Lower Macau is a tiny peninsula with some islands that's located in the south of China, but it's not really China.

Well, you might not see any difference on a map between the two.

Macau has its own independent government, its own money, its own police.

And if you cross from mainland China into Macau or from a cow into mainland China, you'll need to go through customs and get your passport stamped.

This is because Macau is one of two special administrative regions or s a ours of China, the other being nearby Hong Kong across the bay.

Both Hong Kong and Macau are largely independent autonomous regions that operate their own local governments with minimal interference from Beijing.

And while Hong Kong largely steals the spotlight from her sister, what with a Disneyland huge skyscrapers with millions of people and massive protests, Macau is just as loud but in a different kind of way.

You see gambling in all forms is illegal across the entirety of the People's Republic of China, meaning that it is illegal for 1.4 billion people, or over 18% of the world's population, to partake in the practice.

However, since Hong Kong and Macau have different rules and governments, the laws air difference.

Hong Kong has some limited betting on horse races and lotteries, but it doesn't have any casinos.

Macau, on the other hand, has gone crazy with casinos, and you can find 38 of them to choose from today, dotted across the tiny territory, tiny Macau is the only place in China where you can legally gamble inside of casinos.

But Macau's unique situation extends far beyond only China.

Extend the map out and you can see that casino gambling is also illegal in nearby areas like Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan.

While only two casinos exist in the entire country of South Korea, the concentration of 38 casinos in such a tiny area is unprecedented in East Asia, and it's part of why Macao could be considered the most internationally visited city in the world if you count mainland Chinese and Hong Kong tourists visiting Macau as foreign arrivals, which you might because they do need a passport in order to get in.

Macau easily becomes the most internationally visited city in the world, with nearly 31 million people visiting in 2016 alone or nearly 85,000 people every day.

Macau only has a population of 653,000 people living there, which in the tiny space that it occupies, already makes it the most densely populated administrative region of the entire world.

But with the amount of visitors coming in, it means that on any given day, one out of every 10 people that you see in the city is an international tourist.

Macau, as a small city, generates more dollars in tourism revenue than the entire country of Japan does, and it's gambling Industry is seven times larger than the Las Vegas economy.

Macau is indisputably the largest and most profitable gambling center in the world.

But the story behind how it became this way is both long and fascinating.

The area of modern day Macau was probably always sparsely inhabited until the Portuguese randomly showed up in the 15 hundreds.

They basically used a big pile of money to bribe a local official into giving them a lease of the Macao Peninsula, and they even began renting the area from the Chinese government every year until things started getting weird.

In the 18 hundreds, the British showed up into the picture and began taking over Hong Kong on the other side of the bay and getting millions of Chinese people addicted to opium to make some money.

China at the time was like a heavyweight boxer, long past his prime that was weak and addicted to drugs and sensing blood in the water.

The Portuguese just started refusing to pay the rent from a cow and negotiated with the Ching dynasty in 18 87 for permanent rights to occupy Macau in perpetuity.

Since Macau's importance as a trading port had begun diminishing following the British takeover of Hong Kong, the Portuguese decided to legalize gambling in their territory as a way to increase the local government's revenue.

Things were pretty simple for a while, with the only gambling consisting of traditional Chinese Fontane houses that paid a license fee to operate to the government's.

But things started heating up in the 19 thirties, when Macau granted monopoly rights to the entire gambling industry to the Taihang company, but they really sucked, and they didn't really do a whole lot with that.

And oh, whoops.

Now we're in World War Two, and Japan has begun taking a rude, unwelcome vacation in China with millions of soldiers.

But the Japanese were much less rude to Macau and respected the tiny Portuguese peninsula without ever attacking her occupying it.

Macau kind of became known as a safe haven during the war, and it especially became one afterwards, when China couldn't decide who the real China Waas and millions more people died.

Because of that, refugees flooded into Macau and with a new massive workforce, the economy began booming in the 19 sixties, came around and Macau decided to grant the monopoly gambling rights again to a different company that hopefully when it suck as much this time called S t d M.

Which stands for this.

But yeah, I don't speak Brazilian very well anyway.

STDM introduced Western style casino games into Macau for the first time and invested heavily into modernizing the marine transportation between Hong Kong and Macau so that the million's of Hong Kongers could easily begin gambling inside of Macau.

Everything was great until the old problems of there being multiple.

China's came up once again in the 19 nineties.

The UK gave Hong Kong back to China in 1997 because they signed a treaty back in 18 98.

That's they'd give it back in 99 years.

From then, 99 years came and went in.

The British peacefully agreed to transfer it back to Chinese rule.

The Portuguese argued that the treaty they had signed with King China enabled them to keep Macau forever.

But the People's Republic of China wasn't exactly in a listening kind of mood.

And with a population of a jillion times bigger than Portugal's, with millions of soldiers and with a very unsympathetic United Nations, Portugal never really had a choice and they to peacefully transferred Macau back over to China in 1999.

China, however, agreed not to interfere in Macau's gambling policy and true to their word, the Macau gambling economy has actually exploded in the years following the transfer.

The S T D M monopoly was ended in 2000 and two, and since then multiple new foreign casino companies have begun operating in the territory and increasing competition by 2000 and seven, The Macau gambling revenues overtook Las Vegas to become the most profitable gambling center in the entire world, and Macao's tourism industry is among the largest in the world.

But Macau's heavy reliance on the gambling industry does bring certain problems.

As of this moment in 2019 taxes on the gambling industry make up a whopping 70% of Macau's government income.

The gambling industry is heavily reliant on the prosperity of the people who actually gamble.

Recessions mean less money to travel there and less money to gamble their meaning that a future recession in either China or Hong Kong or both, which account for 87% of all the tourism in Macau, would severely negatively impact the Macau economy.

Further, it's unclear what China's intentions are for the future of the territory.

China agreed to respect both Hong Kong's and Macau's territorial sovereignty for a period of only 50 years, so until 2047 for Hong Kong in until 2049 or Macau by that time, the world's largest gambling center could be at a risk of ending, Or maybe not.

But only China knows less than 200,000 Americans visited Macao last year while tens of millions of them visited Las Vegas.

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