From around the mid-1500s to December 1999, Macao was the most longstanding site of economic, religious and political contact between the Chinese and the European worlds. Since the foundation of Hong Kong (in 1840), Macao's survival has depended on a creative use of its marginality - as a centre for gambling, for the coolie trade, for opium trade and for semi-clandestine gold trade. As a rear window to China, Macao provides an example of marginality, that allows us to study the limits of the systems that characterise the Chinese world. These essays look at Macao's society in the 19th and 20th centuries from the perspective of an historically informed anthropology. They focus on paradoxical aspects of cultural confrontation, personal construction and ethnic differentiation, and on constructed amnesia, with a special focus on Macao's Eurasian population.