History
Macau was home to Cantonese farmers and Fujian fishing folk when Portuguese merchants arrived in the 1550s. It was the great era of exploration initiated by Prince Henry the Navigator. Vasco da Gama had made his historic voyage to India, Albuquerque had settled in Malacca and the Iberian explorers were seeking a gateway to China.
In 1513 Jorge Alvares became the first Portuguese to set foot in the land Marco Polo called Cathay. Others followed and began trading with the Chinese. They established various temporary outposts before coming to an arrangement with the mandarins of Canton to settle on a tiny peninsula at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary that they named Macau. It rapidly became fabulously rich as the sole entrepot for China's seaborne trade with Japan and Europe.
Macau also served as a vital base for the introduction of Christianity to China and Japan, an activity which provided the city with some of the most glorious - and tempestuous - moments in its history. Because of the prosperity it was enjoying and its privileged location, other European nations began casting covetous looks at Macau and plotted to seize it from Portugal. The Dutch actually tried to invade the city in 1622 but were repulsed.
As tinle passed and other trading nations from the west sent missions to China, Macau became the summer residence for the taipans (great traders) who retreated from their "factories" in Guangzhou (better known perhaps as Canton) to await the opening of the trading season.