Word: macau
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...high rollers' area with beehive curves to encourage its inhabitants to "leave their honey." The staff is more polite than the Chinese have come to expect. "If you don't tip them, they'll still remain friendly," says Gigi Chan of Hong Kong, who notes that some of Macau's less refined dealers "will yell at you or even take your chips away...
...Enter Macau, the former Portuguese colony handed over to China in 1999. Last year some 12 million visitors poured into the 9-sq.-mi. territory, whose small contingent of casinos generated $3.6 billion in gaming revenue--three-fourths of what the Vegas Strip managed to pull in. Long a mecca for Asia's high rollers, Macau in 2003 averaged a daily haul of nearly $22,000 per gaming table compared with just $2,200 in Vegas. And thanks to the recent removal of certain internal travel restrictions, some 150 million mainlanders can now head to Macau without a tour guide...
Despite the influx of big spenders, Macau is still a far cry from America's glamorous Sin City. For the past four decades, the government endorsed the casino monopoly run by local tycoon Stanley Ho, 82, who failed to fully modernize even his flagship Hotel Lisboa. In the run-up to the 1999 handover, rival loan sharks inspired many of the turf wars in the gangster-ridden colony. Violence escalated to the point that in 1997 Macau's Secretary of Security reassured tourists that they were unlikely to get caught in the crossfire because the city had "professional killers...
...China ended Ho's choke hold on the industry in 2001, launching a bidding war for two additional casino licenses and slapping a 39% tax on all three. One of the new license holders is Steve Wynn, who is credited with reinventing the Strip in Vegas. "Right now, Macau is for the gambler--period," Wynn told TIME last month before breaking ground on a $705 million wonderland to be flanked by the old Lisboa and a planned joint venture between Ho and MGM Mirage. "The trick is to add other dimensions to the town, open the door to more people...
...with its golden facade and shimmering neon-purple fountain, will have some serious sibling rivalry in 2006 when its parent company finishes building an $800 million replica of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, complete with imitation canals and singing gondoliers. Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson is so gung ho about Macau that he is enlisting partners in a $10 billion project to duplicate the Vegas Strip on a sliver of reclaimed land between two of the territory's islands...