Word: macao
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...Kwangtung province, around Canton, and had tried to keep news of it from slipping through the cracks in the Bamboo Curtain. They could not keep the tiny microbe of cholera, Vibrio comma, from slipping through with refugees escaping to Hong Kong or to the nearby Portuguese islet colony of Macao...
...gimlet-eyed money-changers on Hong Kong's Connaught Road and along the nearby Macao waterfront traditionally buy-at carefully reckoned prices-even the most dubious currencies. But last week they were shaking their heads at fishermen and smugglers selling Communist China's yuan. For the yuan had dropped to an alltime low. It began its spectacular decline last year, took its biggest plunge since January, when the news of China's food shortages first leaked out. Overall, it has dropped 50% in value from a year ago; buyers can get all they want...
Tough on Birds. All that Peking officially owned up to was that "the production plan in agriculture was not fulfilled in 1960." But Chinese refugees fleeing into Macao reported that food rations in China are so scanty that "even the birds would find it hard to survive." Worried Hong Kong Chinese are shipping more than 100,000 lbs. of food daily to relatives on the mainland. Peking is urgently seeking freight space to import 330,000 tons of wheat from Australia, 350,000 tons of rice from Burma and 120,000 tons of barley from Canada...
Died. Fu Tak-iam, 67, who started as a Cantonese doughnut peddler and wound up as the gambling czar of Macao by matching yens for fantan, cricket fights (in which trained insects do battle unto death) and cusek-a type of roulette played with dice; of a heart attack; in Hong Kong. A strapping (6 ft., 200 Ibs.) brigand, Fu was ransomed in 1946 for $150,000 when captors sent a slice of his right ear to relatives, but seven years later stalled on paying ransom for his kidnaped son until the gang proved their seriousness by slicing...
Over & Back. Chief suppliers of Macao's gold are a clutch of old-line Hong Kong trading firms, which buy it legally on the London gold market at a pegged price, then pass it along to Lobo's syndicate for a "service charge." Gold dealers in Hong Kong say that it is the Portuguese who let the gold slip into illegal channels. The Portuguese, in turn, blandly declare that the bulk of the gold brought into Macao is immediately smuggled back to Hong Kong in junks or on ferries...