More than half of the territory of Macao is land reclaimed from the sea. The majority of this growth took place during the twentieth century, but even now Macao continues to expand incrementally into the surrounding waters. Each reclamation is effectively a tabula rasa — a ‘blank slate’ with no existing buildings or infrastructure — that allows the reimagining of what a contemporary city might be. This includes quantifiable decisions about street organisation, building volumes, and infrastructural links, but also entails consideration of qualitative effects: degrees of freedom, constraint, coherence, complexity, legibility, permeability, interiority, intimacy, and mystery, the synergistic relationships between different areas, and the types of urban lifestyles thereby enabled and engendered. The cumulative result is a patchwork of contiguous yet discontinuous urban fragments, each one a manifestation of contemporaneous ideas about desirable city design. And for every project built, there have been many more unbuilt proposals. Collectively, these delineate an alternative history, or histories, of Macao: an array of phantom Macao that show what might have been and suggest what might still be possible.