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MACAU – LAW / CHINESE COMMUNITY / PORTUGUESE-CHINESE RELATIONS / MACAU IMPRINT:

 

António Feliciano Marques PEREIRA (1839 – 1881).

Macau: Typografia de J. da Silva, 1867.

 

Portugal made Macau its permanent trading base in China in 1557, owing to its decent natural harbour and proximity to the great Chinese port of Canton.  While Portuguese sovereignty over the tiny point of land was legally ambiguous, leading to interminable disputes with China, the Portuguese proceeded to govern it as if it was their own enduring possession.

Upon the Portuguese arrival in Macau, it was only a small fishing village of only 400 residents.  To create a viable commercial base, the Portuguese encouraged Chinese emigration to the colony.  It was not long before Macau’s rise as a commercial and trading hub attracted the first waves of Chinese emigration that ensured that great majority of its population was ethnically Chinese.  The Portuguese accorded different legal rights to European and the Chinese residents in Macau and required an authority to specifically oversee the affairs of the Chinese community.

In 1583, the Portuguese created the incredibly powerful office of the Procuratura dos Negócios Sinicos de Macao, which roughly translates to the ‘Crown Attorney of the Chinese Affairs of Macau’.  The head of the office, the Procurador, was unilaterally responsible for adjudicating all legal matters of the Chinese community, as well as enforcing all business regulations, immigration and emigrations laws, taxation and policing and corrections matters for the same.  The Procurador was also charged with managing Macau’s always prickly, yet all-important, relationship with China.

Over the generations, the Procurador was usually a political appointee, and while some officeholders were well educated, experienced and very professional, many were ‘hacks’ with no legal training who exploited the position for personal gain.  The office’s immense power and autonomy ensured that it provided limitless opportunities for corruption and abuse, and for this reason the Procurador, while feared, was looked upon with resentment and disdain by most Chinese Macanese, not to mention some members of the Portuguese colonial firmament.

In the 1840s, shifts in global trade and the sudden rise of Hong Kong as an alpha-competitor saw a sharp decline in Macau’s economy.  To drum up action and revenue, the Macau government came up with a scheme for the colony to act an entrepôt for migrant workers from China proper to emigrate to Latin America (primarily Cuba and Peru), where there was a dire shortage of agrarian and mining labour.  While according to Portuguese law, these Chinese labourers were all supposed to be voluntary migrant contract workers for agreed wages, in reality, these ‘coolies’ were often tricked and/or coerced by Chinese ‘snakeheads’ into leaving their homes with false promises of decent lives abroad.  These unfortunates were then brought to Macau, where European brokers would gain handsome fees for arranging for the labourers to be handed over for transport to the Americas aboard foreign vessels.

In most cases, the Chinse labourers were treated harshly, often no better than slaves (some literally became slaves, as they ended up being confined to plantations or mines without any compensation).  While this abusive new form of bondage was against both the letter and spirit of Portuguese law, the Procurador ensured that the system functioned unfettered, while it seemed that almost everyone in the colonial regime, from the governor on down, either looked the other way or took their cut under the table.

Beginning in 1848, and lasting until the early 1870s, Macau sent tens of thousands of ‘coolies’ to the Americas, mostly as quasi-slaves.  Whenever concerned parties complained that this system was illegal and unethical, the Procurador merely replied that this office oversaw the system of Chinese emigration in good faith and that the abuses were carried out by foreigners, either aboard foreign vessels, or, in faraway lands, actions that were beyond the control of the Macanese authorities.  Moreover, they denied that any corruption occurred, and challenged their critics to provide proof (which was challenging, as the Procurador and his accomplices were traditionally good at covering their tracks).

Directly relevant to the present work, by the 1850s the office of the Procuratura dos Negócios Sinicos de Macau had become severely overburdened and inefficient.  Political reforms enacted in 1849, which sought to better integrate the Chinese residents of Macau within the Portuguese colonial system, led to the Procurador’s office to assume an even broader mandate.  For instance, instead of sending many ethnic Chinese criminal suspects to China to stand trial for crimes committed in Macau (as had been the custom), these alleged perpetrators were to be tried in Macau by the Procurador.  Moreover, the rapid growth of the Chinese population in Macau ensured that the Procurador’s office was burdened with an exploding caseload, with the majority of files concerning minor but bureaucratically intensive cases that chewed up resources, often at the expense of far more important matters.

 

Enter António Marques Pereira

At the end of 1865, the brilliant, politically well-connected, but controversial young journalist António Feliciano Marques Pereira (1839 – 1881) was appointed as the Procurador, overseeing the affairs of the 60,000 Chinese residents of the colony (against the European population of only 5,000).  A native of Lisbon, after dropping out of law school at the University of Coimbra, he worked in his hometown for a series of prestigious periodicals.

