In City of Broken Promises, Austin Coates has delineated late eighteenth-century Portuguese Macao as the inscrutable and seductive Orient, or the East, and, not least, as the West’s shackled ‘Other’. This colonialist novel is redolent of benighted backwardness and sexual fantasy, along with colonial ideology and Orientalist stereotype. Even so, the author inadvertently reworks the colonial/Orientalist perception. Resonant with a Bakhtinian carnival aesthetic, he discloses a dissenting stance of subversion, in which colonial hierarchy and supremacy are ridiculed through the switching of roles. The Bakhtinian carnivalization in literature entertains the idea that literary texts do not merely contain a unitary ideological perspective, they may well draw a veil over concealed voices that are riddled with a revolutionary potential to mock dominant ideologies. Symbolising the superior/masculine West, Thomas van Mierop, an Englishman, is forced out from the East by dysentery and punished by death at sea. His Chinese pensioner-mistress Martha, reified as the inferior/ feminine East in an ‘Oriental harem’, emerges in the end as a successful trader and the greatest public benefactress of Macao. The novel oddly reveals a hidden resistance to imperial transgressions and a reversal of the West over the East paradigm in the present rhetoric.