Macao - once a sleepy Portuguese dependency - now rivals Las Vegas as an international gambling capital. Clifford Coonanreports from the southern Chinese city and meets the Irish entrepreneurs behind some of its vast casinos.
The middle-aged Chinese woman sitting at the baccarat table has just lost €9,000 on a single hand. She shrugs, restacks her chips and plays again. Only a hint of perspiration suggests the stakes she is playing for. Besides, she is among friends: the next time she's on a roll the casino's other gamblers will probably cheer her on.
This is Macao. It used to be a quiet Portuguese dependency, but today the southern Chinese city is a favourite destination for China's high-rollers, and they and millions of their compatriots are spending so much money that Macao, the only part of the country where casinos are legal, is poised to overtake Las Vegas as a gambling resort, earning €4 billion from casinos this year.
Much of Macao still has a colonial feel. Its neoclassical architecture is similar to what you might see in Brazil, and street signs are in both Chinese and Portuguese, which is still an official language. Stop for something to eat and you'll find that Macanese food incorporates Chinese, Portuguese and African cuisine, with a dash of Indian spice, from Goa, thrown in for good measure. The favourite local tipple is vinho verde: young, green-tinged Portuguese white wine. In the city centre, near Leal Senado Square, you climb steps to get to St Paul's church, which was built by the Jesuits in the 17th century, although only the facade remains.
It feels a million miles from the roulette wheels and baccarat tables that are fuelling the economy. The heart of gaming in Macao - which is, like Hong Kong, a special administration region of China, with the freedom to set many of its own laws - is the Cotai Strip, a new €20-billion neon alley of casinos, hotels and shops on 200 acres of reclaimed land. Such big investments, with such huge potential profits, mean the stakes are high in this formerly sleepy enclave, as some of the world's biggest gaming companies shake the dice for influence.
"Soon they'll be talking about Las Vegas being the Macao of America," says Ciaran Carruthers, the Irishman who is senior vice-president of Hong Kong's Galaxy Entertainment company. "Macao over the next few years is going to develop into something quite unique and will be a replica of neither Las Vegas, Atlantic City nor Australian gaming."
I meet Carruthers, an engaging Dubliner who went to Synge Street Christian Brothers School, on the gala opening night of the Grand Waldo, the Cotai Strip's first resort. The casino has been built with Chinese tastes in mind: hostesses sit in a giant glass fishbowl while, in the VIP room, a Filipino band plays covers of disco classics. The Grand Waldo - in Cantonese, wah dou means "Chinese capital" - is a large casino, with 168 tables and 334 slot machines. It also has restaurants, shops, a hotel, a spa, nightclubs, a fitness centre and a swimming pool. It even has a children's playground and, inevitably for a casino targeted at Chinese customers, karaoke facilities. You know that Macao is a huge draw for mainland Chinese when you hear the distinctive dialects of Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai being spoken.
Not far from the Grand Waldo is the smoky and now slightly run-down Casino Lisboa, the 24-hour venue that revolutionised gambling in Asia when it opened in 1970, and made its owner, an octogenarian tycoon named Stanley Ho, a legend.
Growing competition means the 12-storey Lisboa is not as full as it used to be, but its customers are still spending money. The casino likes to helicopter VIPs to its high-roller rooms, where they can win or lose millions of euro in a day. Legend has it that one gambler said goodbye to €100 million in a single game of baccarat.
Scores of legally tolerated prostitutes, many of whom live in the casino's hotel, circle the Lisboa's public areas. The privilege of luring foreign guests by saying "Come to my room" is hard won. They cast lots for who gets to patrol the prime spots and who has to wait for clients in the restaurant or, worse, in their rooms. Everyone has to gamble in Macao, prostitutes included.
Ho, a staunch Catholic with Irish blood, is the city's king of gambling. Although foreign gaming companies see themselves as the future of Macao, a good 80 per cent of gambling revenue still comes from locally owned casinos. Most of them are run by Ho, who has just made a Belfast man, Frank McFadden, president of joint ventures and business development at his company Sociedade de Jogos de Macau.
McFadden, who posed with a Celtic jersey on the day of his appointment (and who has hired another Irishman, a Las Vegas veteran named Niall Murray, to help him), used to run Sands Macao, a huge gambling complex whose owner has almost finished building its contribution to the Cotai Strip: the Venetian.
At the construction site, beneath scores of cranes, armies of hard-hatted workers are completing an enormous replica of the doge's palace in Venice, topped with a huge statue of the archangel Gabriel. The 39-storey, €1.4 billion resort, which will feature 3,000 suites, a 2,000-seat showroom, a 15,000-seat arena and 80,000sq m of retail space, is the anchor resort for the strip, which will also be home to an underwater casino.
When you look at some of the figures it's easy to understand why gaming companies are prepared to invest so much. Sands Macao, which opened in 2004, two years after the city's government began offering casino licenses to foreign investors, cost its owner, Sheldon Adelson, €200 million to build. It advertises itself as the world's largest casino, with 740 tables and 1,250 slot machines spread over three floors - 21,000sq m - of gambling space. He recouped his investment within a year, according to Forbes magazine (which also ranks Adelson the United States' third-richest man, with a fortune of €16 billion).
The atmosphere at the Sands, which has 51 rooms for big spenders, is very different from that at the Lisboa. The Lisboa's rooms are clearly built for no-frills, hard-core gamblers. The Sands' main gambling hall, meanwhile, is open and spacious, and its upper floors are luxurious. In the Shanghai Room, croupiers deal cards, roll dice and spin roulette wheels as gamblers take their chances. It's impossible to ask where the players are from. As a journalist based in China, you presume they are all gambling with tax revenue from some town or another. But you will never know.
Adelson expects to control 60 per cent of Macao's gaming market by 2010, when he forecasts revenue to be €11 billion a year. The remaining 40 per cent will be targeted by, among others, Steve Wynn. Adelson's fellow casino magnate, who was in the news in October after he put his elbow through a €100 million Picasso at his office in Las Vegas, recently opened Wynn Macau, a €500 million hotel and gaming complex that is quickly becoming a landmark. More pieces from Wynn's collection, Matisse's The Persian Robe and Renoir's Among the Roses, adorn the reception area of the hotel, which has Chanel, Prada, Dior, Fendi and Vuitton boutiques. The 24-storey complex has 210 gaming tables and 380 machines. Rooms start at about €300 a night, rising to about €2,150 for a suite.
"This place will go profitable tomorrow, on its first day. It'll take that long," Wynn told reporters at the launch ceremony, wearing a T-shirt that said "Knowledge destroys fear". "In Macau, the invitation has been rather one-dimensional: just gambling. Now the invitation is being enriched at a pace not seen in any other destination in the world. The speed of development is dizzying."
As Carruthers says, this is not happening anywhere else. "Keeping up with the changes is one of the biggest challenges of living here, understanding what the people want. Macao is more like Atlantic City than Las Vegas, with people coming in tour buses to gamble, but it is developing into more of a destination."
Carruthers points out that, from January, another seven Chinese cities will allow their 28 million inhabitants to travel to Macao. Disposable income is growing incredibly quickly. Disposable in more ways than one. The dice will get hotter.