of Portuguese trade and culture on the South China Coast. Until the founding of Hong Kong and the opening of other ports in the 1840s, it was also the main gateway to China for independent British merchants and their only place of permanent residence. Drawing extensively on Portuguese as well as British sources, The British Presence in Macau traces Anglo-Portuguese relations in South China from the first arrival of English trading ships in the 1630s to the establishment of factories at Canton, the beginnings of the opium trade, and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. The British and Portuguese—longstanding allies in the West—pursued more complex relations in the East, as trading interests clashed under a Chinese imperial system and as the British increasingly asserted their power as “a community in search of a colony”.

Early British Presence in China (Macao), 1635-1793.

There is an English translation of this book: "The British Presence in Macao (1635-1793)", published by the Royal Asiatic Society (London), Hong Kong University Press and University of Macao.

Resumo: Em dezembro de 1963, o conhecido romancista Graham Greene (1904-1991) visita Goa em trabalho para o jornal Sunday Times, no qual vem a publicar, no ano seguinte, uma crónica intitulada " Goa the Unique ". O presente artigo analisa a representação da Goa católica dois anos após o final da administração colonial portuguesa (quando o futuro político do território era ainda uma incógnita) através dos topoi da singularidade da Goa católica e higiénica face a uma Índia ameaçadora, suja e doente (poética da sujidade), metáforas que eram, havia muito tempo, recorrentes na literatura inglesa. Palavras-chave: Goa, catolicismo, poética da sujidade, crónica de viagens, Graham Greene Abstract: In December 1963, the renowned English novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) visited Goa while working for the Sunday Times. The following year he published the travel chronicle " Goa the Unique ". This article deals with the representation of Catholic Goa two years after the end of the Portuguese colonial administration (when the territory's future was still uncertain), through the topoi of the uniqueness of a sanitary Catholic Goa compared to a threatening, dirty, and sick India (poetics of dirt), metaphors that were already recurrent in English literature.

In 1614-15 the University of Cambridge staged the neo-latin comedy Ignoramus, by George Ruggle (1575-1622), during king James I's visit. This paper deals with the text's negative hetero-stereotyping of the Portuguese (Catholic) characters and analyses the characterization of both Englishness and the Catholic definitional Other(s).

This article establishes that the first museum in China was not the Zhendan Museum in Shanghai, founded by the French Jesuit Pierre Marie Heude (1836–1902) in 1868, but the “British Museum in China”, founded in 1829 by three supercargoes of the English East India Company, in Macao, a Portuguese enclave in the Pearl River Delta since c.1577. My research, based on Portuguese, British and American sources, allows us to better understand the context in which the founders of the museum interacted and lived in Macao, how their research and field-work was important for academic British institutions such as the British Museum in London and how the British Museum of Macao was founded and became the first (western-styled) museum in China.

This article represents an extended version of a section of a paper I presented at the seminar Commerce, Migration and Culture: New Perspectives, at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London), on 21 July 2010.

Em 1902, doze anos após o Ultimato britânico, Teófilo Braga publica o seu poema narrativo Os Doze de Inglaterra, que revisita um dos mais conhecidos episódios e temas da literatura portuguesa, sobretudo através de acontecimentos históricos, lendas e personagens de cariz anglo-português, como a lenda de Machim, que enriquecem o texto e a tradição dos Doze de Inglaterra.1

In 1902, twelve years after the British Ultimatum, Teófilo Braga published his narrative poem The Twelve of England. The text revisits one of the most famous episodes and themes in Portuguese literature, especially through Anglo-Portuguese historical events, characters, and legends such as the story of Machim, which enrich both the text and the literary tradition of The Twelve of England.

Keywords: episode of The Twelve of England; Teófilo Braga; episódio dos Doze de Inglaterra; poema narrativo; narrative poem

In 1500 the fleet of Admiral Pedro Álvares Cabral discovers the land of Vera Cruz (True Cross), which would later be called Brazil. Facing a vast and wild territory inhabited by natives represented as kind and naive, the scribe Pêro Vaz de Caminha presents King Manuel I with images of an exotic and fertile territory where everything is abundant, and of edenic freedom and innocence. This same space is represented as waiting to be discovered by the Portuguese, and, through the rhetoric of the discovery, Caminha advises the king to colonize the territory and to convert its inhabitants, compared to fugitive birds and wild animals which must be tamed, an image I will deal with throughout this article.

O presente artigo analisa a imagem acústica (soundscape), figuras-tipo da Macaudo início da segunda metade do século XX, bem como elementos etnográficos, como ovendedor ambulante, da narrativa “Min-Pau-Lou”, inserida na antologia de contosexperiênciasAguarelas de Macau 1960-1970: Cenas da Rua e Histórias de Vida. Um OlharRetrospectivo, um Olhar de Saudade (1998), da antropóloga Ana Maria Amaro.

Palavras-chave: conto; imagem acústica (soundscape); narrativa de cariz etnográfico;Macau; vendedores ambulantes.

This article deals with the intertextual process of representation of the myth of the foundation of Lisbon by Ulysses in Teolinda Gersão’s most recent novel A Cidade de Ulisses (2011). It analyses the strategies and symbols which allow the Portuguese novelist to rewrite and update the literary myth.


Keywords: Ulysses; A Cidade de Lisboa; Lisbon; myth; Teolinda Gersão; novel;
intertextuality.

Both Austin Coates' City of Broken Promises (1967) and Timothy Mo's An Insular Possession (1986) depict the western modus vivendi in South China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries using Chinese Pidgin English as a symbol of the restricted space of action in ...

e natural de Macau e da província de Guandong nas obras em questão. A antologia de contos AC, publicada em edição de autor 2 originalmente em Lisboa no ano de 1974 e reeditada, com um prefácio de Maria Ondina Braga (1932-2003) em Macau, no ano de 1995, não tem praticamente sido estudada, apesar de ser referida, quase sempre de forma breve, sobretudo em estudos dedicados às culturas lusófonas. 3 Já a segunda antologia de que nos ocuparemos, AM, foi publicada em Macau no ano de 1998, décadas após a sua redacção e um ano antes da transição da administração do enclave para a República Popular da China. AS AUTORAS Perante a inexistência de estudos sobre a autora de AC e sobre o contexto de produção dessa obra, para recolher os dados biográfi cos que aqui apresentamos recorremos a familiares-Graça Pacheco Jorge, prima da escritora-e à outra autora cuja obra estudamos No one who has studied the history and literature of the Chinese Empire can fail to be impressed by the women of that nation. For the past four thousand years they have played their part gently and quietly behind the scenes with a modesty that commends itself, but which makes the task of revealing their lives exceedingly diffi cult. Th ere were so many women of outstanding ability among them whose names are mentioned here and there, and yet, when we attempt to reconstruct their lives, the information available is at best meager and unsatisfactory.