The Epilogue addresses the legacies of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau. The war period provided a peculiar blueprint for later developments in terms of bilateral Sino–Portuguese relations and of local practices in the enclave, including towards new waves of refugees. The Epilogue also covers recent written and visual representations of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau.

This chapter centres on Macau’s experience from the occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941 until the end of the war in September 1945, when the enclave became the last foreign-ruled territory in China to remain unoccupied by Japan. It argues that collaboration through compliance was a way of avoiding occupation. In this period, the practice of neutrality in Macau reached a peak of ambiguity. It was marked by the interplay of different forces and important new players competing for political legitimacy, economic control and social influence. These included Chiang Kai-shek’s government, Wang Jingwei’s Reorganised National Government, Portuguese colonial authorities, Japanese military forces and local elites.

The book concludes by analyzing what it means to say that the First World War ended in less than victory for the Allies. The peace process amounted to little more than reimaging an old imperial system that forged a peace that came at a heavy price.

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. It places Macau in the history and historiography of the Second World War in China and in Portugal, and contrasts Macau with other foreign-ruled territories in China, such as the International Settlement and the French Concession in Shanghai. The chapter also revisits the history of Sino–Portuguese relations in Macau, framing the enclave’s Second World War experience in a larger context of global connections, ambiguities and relative autonomy unfolding since the sixteenth century.

This chapter analyses the multifaceted impact of the arrival of thousands of refugees in Macau, showing how relief activities depended on the pragmatic interplay and cooperation of different state and non-state actors. Focusing on Chinese refugees from Shanghai and Guangdong province, and on Portuguese Eurasian refugees from Shanghai and Guangzhou, the chapter details how an unprecedented refugee influx constituted both a crisis and an opportunity for the territory’s administration, local population and the refugees themselves. These wartime refugee waves led to the emergence of a peculiar wartime cosmopolitanism in Macau, which sprang from new flows of people, capital and ideas from major treaty-port metropolises.

This chapter explains how failure at Gallipoli in spring 1915 focused attention on fighting the Ottoman Empire. The secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, understood by historians as emblematic of broader British and French imperial ambitions, also provided a blueprint for the prosecution of the war. In this multifront war, what happened on one battlefront had consequences on others and for Allied military and domestic agendas back in Europe.

This chapter focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.

This chapter focuses on the experience of Hong Kong refugees in Macau. It addresses the role the British consulate in Macau played in refugee management and intelligence networks, explaining how the enclave was an important base and a connecting node for British operations. This chapter argues that Macau played an important supportive role to many in and from Hong Kong from late 1941 to the end of the war. It allowed for escapees to reach unoccupied China, for a great number of refugees to receive assistance, for intelligence to be gathered and for resistance activities to be coordinated. The chapter highlights the significant experience of colonial transplantation that allowed the British to keep a foothold in South China and facilitated the reoccupation of Hong Kong.

With an international focus, this chapter analyses Portuguese neutrality in wartime China before the fall of Hong Kong in late 1941, with reference to the British and Japanese imperial presence in the region. It argues that the war in South China saw Macau and its Portuguese administration engaged constantly with these two major imperial powers in a precarious balance marked by continuities in Portugal’s relations with its old ally, the United Kingdom, and a novel proximity to Japan that generated contradictory practices on the ground.