Bond island
It might be said that the person who first put Macau on the map of general attention was Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. In the 1960s, he travelled around the world, collecting material for Thrilling Cities, a travel book which ultimately included Macau, along with Las Vegas, Tokyo, New York and Hamburg.
Fleming was seduced by the aura of intrigue, danger and decadence he found in Macau. He wrote, for example, about the Central Hotel, a nine-storey den of vice, where, as you went up storey by storey, the girls got prettier, the gambling stakes higher, the booze more expensive, the music better. It was also in Macau that Fleming stumbled upon the idea for his famous villain, Goldfinger, after meeting a shadowy Chinese millionaire who arbitraged the price of gold in Macau—the most favourable in the...
