St. Augustine's Square

This guide to St. Augustine's Square in Macau begins in December nineteen forty-one, when Japanese forces seized Hong Kong and one of Asia's wealthiest men, Sir Robert Ho Tung, crossed the water to the ochre-yellow villa he had owned here since nineteen eighteen. It follows what neutral Macau's wartime shelter meant for the square around it, from refugees streaming across the border to the Dom Pedro V Theatre converting its stage for their use. It also traces the square's older layers, including a church that has held mass here for over four centuries and a Baroque seminary raised in seventeen fifty-eight. Listen for how each building on this small piazza came to shelter someone.