How Macau keeps a Cantonese city and a Portuguese one

What languages the people of Macau speak

Chinese and Portuguese are both official, and Article 9 of the Basic Law lets Portuguese be used beside Chinese by the government, the legislature and the courts. Spoken life is Cantonese. The 2011 census, as reported by Macao News, found Cantonese the first language of 83.3% of residents aged three and over, and 90% able to speak it. Portuguese was the first language of 0.7%, and another 3% spoke it as a second language. Written Chinese in Macau uses traditional characters, not the simplified forms of the mainland.

The census showed two languages gaining between 2001 and 2011.

Counting second languages, 41.4% of residents spoke Mandarin in 2011, up from 26.7% in 2001, and 21.1% spoke English as a second language. Schools follow no single curriculum. Most teach in Cantonese, write in Chinese and require Mandarin classes; a minority of private schools teach in English or Portuguese, and Luso-Chinese schools add compulsory Portuguese, according to Wikipedia's article on Macau. The Catholic diocese ran 30 schools and colleges with 32,707 students in the 2022 to 2023 school year.

Who the Macanese people of Macau are

In English, Macanese can mean anyone from Macau, but in Cantonese the word for the community is a separate one, meaning native-born Portuguese. Wikipedia's article on the Macanese people describes an ethnic group formed from the sixteenth century out of Portuguese settlers and women from Malacca, Goa, Ceylon, Japan and the Tanka boat people of the coast, joined by Chinese converts to Catholicism who took Portuguese names. The 2011 census counted 8,106 Portuguese and Macanese residents, 1.5% of the population.

Membership has never been settled by ancestry alone. The traditional marker was Portuguese spoken at home and schooling in Portuguese. In the mid-1990s the colonial government tried to redefine Macanese as everyone born in Macau, and the attempt failed. Many Macanese families left around the handover, and many children switched from Portuguese to English-medium schools; some Macanese now speak only Cantonese as a first language.

Portuguese nationality outlasted the colony. At the handover 107,000 residents held Portuguese passports, according to Wikipedia's article on Macau. Since 1999, permanent residents of Chinese nationality who hold Portuguese travel documents may keep using them, and residents of mixed Chinese and Portuguese descent may choose either nationality; by the end of 2023, 82 had opted for Portuguese nationality, according to the yearbook.

How Patuá survives on the stage

The community's own language is Patuá, a creole rooted in Portuguese with borrowings from Malay, Cantonese, English and Spanish. Macao News put the number of native speakers at as few as 50 by one estimate in 2025. Macao News describes Dóci Papiaçám di Macau as the only drama group working in the language. Its plays, often satirical and about social issues and current affairs, are written and directed by its co-founder Miguel de Senna Fernandes, and What's the Deal? ran at the Macao Arts Festival in May 2025 with surtitles in English, Portuguese and Chinese. Patuá theatre is one of 11 Macau items on the national list of intangible cultural heritage.

What Macau's temples and churches hold

The Freedom of Religion and Worship Law of 1998 declares no state religion and treats every denomination as equal before the law. The Macao Yearbook names Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism as the main belief systems of the local community, and notes that Buddhism in many residents' minds is mixed with the other two. More than 40 Buddhist temples stand in the territory, most dedicated to Kun Iam, the Goddess of Mercy; to Tin Hau, the Heavenly Queen and protector of seafarers; or to Kwan Tai. The A-Ma Temple and the cult of A-Ma, the sea goddess whose temple gave Macau its Portuguese name, are both on the national heritage list, as are the customs of Na Tcha, inscribed in 2014, and of Tou Tei, the earth god.

What the Christian churches count

Christianity arrived with the merchants. Pope Gregory XIII created the Diocese of Macau on 23 January 1576, and Jesuits had a mission and college in the city by 1565. The diocese now covers only the region, with nine parishes, 18 freestanding churches and 55 chapels. It counted 17,464 Catholic residents at the end of 2023 and about 15,457 more among temporary residents, Filipino domestic workers and Portuguese-speaking expatriates among them, for a total of about 32,921. Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society arrived in 1807 and baptised the first Chinese Protestant in 1814; nearly 80 Protestant churches now serve more than 8,000 believers. The Islamic Association was founded in 1935 and the Baha'i Faith arrived in 1953.

Temple archives have their own place in the record. The Kong Tac Lam Temple, founded in 1924 as the first Buddhist college for women in the Lingnan region, kept more than 6,000 items, and its archives and manuscripts from 1645 to 1980 were filed for UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register on 24 May 2023.

Which festivals Macau keeps from two calendars

The public holiday calendar carries both traditions. The yearbook calls the Lunar New Year the most important festival for Chinese people, and notes that civil servants, normally barred from casinos, may enter them on its first three days. Buddha's Birthday was declared a public holiday after the handover. On that day Macau's fishmongers perform the Drunken Dragon Dance, a custom from neighbouring Zhongshan in which only the dragon's head and tail are carried and the dancers drink as they dance; it was listed as Macau heritage in 2009 and national heritage in 2011.

