Macao Museum

This guide to the Macao Museum starts in June 1622, when a Dutch fleet of more than a thousand men landed below this hilltop fortress and began climbing toward badly outnumbered Portuguese defenders. You'll hear the competing accounts of who fired the cannon shot that turned the battle, and how that contested moment set four centuries of Chinese-Portuguese life in motion below the hill, producing the culture the guide calls Macanese. The museum itself is built into the old fortress walls, its three floors tracing the encounter, the daily life it produced, and the city that grew from it. You enter today by escalator, through a tunnel cut into the same stone.