1959: Ian Fleming describes ‘the largest building in Macau’

“Macau had a single street running half the length of the town, the ‘Street of Happiness,’ which had been one great and continuous street of pleasure until 1928 when the nine-
story-high Central Hotel, the largest house of gambling and self indulgence in the world, was constructed.
It is a nine-story skyscraper, by far the largest building in Macau, and it is devoted solely to the human vices. It has one more original feature. The higher up the building you go, the more beautiful and expensive are the girls, the higher the stakes at the gambling-tables, and the better the music. Thus on the ground floor the honest coolie can choose a girl of his own class and gamble for pennies by lowering his bet on a fishing rod contraption through a hole in the floor on to the gaming-tables below. Those with longer pockets can progress upwards through various heavens until they reach the earthly paradise on the sixth floor. Above this are the bedrooms.
In the pursuit of information which would be in accordance with the readership of the Sunday Times, it was a matter of course that, very soon after our arrival at the Central Hotel, Dick Hughes and I should take the lift to the sixth floor.”