In 1859, Marques Pereira moved to Macau and the following year became, at only the age of 21, the editor of the Boletim do Governo de Macau, the official crown organ.  In 1860, he was made the Superintendent of Chinese Immigration, a senior role that assisted the Procurador in such matters.  In this capacity he wrote a report for the governor, Relatório da Emigração Chinesa em Macau (1861), which is today considered a fundamental text on the issue.  In 1862, he served as the Secretary to the Portuguese diplomatic mission to Beijing, which resulted in the Sino-Portuguese Treaty of 1862, an important trade accord.

While still serving as Superintendent, Marques Pereira continued his journalistic activities, being the editor of the short-lived but highly regarded weekly Ta-Ssi-Yang-Kuo (Daxiyangguo 大西洋國), published in Macau by Typografia de J. da Silva (the same printer as for the present work) from October 8, 1863 and April 26, 1866.

 

The Present Work in Focus: Reforming the Procurador’s Office

On November 22, 1866, not long into Marques Pereira’s tenure as Procurador dos Negócios Sinicos de Macao, the Governor of Macau, José Maria da Ponte e Horta (in office, 1866-8), convened a commission to study the mandate of the Procurador’s office with an eye on how it could be reformed to make it more efficient and responsive to critical judicial and diplomatic matters.  While the commission consisted of five members, Marques Pereira, who served as the body’s Secretary was, as the incumbent Procurador, its de facto driving force and the author of its final report.

The present work, Relatório acerca das atribuições da Procuratura dos Negócios Sínicos da Cidade de Macau… (Macau: Typografia de J. da Silva, 1867), is the official and first printing of the final report of the commission, which was submitted to Governor da Ponte e Horta on March 21, 1867.  As per custom, shortly thereafter, the basic text of the report (minus its valuable, extensive footnotes) was published within the Boletim do Governo de Macau e Timor (vol. XIII, no. 12, March 25, 1867).

The report shrewdly analyzes the problems that currently afflicted the Procurador’s office. Here is should be noted that Marques Pereira and his fellow commissioners held considerable respect for the Chinese community of Macau and their traditions yet recognized that it was often difficult to reconcile their interests with the crown’s expressed desire to better integrate their community within the broader colonial Portuguese legal and social system.

The report is augmented by extremely extensive footnotes (that are perhaps as lengthy as the main text) that explain the evidence that the commission consulted, including legislation, as well as printed and manuscript sources in the archives of the Procurador’s office.

The Relatório asserts that the “best organization of the justice system in Macau with respect to the Chinese population…[takes] into account the special nature of this very important portion of the inhabitants of the colony” and, as such, “Laws must be adapted to the nature and customs of the people for whom they are made, provided that such a condition is not repugnant to the absolute principles of civilization and justice”.

The report goes on to opine that due to the “historical widening of functions” of the Procurador’s office, it will be necessary to “rid it of the excess of various functions, which, instead of increasing its respectability and effectiveness of action, alienated its public trust by hindering it proper performance”.

It continues that a major problem was the “lack of permanence” in the personnel of Procurador’s bureaucracy, as the Procurador and his main subordinates were often political appointees who only held office for a short time, such that many critical cases were left hanging in the wind.

The rapid increase in Macau’s Chinese population had led to “increased burdens” and a “double jurisdiction” for the Procurador’s office, as “cases of life and honor were added to those of property”, especially since the Procurador, in an effort towards “assimilation”, was now expected to try ethnic Chinese criminals in Macau, instead of handing them over to China.  Rather, it is suggested that many criminal cases, except for the most serious, should be tried by the normal colonial high court, the Junta de Justiça.

Moreover, the Procurador’s office was now deluged with small claims cases involving 100,000 parties.  Instead, these minor yet onerous duties should be handled by newly appointed justices of the peace.  Moreover, the Procurador’s office found itself handing double the cases involving movable property than it did in 1862.

As for arbitration, a form of adjudication commonly employed by the Procurador for civil disputes, it was not trusted by the Chinese.  It is suggested that such cases should rather be decided by rulings made by Chinese jurors drawn from an annual appointed pool, with a number of which drawn for each case.

The Relatório strongly asserts that the Procurador’s office should retain its traditional role as the main diplomatic conduit between the Macau government and the Chinese Empire, as it possessed the specialized expertise and legacy required for said mandate.

 

The report concludes by recommending 12 points of reform for Governor da Ponte e Horta’s review:

 

1. The Procurador’s office should become a Portuguese court with ordinary jurisdiction, in the manner of the Portuguese courts of first instance.

 

2. The Procurador’s jurisdiction, processes and appeals, should henceforth generally adhere to regular Portuguese laws.

 

3. The Procurador’s office should handle civil and commercial cases where the minimum penalties for the offenders are at least 2,300 Reis in moveable property and 500,000 in real property. For criminal matters, it should handle only cases where the guilty are subject to at least 3 months imprisonment.