On the Catholic side, processions follow the Church's calendar: Our Lord of the Passion, Our Lady of Fátima and Corpus Christi. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December has been celebrated by Macau's Catholics since 1854 and is a public holiday, as is All Souls' Day on 2 November. The Dragon Boat races, held on the fifth day of the fifth moon, have grown into an international competition, and the A-Ma festival fills the temple in April.

What Macanese cooking is made from

Macau's food is Cantonese at its base, with Portuguese dishes adapted over four centuries. Wikipedia's article on Macau describes Portuguese recipes reworked with local seafood, turmeric, coconut milk and adzuki beans, with influences from Indian and Malay cooking, producing local versions of caldo verde and cozido and minchee. Many restaurants serve a looser Cantonese and Portuguese mix, and galinha à portuguesa, despite its name, is a Chinese dish drawing on Macanese influence. Hong Kong style cha chaan teng cafés are common, and egg tarts, pork chop buns and almond biscuits are sold as street food.

Macanese gastronomy is on the national list of intangible cultural heritage, and UNESCO, which lists Macao in its Creative Cities Network for gastronomy, describes Macanese cuisine as the first fusion food. UNESCO's profile reports that 6.6% of the workforce was employed in gastronomy and that the Macao Food Festival drew an audience of more than 800,000 in 2016.

How Macau protects its old city from towers

The Historic Centre of Macao, inscribed by UNESCO on 15 July 2005, links 22 principal buildings and public spaces along the route from the old Chinese port to the Portuguese city. It includes the Dom Pedro V Theatre of 1860, described by the yearbook as the first Western-style theatre in China, which received 101,531 visitors in 2023, and the Guia Fortress of 1622, whose lighthouse began working in 1865, was wrecked by a storm in 1874 and was relit in 1910. The Ruins of St. Paul's are what a fire in 1835 left of the Jesuit Church of the Mother of God.

Height is the recurring dispute. In 2007 residents wrote to UNESCO about construction around the Guia Lighthouse, including the headquarters of the central government's Liaison Office, and a notice limiting building heights near the site followed. In 2015 the New Macau Association reported to UNESCO that heritage was not being protected from development, and in 2016 the government approved an 81-metre limit for a residential project that was reported to breach the height rules around the lighthouse. UNESCO's own statement records Chief Executive Directives of 2006 and 2008 extending planning control over the site and its views to the sea.

What Macau's working heritage looks like

The government's heritage list reaches beyond churches and fortresses to the trades the city lived on before the casinos. Firecracker factories opened on Taipa in the 1920s, and from the 1950s to the 1970s fireworks were a major export. The former Iec Long Firecracker Factory, a site of more than 20,000 square metres with its layout intact, opened to the public on 23 December 2022 and received 173,675 visitors in 2023. The shipyards at Lai Chi Vun on Coloane were built in the 1950s and fell out of use in the 1990s; the yearbook describes them as the only relatively well-preserved site of the shipbuilding trade.

Two other sites record the social history of the territory. At Ka Ho on Coloane, the village of Our Lady, a former leprosarium, has held a permanent exhibition on the leprosariums of Macau since 6 November 2021 and received 59,685 visitors in 2023. The Mandarin's House on the peninsula, probably built before 1869, was the ancestral home of the writer Zheng Guanying, who completed his book Words of Warning in Times of Prosperity there; it opened after restoration in February 2010.

Living practice is listed too. Macau's inventory of intangible cultural heritage held 70 items when the yearbook was compiled, 12 of them on the List of Macao Intangible Cultural Heritage, and the Taoist ritual music of Macau's temples was added to the local list in 2009 and the national list in 2011.

How Macau fills its calendar of events

The Macau Grand Prix began as a treasure hunt through the city in 1954 and became a motor race. It runs on the Guia Circuit through the streets of the peninsula and is the only street circuit that hosts Formula Three, touring car and motorcycle races at one event, according to Wikipedia's article on Macau. The 70th edition, in November 2023, ran 11 races over six days with 245 drivers and an audience of 145,000.

The arts calendar is set by the government's Cultural Affairs Bureau. The 33rd Macao Arts Festival ran from 28 April to 28 May 2023, the 35th International Music Festival through October, and the Lusofonia Festival of 27 to 29 October 2023 put up booths for the Macanese and for communities from Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Goa, Mozambique, Portugal, Timor-Leste and other Portuguese-speaking places, drawing about 23,000 people. Macau keeps its own National Olympic Committee and sends its own teams to many international competitions, but it does not compete at the Olympic Games, which admit new committees only from sovereign states.