Well before Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and England sailed the seas to compete for colonial wealth, the diffusion of printing after 1450 in Europe became a major stimulus to development. Like ripples on a pond, economic and social ‘spillovers’ led to increased literacy, public knowledge, commerce, and mass migrations across the continent.
Printing soon moved through Portuguese territories as well. The earliest moveable-type press in Goa was imported from Lisbon in 1545, producing religious and scientific manuscripts. Production increased when another press arrived in Macao from Lisbon in 1588 at the Jesuit residence. As the Portuguese Empire faded in the seventeenth century and Macao declined, printing entered a period of stasis until the British East India Company was permitted by Macao’s Loyal Senate to build factories and take up residence in 1738. Following the Opium Wars, a new era began in nineteenth-century Macao, Hong Kong, and other European ‘treaty ports’, signalling a turning point in which journalism, ‘free trade’, and liberal discourse gained prominence.
This paper discusses the uses of print journalism in nineteenth-century Macao and Hong Kong, moving from religious origins through the advocacy of new social ideas and commercial interests that marked these early years. The focus will be on Macaense trained in Macao as printers and compositors, who migrated to Hong Kong after 1841 to set up their own businesses. As evident from their personal histories, these entrepreneurs were well aware of the tensions between liberal and conservative factions in Lisbon and Macao, as well as the rising dogma of ‘free trade’ in Hong Kong, which both attracted and repelled them as they asserted a unique cultural identity under British rule. As publishers and journalists, many from humble origins, their stories provide examples of how they navigated spaces between prevailing ideologies.