This Week in China’s History: The Passaleão Incident and the Death of a Portuguese Governor

August, 1849

Listen to Kaiser’s narration of the column in the embedded player above!

Captain João Maria Ferrera do Amaral was Macau’s colonial governor and the center of a firestorm. He had been in Macau for more than three years — none of them easy. After a day of difficult negotiations with both Portuguese and Chinese officials, Amaral took his customary ride on horseback around sundown near the territory’s border with the mainland, a stone structure called in Portuguese the Porto do Cerco (in Chinese 關閘 guānzhá, in English variously the Boundary Gate or the Customs Gate). If the governor was looking for some calm, he did not find it that evening.

It was the summer of 1849, and European imperialism in China was ascendant in the wake of the First Opium War. Portugal, which had the longest-standing toehold on Chinese territory, was struggling to keep up. Portuguese had first arrived in Macau in the 16th century, making it the first European territory in China, but its status had long been ambiguous. The first agreement, from the 1550s, was simply a rental of the port, followed soon after by a “permanent” lease — though even that came with conditions not typical of a colony: fortifications, for instance, were prohibited.

This vague arrangement persisted for nearly three centuries (once the Portuguese had fended off Dutch attempts to capture the city). When the Qing supplanted the Ming, the Manchu rulers incorporated Macau’s liminal status into their foreign policy, requiring foreign ships to stop in the Portuguese port before proceeding, if permitted, to other ports. Along with this, Qing officials assumed a strong administrative role in the city, controlling many aspects of commerce and society, again belying the notion that Macau was a Portuguese colony.