Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
roulette in casinos with the smoky ambiance of a Graham Greene novel. When the Com-
munists won the Chinese Civil War, they outlawed gambling. This was an extraordinary
decision in a country where gambling is woven into the culture. For literally four thou-
sand years the Chinese have been gamblers, as hard-driving in the casinos as they are in
their business dealings and with all of the intricate superstitions of a gambling culture. In
popular Chinese movies like Kung Fu Mahjong , gamblers wear red underwear for luck
when they hit the mahjong tables in Macao, the tiles clicking like castanets, and hope for
the lucky number 8.
Macao was transferred to China as a special territory in 1999, the same status as nearby
Hong Kong, and the flow of Chinese from the mainland increased dramatically. Three
years later Stanley Ho, a Hong Kong billionaire, lost his monopoly on Macao casinos.
Overnight the door was open to the biggest gamblers in the world.
Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas gambling tycoon and financier of Newt Gingrich,
leaped at the prospect. In short order, he secured permission from Beijing to construct a
casino, which opened in 2004 as the Sands Macao at a cost of over $250 million. The
response was so extraordinary that he then built a “strip” of landfill connecting two small
islands in the territory, where he built the Venetian Macao, an enormous replica of the
Las Vegas resort. Adelson became one of the world's wealthiest men on the strength of the
high-stakes gambling in his VIP lounges in Macao.
Steve Wynn, the better-known Las Vegas casino billionaire, soon followed and opened
the Wynn Macau, a far more elegant resort but with the same accent on the high rollers.
By 2006, gambling in Macao had outpaced that in Las Vegas. Now, with $33.5 billion in
wagers in 2011, it is at least five times larger than the money gambled in Las Vegas. That
trend will only widen if and when gambling is allowed in China proper and those 1.37
billion Chinese have the opportunity to tempt fate and gamble at home.
That specter helped convince Singapore to open its island city-state to gambling and
casino resorts before it lost out on the Chinese hunger for wagers; Adelson opened the
Marina Bay Sands in Singapore in 2010. This was a dramatic reversal for Singapore and
its founding father Lee Kuan Yew, who had vowed to keep out the gambling disease in his
majority-Chinese nation.
In terms of big-time gambling, Las Vegas has been left in the dust, so to speak. But
it looks the same. The strip is still the strip: cars cruising up and down the four miles of
casinos, tourists crowding the sidewalks and waiting in line at the line restaurants and the
tacky hamburger joints. “Hot babes” are advertised on billboards and in handouts. Photo-
graphs of bare-chested men offer a new definition of a “girl's night out.” Inside the casinos,
the habitués are in position at the slot machines early in the morning, coffee and cigarette
in hand. Gamblers still come but not many really big spenders.
The city has found a replacement. It is the more prosaic business of MICE hosting
meetings, conventions and exhibits. In the tourism trade this is anything but glamorous.
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