Macau was once a tired colonial outpost. Now China is turning it into the world's gambling capital. Dorinda Elliott plays the tables—and looks for the old romantic Macau of her past

One by one the players lean forward, pressing their noses to the table, slowly peeling back their two cards with tobacco-stained fingers. I am hovering over a baccarat table, trying to muster the courage to join some Chinese card sharks with buzz-cuts. They throw their cards at the dealer in disgust. She responds with a bored roll of her eyes. A cloud of cigarette smoke hangs over the table: Just about everybody in the casino seems to be smoking—in fact, the place reeks of cigarettes. It's two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon at the Venetian Macau casino, just a half-hour free bus ride from mainland China, and the tables are packed.

I'm not sure why I find this intimidating. As a foreign correspondent, I had dodged bullets in Jakarta, marched with protesters in Beijing, and faced angry mobs in Moscow. But sitting down to play cards with a bunch of Chinese gamblers seems beyond me. Not that anybody is much interested in my conundrum: These people, thousands and thousands of them, are focused on winning. A couple of giggly waitresses try to explain the game; I get that it involves cards adding up to nine, but the rest eludes me. Instead of giving them the pleasure of seeing a dumb gueilo (foreign ghost) lose her shirt, I wander over to the slot machines—four thousand of them, a sea of clanging, dinging, flashing robots. For good luck, I choose one with Chinese symbols—the icons show golden taels and carp and mah-jongg tiles—and insert the equivalent of $2.50. I score $5. Another $2.50 quickly dwindles to nothing. Yet another $2.50 and I make another $5! I feel myself getting sucked in—like that Chinese woman with pencil-drawn eyebrows slouched on the stool opposite me: With thousands of points racked up, she looks like she's been sitting there for days. I drag myself away. As far as I can see, I am the only white-faced customer in the biggest casino in the world—football fields of baccarat, blackjack, and craps tables.

I have come to Macau, the former Portuguese colony, with some misgivings. I first came here twenty-five years ago, when it was a sleepy backwater known to residents of nearby Hong Kong mostly for its languid lifestyle—Chinese grannies and gangsters gambled at the seedy Lisboa casino, while expatriate visitors came on the hydrofoil for an escape from the stiffness of British Hong Kong—and for the Mediterranean ambience, pastel Portuguese buildings, crumbling Chinese shophouses, and long lunches of African chicken and vinho verde at Fernando's, out on the undeveloped Coloane Island.

There is something exhilarating about Asia's former colonial ports: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Penang, Macau. Even as their history fades, they are strikingly cosmopolitan places—the local people are pragmatic, long accustomed to the idea of cultural exchange, doing business with foreigners, even intermarrying. Have Macau's residents, the descendants of refugees who fled famine and political strife to build new lives in the arms of Europeans, hung on to their worldly ways? I am still drawn to memories of that earlier, colonial era, when I fell in love with my future spouse over breakfast at the cavernous Bela Vista Hotel, up on a hillside that overlooked the city's Praia Grande waterfront promenade. The hotel had fifteen-foot ceilings, graceful archways, and checkerboard marble floors. But by the 1980s, it had seen better days: The rooms were mildewed, and the paint was peeling. Breakfast was a -seven-course affair, a vestige of grander times. Laconic white-jacketed Portuguese waiters served cornflakes and sweet breads on the open-air balcony. As geckos skittered along the ledge, my boyfriend and I laughed over the first course: potato chips, served with a flourish. I suppose my fate was sealed then and there—after potato chips at the Bela Vista, whom else could I marry?