The Telegraph – With 43 varieties of pillow, 150-year-old bottles of cognac and breathtaking, neon-lit views, no expense is spared for high rollers at the Las Vegas of the East. At the entrance to the Galaxy casino, elegant Filipina glamour models usher gamblers past a giant model diamond into a world of palm-lined artificial beaches and £48-a-time cocktails. This is Macau, a former Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast that in just over a decade has become the undisputed global king of the casino.
It is also a world of money laundering, corruption, human trafficking and over-indulgence that stands in stark contrast to the current austerity campaign being spearheaded by Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
Macau returned to Chinese control in 1999, two years after the British handover of neighbouring Hong Kong, and almost immediately set about transforming itself into the global casino capital.
On Friday, it took a step closer to its goal when the Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld announced plans for a 270-room hotel there. Tonight, it will notch up another coup when the Rolling Stones play the 15,000 capacity arena at the Sands China casino. A sister venue to the Sands casino in Las Vegas, its bosses have also enlisted David Beckham as a “regional ambassador” in the hope that his “well-known personal values” will help.
But while the likes of the Rolling Stones may now be considered the very definition of a clean, family-friendly corporate entertainment, the same cannot yet be said of Macau itself, which is yet to completely throw off its wilder, sleazier side.
Its recent boom, spurred by China’s rise as an economic superpower, has brought huge wealth to this tiny colony, which is barely the size of an average London borough.
But it has also attracted an avalanche of problems, including loan sharks, gambling addiction, prostitution, a widening wealth gap and rampant corruption.
Last October a US congressional report cited claims from one local academic that at least “$202billion in ill-gotten funds are channelled through Macau each year”.
