At midnight last night, inside Macau's biggest casino, the Lisboa, the handover of sovereignty by Portugal to Communist China went almost unnoticed.
There was hardly a pause in the frantic rate at which people were working the slot machines, or gambling huge sums at the blackjack, baccarat and fan tan tables.
The big bets in the Lisboa, the most opulent of Macau's ten casinos, are wagered in 21 VIP rooms, located upstairs in a maze of carpeted corridors lined with bouquets of flowers and gilt-framed sofas. There are no windows or clocks in any of the rooms so guests are not reminded of the time or the season, and one can wander for a long time trying to find the way out, only to end up, like Alice in Wonderland, at yet another discreet gaming room with a name like Treasure Island or Golden Dragon.
The expressions on the faces of the high-rollers playing baccarat, the big money game, and of the croupiers and card dealers and security officials, are as impassive as those of Falun Gong practitioners. No one laughs or smiles or even talks much in Macau's casinos. The only sign of emotion is when a player bends a card over, leaving it permanently crumpled in disgust. The management doesn't mind, and new packs are always to hand.
The grim atmosphere may owe some thing to the enormity of the risks involved. Some Chinese officials have been jailed and executed for gambling away huge sums in Macau, the only city on the Chinese mainland where casinos are permitted. A senior Chinese State Security Bureau official, Qiu Guanghui, from Shenyang, committed suicide after losing most of the $1.2 million he had withdrawn for "procurement" at the tables.
Each VIP room is reputed to be the "territory" of one or another of the Macau triads. Their members loiter around waiting for a high roller to run out of money and then step forward with a loan to get him even further into trouble. Control of such gaming rooms is one of the reasons for gang warfare in Macau, where drive-by shootings and bombing had become common, at least until a recent crackdown on triad violence.
All of this combines to make the Chinese casino truly joyless places. I watched one man who could have been a typical mainland official - the white socks are a give-away - wager and lose a pile of big flat chips which might have been worth the annual budget of a medium-sized Chinese city. His expression never changed as his mountain of chips was ladled away and his dark-suited companions never spoke or moved a muscle.
Even in the noisy slot machine hall on the ground floor, winners do not smile as hundreds of coins cascade into their plastic buckets. Every type of gambling is available at the Lisboa. It has betting shops where one can place wagers on soccer matches anywhere in the world, or on horse or dog racing results.
The territory boasts the only dog track in the whole of Asia, situated across town off the Avenida General Castelo Branco (Macau's streets are short but their names are long). There was much more excitement there on Saturday evening, despite the fact that the usual big crowd had been reduced to a few dozen by driving rain and a ban by the Chinese authorities on coaches from mainland China in case they were infiltrated by Falun Gong members.
Watching with an expert eye as the greyhounds skidded round the wet track in pursuit of the mechanical hare was the canidrome marketing manager, Brian Murphy of Newry. "I had to go and look up Macau on the map when I was offered a job here 12 years ago," he said, explaining how he was invited by a world-famous vet visiting Northern Ireland to train greyhounds in the Portuguese enclave. There had been dog racing in China before, in Shanghai, he said, but it was banned when communist troops marched in 50 years ago, and eventually relocated in Macau.
Today troops from the People's Liberation Army will enter Macau as the Portuguese leave, but this time dog-racing will stay. "It will be business as usual," said Mr Murphy, who like everyone else in Macau works for Stanley Ho, owner of the canidrome, as well as the Lisboa, most of the big hotels, the ferry service to Hong Kong, the airport and Macau Airlines.
It is just as easy to get cleaned out at the dog track as at the gaming tables. If that happens then there is nothing else for it but to trek back across town to the Lisboa, and to the pawnshop by the entrance, where the shelves are full of the Rolex watches surrendered by those who lost their chips the night before in the VIP rooms, and hand over one's valuables. A visit to Macau confirms the old adage: the only sure way to win at gambling is to own the casino.