 

4. In criminal cases, and those involving property, orphans, absentees and other people of special status, a magistrate of the public ministry should intervene in lieu of the Procurador, and he should have the authority to confer rulings to the Procurador.

 

5. Commercial cases tried under the Procurador’s supervision should be decided by 3 jurors drawn by lot from a pool of 15 prominent Chinese merchants appointed by the Governor.

 

6. The Procurador should try crimes under normal Portuguese law, expect for those that mandate the death penalty.

 

7. The superior court for appeals should continue to be the Macau Government Council, with the representation of the Procurador’s office and other appropriate bodies.

 

8. Chinese people charged with capital offenses should be tried by the Junta de Justiça, with the advice of the Procurador’s office, especially with regards to appeals.

 

9. The Procurador should be the rapporteur at capital crimes trials presided over by the Junta de Justiça; in the cases of appeal or grievance, a Chinese citizen of Portugal should be appointed by the Governor to serve as the rapporteur for a two-year term.

 

10. Existing conciliation processes will continue to be handled by the Procurador.

 

11. For minor disputes between Chinese parties, these should, in lieu of the Procurador ‘s office, be handed by 2 or 3 justices of the peace who possess the powers of elected judges, to be appointed by the Governor every two years.

 

12. The Procurador must still maintain the function as the Diplomatic Secretary to the Macau Government regarding its correspondence with the Chinese Empire.

 

The Relatório’s recommendations were broadly accepted and enacted by Governor da Ponte e Horta, with the result that the Procurador’s office became far more efficient and effective.  However, these noble efforts were soon overwhelmed by a furore surrounding the Procurador himself.

Marques Pereira’s tenure as Procurador was rocky, to say the least.  His detractors, led by the distinguished Hong Kong-based Portuguese journalist António José da Silva e Sousa (b. 1838).  Often writing in the O Eco do Povo, the Hong Kong Portuguese-language newspaper he founded, Silva e Sousa accused Marques Pereira of running an administration of unprecedented corruption and coercion, knowingly sending ever more Chinese labourers into slavery abroad.

While Marques Pereira could normally have counted on the crown to have his back, unfortunately for him, the new Governor of Macau, António Sérgio de Sousa (in office, 1868-72), personally found the ‘coolie trade’ repugnant, and disliked the Procurador.  The scandal forced Marques Pereira’s resignation in 1869; however, the drama was far from over.

Marques Pereira promptly sued Silva e Sousa for criminal slander in the Portuguese courts of Macau, and mounted a civil suit for libel against the editor of the O Eco do Povo in Hong Kong.  In the latter trial, the burden of proof would be squarely on Silva e Sousa, as British law would require him to forensically prove that his accusations were true.  The former Procurador was defended by the O Independente newspaper, which accused Silva e Sousa of being a liar.  In the end, the Hong Kong courts sided with Marques Pereira, compelling Silva e Sousa to pay him damages of HK$5,000 (then a great sum).  As for the criminal case, it was dismissed, likely in good part due to the intervention of the governor, who both personally agreed with Silva e Sousa and wanted the whole issue to go way.

However, the Procurador’s office, while transformed, never recovered from the scandal brought about by Silva e Sousa’s accusations, while also coming to be seen by the crown as archaic institution.  The office was dissolved in 1894.

As for António Felicano Marques Pereira, the scandal forced him to leave Macau for good.  He then pursued a diplomatic career, being the Portuguese Consul in Siam, and subsequently serving in the same role in Singapore.  In April 1881, he was appointed as the Portuguese Consul in Bombay, where he sadly died later that year.

 

Provenance

The present example of the Relatório has a fine provenance, as the title bears the author’s signed manuscript dedication to “Duarte Gustavo Nogueira Soares / 18/6/[18]”.  Duarte Gustavo Nogueira Soares (1831 – 1901) was one of the most prominent Portuguese diplomats and legal minds of the second half of the 19^th century and a major supporter of António Marques Pereira’s career advancement.  A law graduate of the University of Coimbra, in 1852 he entered the service of the Foreign Ministry, rising to become its Chief of Staff in 1883.  He subsequently served as the Portuguese Ambassador to Brazil and Switzerland.

 

A Note on Rarity

The present work is extremely rare, like almost all 19^th century Macanese imprints.  We can locate only a single institutional example, held by the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.  Moreover, we cannot trace any sales records for any other examples from the last 25 years.

 

References: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal: S.C. 16845//7 P.; Luís G. GOMES, Efemérides da história de Macau (Noticias de Macau, 1954), p. 103; António Manuel HESPANHA, Panorama da história institucional e jurídica de Macau (1995), p. 87; O Boletim do governo de Macau, vol. XIII, no. 12 (March 25, 1867). p. 61-4.