History | Anglophone community old memories reveal ‘hidden secrets’

Rogério Puga

The importance of the written diaries of the women of the anglophone community, who visited Macau of the nineteenth-century, was one of the topics of the International Conference on Memorialist Discourses and the Building of History being held from October 25 until today at the University of Macau (UM).
On the topic Rogério Puga, a scholar from the New University of Lisbon with an extensive history of work on the anglophone presence in the region, addressed the importance of such written documents in obtaining a “more clear picture” of what Macau was like during that era.
In a presentation focused mostly on the journal of Caroline H. Butler Laing (1837), Puga highlighted the importance of Laing’s journal and other records from the English speaking community. He said that those records were mostly written by women that had travelled to accompany their husbands (businessmen) or for health reasons. Since it was not possible for women to enter China in those days, they established their homes in Macau, often bringing along children.
Puga said that “females have a different look over things than males and they were spending much time in the city mostly alone and without means of communicating to others,” which often led them to pay attention to many things that others would not notice and write about these everyday occurrences in their journals that they would then send back home to the family members.
On another important point, Puga mentioned, “these women were mostly American, New Yorkers or Boston residents and Protestants what led often to the descriptions of any events in the city as ‘exotic’; either these were Portuguese-catholic processions or Chinese cultural events.”
According to the scholar’s research these “travelling women” also had the clear notion that they were pioneers of world travel. That fact also contributed to their motivation to keep writing their journals and sending them back to be read by their families but also by other people who had access to these reports of what China and especially Macau would look like.
“These women, contrary to what was originally thought, were not housewives. They were very active and while the husbands were away in mainland for some periods of time, they were the companies’ only representatives and would handle all the business,” Puga mentioned.
In the particular case of Caroline Laing, her journal becomes a particularly special document due to its last section and the way that she acknowledges that “she doesn’t know China because her contacts were limited to only a few people” and especially because she decided to write complete descriptions of what it was like to live in Macau during a typical day of her life. She added a large number of details that led the researchers to find fact that would not have been possible to discover in any other way, for example, many aspects related to the cultural life and the fact that operas, concerts and theatre performances were held, as well as the establishment of a library and a museum in the third decade of the 1800’s.
“[These are] things that were never present in any Portuguese written documents,” he concluded.

New generation of bilingual researchers should ‘unveil’ local history

In response to an open question from a member of the audience during the discussion session under the topic of the “Memories of old Macau,” the panel of scholars and conference speakers avidly supported locals taking a stronger interest in Macanese history.
Mario Lugarinho, Marta Pinto and Rogério Puga agreed that the new generation of university students and researchers, and especially the ones who can read and speak in Chinese and Portuguese languages “have the important task to discover more about the history of the territory in its different perspectives.”
The question from the audience was focused on the fact that generally in research and tertiary studies, historical facts are always addressed in a “colonialist” perspective or from a perspective of a “passers-by”, and are often missing a “local perspective” about how the locals would have seen the same events.
The debate occurred during the discussion panel of Session 5 of the International Conference on Memorialist Discourses and the Building of History held yesterday afternoon at the University of Macau.
During the session, Lugarinho addressed the history topics: the 1848 murder of Ferreira do Amaral, Portuguese governor of the territory , based on new perspectives and namely the point of view of the killer in “Assassin” (2015) by Joe Tang and a biographical work by Lia Ferreira do Amaral, her ancestor, published in 1942.
Previously on the session, Pinto had spoken about the work of Wenceslau de Moraes and the Memories of the place, which uses the place commonly known as “Camoes Cave” to express feelings and thoughts on the territory and on his perspective of China in a broader sense.
Rogério Puga presented a paper on the importance of Diary Writing as a Performative Process for the Construction of Personal and Collective Memories based on the journal of Caroline H Butler Laing (1837) that details her life in Macau during the years of 1836 and 1837.