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"For all your arrows tipped with poison,
The curved daggers you bear as arms,
Amorous Malays and valiant Javanese
All will be subject to the Portuguese."
-- Luís Vaz de Camões, "The Lusíads"
(translated by Landeg White, Oxford University Press, 1997)

Compared with the high-profile Hong Kong handover back in 1997, the formal withdrawal of Portuguese officials from Macau late Sunday night is shaping up to be a relatively minor event in the Millennium-fogged eyes of the international news media. With big business and civil liberties hanging so publicly in the balance, foreign correspondents simply couldn't resist the allure of Britain's controversial exit from Asia, and they dutifully endured torrential rains, oppressive summer heat and extravagant late-night handover parties to bring the story to the world. But across the Pearl River Estuary in Macau, the resumption of Chinese rule has long seemed like a fait accompli, yielding meager fodder for sexy headlines beyond the occasional eruption of gang violence in the waning months of Portuguese administration.

In a broader historical sense, the impending change of government in Macau has far greater symbolic importance than the territory's size or current economic status would suggest. When the big countdown clock in Tiananmen Square strikes zero and the Chinese flag is raised over this diminutive slice of coastal real estate on the South China Sea, nearly 500 years of colonial occupation will come to an end as Portugal, the first Western European nation to expand into Asia, becomes the last to leave. And at that very moment, the final dissolution of Lisbon's erstwhile Asian empire will deliver a conclusive coup de grâce to the supremacist fantasies of a swashbuckling 16th-century poet whose magnum opus, "The Lusíads," is considered the crowning work of Portuguese Renaissance literature.

I first encountered this extraordinary figure on a bright summer morning in the inner courtyard of the Leal Senado, just off Macau's exquisitely preserved central plaza. In an intimate formal garden below the dear old municipal library, I happened upon the stone bust of a bearded man with European features and an unruly crop of windblown hair, one eye curiously closed in an eternal, joyless wink. An inscription in both Western and Chinese characters identified the statue as:

LUIS VAZ DE CAMOES
POETA PORTUGUES
1524-1580

At the Macau Museum later that day, I learned that Camões settled briefly in Macau in the mid-1500s, and that parts of his most famous work are thought to have been composed here in a public garden that now bears the poet's name. Later still, after tracking down an English translation of "The Lusíads," I began to grasp the full irony of Camões' official canonization on the soon-to-be-Chinese soil of Macau.

The son of a sea captain, born in Lisbon and educated at the University of Coimbra, Camões began his career as a tutor in the court of King João III, only to be banished in 1546 for pursuing a forbidden love affair with one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting. Still in his early 20s, he joined a Portuguese military garrison in Morocco, where he lost an eye battling the Moors, and a few years later he was jailed back in Lisbon for injuring another man in a street brawl. He subsequently traveled by sea to the Portuguese settlement at Goa on the west coast of India, then continued east to the Spice Islands and southern China, where he spent two years as a functionary in the recently established colony of Macau. Recalled to Goa in 1558 on charges of extortion, he survived a shipwreck at the mouth of the Mekong River, abandoning most of his possessions to the waves but clutching his precious unpublished manuscripts as he swam to shore.

Over the next 10 years, Camões grappled with criminal charges and financial woes in Goa and Mozambique before finally borrowing enough money to return to Lisbon in 1570. "The Lusíads" was published two years later, giving Camões the distinction of being the first notable European literary figure to pen eyewitness accounts of life in Asia, and posthumously earning the poet a prominent place in Portugal's national pantheon.

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