Ciao, Macao

Bruno Maestrini / China Daily

The Macao Museum offers good historical context before you start exploring－it's located in Monte Fort, where Portuguese cannons now point toward the Grand Lisboa.

That lavish hotel towers over the city skyline with its flaming-torch silhouette, expansive casino, three-Michelin-starred Roubuchon a Galera and an award-winning list of more than 14,600 wines.

The hotel's museum exhibits include immense carved jades and The Star of Stanley Ho, a 218.08-carat diamond experts say is "the largest cushion-shaped, internally flawless D-color diamond in the world". You don't really have to know what all that means to be impressed.

The Macao Museum of Art is a huge treasure trove of works by Chinese and Western artists－the latter including painter George Chinnery (1774-1852), who spent much of his adult life wielding a brush in Macao.

The Maritime Museum celebrates the city's seafaring traditions, with a mock-up of an old Hakka fishing village and displays featuring dragon boats and the intriguing Feast of the Drunken Dragon.

We were too early in the year to see the real thing, which happens in May or June when a crew of cheerfully intoxicated men performs a dragon dance through markets and lanes. It's a wet party, and though not clear from photos whether the onlookers are being sprayed with water or baijiu (traditional Chinese liquor), it's good, mad fun.

Appropriately next door is the charming temple of A-Ma, known to Chinese as Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea.