Word: macao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Across the river mouth from Hong Kong on the mainland of Red China is the tiny (eleven square miles) Portuguese colony of Macao, whose legitimate industries are the packaging of matches, firecrackers and Sin. Into Macao one day last week came the Portuguese ship Rovuma, with a cargo of iron and steel plates, machine tools and industrial chemicals. That night coolies shifted the Rovuma's freight into motorized junks, which began moving up the Pearl River toward Canton...
Smuggling, for centuries a profitable career in these waters, has been brought to an art by the Communists. Peking maintains an official purchasing agency in Macao called the Nan Kwong Trading Corp. Smugglers get an order from Nan Kwong, then wangle a Macao government import permit, place their order somewhere in Western Europe, and wait for the ships of the Portuguese-owned Companhia National de Navegaçáo to arrive. When the smuggler delivers the goods, profits are enormous...
Secure Smuggling. When the Communists withheld their orders for a couple of months last winter, Macao almost skidded into bankruptcy. Portugal is pledged to enforce the U.N. embargo on strategic materials entering Red China, but the colony of Macao lives in such absolute dependence (even for food and water) on the Communist mainland that it considers it a question of smuggle...
...them, the Communists have made smuggling operations in this area comparatively secure. Red gunboats constantly patrol the Pearl River estuary, and the oldtime speculator who ran the blockades with mixed cargoes has disappeared. The Communists ask for and get only strategic materials. Not satisfied with waterfront facilities at Macao, they have set up their own transfer port for smuggled goods on the islet of Lap Sap Mei between Macao and Hong Kong. Here, instead of lightering, overseas ships tie up at a new pier, unload into junks of sufficiently shallow draft to make the mud banks up to Whampoa...
...kidnapers had chosen their victims carefully. The two youths were members of wealthy and prominent families in Macao: Fu Iam-kin, 14, was the son of multimillionaire Gambling Magnate Fu Tak-iam, and Antonio de Assis Fong, 22, was the son of the manager of Macao's Central Hotel. The kidnapers sent word to the parents demanding ransom of 700,000 Hong Kong dollars ($122,850 U.S.). But they reckoned not on Gambler Fu Tak-iam. He announced that he would not pay ransom for his son because it would set a bad precedent: he has four wives...