Late on a Friday evening, the jetfoil to Macau was packed to the gills with grim-faced gamblers, most of them Hong Kong Chinese hoping for a profitable weekend in the casinos, but I had my sights set on sin of a different sort: gluttony. The early settlers who claimed Macau for Portugal in the mid-1500s brought with them the flavors of home, and for more than four centuries, this tiny sliver of coastline on the South China Sea has cultivated an exquisite marriage of European and Asian culinary arts, spiked with exotic spices from other far-flung corners of Portugal's erstwhile colonial empire. I'll always choose a dining table over a gaming table, so instead of straight flushes, lucky sevens and clattering roulette wheels, I was contemplating dim sum breakfasts, plates piled high with seafood and generous helpings of good, affordable Portuguese wine.

As the ferry slowed and entered Macau's Outer Harbour, the gaudy lights of the Macau Palace floating casino came into view at its mooring adjacent to the ferry terminal. Off to the left I could make out the sweeping ski-jump roofline of the new Macau Cultural Centre, and next to it the site of a temporary pavilion where, on the night of Dec. 19, Portugal will formally relinquish all claims to the narrow peninsula and two small islands it has governed here for the past 442 years. At the stroke of midnight, this last remaining European outpost in Asia will become a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, established under the same "one country, two systems" policy implemented in Hong Kong in July 1997.

By the time I'd disembarked and checked into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, it was too late for dinner, so I poured myself a glass of port and tucked into the complimentary Macanese egg tart in my room — a buttery round of bliss with a delicate crust and a sweet custard filling — before tucking in for the night.

The next morning, fortified with siu mai, steamed buns and sticky rice, I decided to fill the space between breakfast and lunch with a history lesson. On a previous visit, I'd made a quick pass through the year-old Macau Museum, and now I wanted to study the exhibits at a more leisurely pace. The taxi dropped me off next to the territory's most famous landmark, the ghostly stone facade of St. Paul's Church, where I immediately blundered into at least a dozen snapshots as knots of Chinese tourists clicked photos of each other on the steps below. This towering hilltop ruin is all that remains of a grand basilica built by Jesuits from 1602 to 1637, destroyed by fire in 1835 and reincarnated in the 20th century as the ubiquitous emblem of Macau, liberally reproduced on T-shirts, postcards, coffee mugs and key chains. Across the road from St. Paul's, an escalator climbs into the bowels of the 17th-century Citadel of São Paulo do Monte, where a thoroughly modern three-story exhibition space has been cleverly incorporated into the old fortifications.

For the next 90 minutes, I took a walk through the history of Macau, beginning with the early Cantonese farmers and Fukienese fishermen of pre-colonial days, then tracing the path of Portuguese colonial expansion, which began with Vasco da Gama's heroic voyage around the southern tip of Africa to India at the end of the 15th century.

By charting a viable maritime trade route between Europe and the lucrative spice markets of the Orient, da Gama paved the way for Portugal to become a dominant world power in the early years of European empire-building. After da Gama returned to Lisbon in 1499 with news of his discoveries, the Portuguese wasted no time in leveraging their superior seafaring skills to establish a network of commercial outposts along the east coast of Africa, at Goa in India, in Malacca and the Malay Archipelago and at several settlements near the mouth of the Pearl River in southeastern China. With the cooperation of the Chinese emperor, these settlements were consolidated at Macau in 1557, and the colony flourished for the next 300 years, thanks to a cozy trade agreement that gave Portugal a virtual monopoly on maritime commerce between China and Europe.

The uppermost level of the museum opens onto a landscaped esplanade where a few tired old canons still jut out from thick battlements overlooking the harbor. In their prime, these big guns were meant to protect the territory from invasion by rival European powers. Now they're aimed squarely at ranks of dismal concrete apartment blocks and at the congested heart of Macau's modern business district.

Upon leaving the museum, I descended the wide stone steps below St. Paul's, poking through the jumbled antique shops along the Rua de São Paulo, then wandering through the narrow lanes that wind down the hillside toward the epicenter of colonial Macau, an expansive plaza called the Largo do Senado.

After the Portuguese set up shop in Macau in the 1500s, they set about making their hilly patch of waterfront real estate feel more like home, erecting grand neoclassical commercial and residential buildings, Roman Catholic churches, paved public plazas and conspicuous mansions for the Portuguese elite. Unlike Hong Kong, where constant urban redevelopment has wiped out most traces of early colonial architecture, Macau has managed to preserve many of its atmospheric old Portuguese buildings — the former Bela Vista Hotel, closed last spring to become the future residence of the Portuguese consul-general; the Guia Fortress and lighthouse atop Macau's highest peak; the pink Palacio do Governo, overlooking the harbor from the Avenida da Praia Grande; and numerous private commercial buildings housing shops, restaurants and Portuguese-style pousadas.

As you follow the pedestrian-only streets below St. Paul's to the shady arcades lining the Largo do Senado, you can almost imagine yourself in Lisbon, until you catch a pungent whiff of five-spice noodles from a vendor, or happen upon a crimson shrine squeezed into a narrow alley fragrant with hanging yellow coils of incense. The area is still a busy shopping district, and on this sunny Saturday it seemed that all of Macau had turned out for a stroll, browsing through trendy shops and bargaining for cheap clothing and toys at the outdoor market stalls just off the plaza. I followed my nose into a crowded cafe to resume my gastronomical indulgences, savoring a garlicky shrimp tart served with fried potatoes and salad, and a refreshing dose of the crisp, young wine the Portuguese call vinho verde.

About 15 minutes on foot from the Largo do Senado, at a prominent intersection near the southern waterfront, stands the Hotel Lisboa, an exuberant flight of architectural fancy entered through a high cylindrical tower suggestive of an oversized bird cage. Pleasantly full from lunch, with my vague urge for an afternoon nap tempered by a cup of strong coffee, I crossed the Lisboa's lavish marble foyer into the hotel shopping arcade. The prostitutes who openly fish the corridors for customers followed my every move as I walked past expensive boutiques to the casino entrance, then filed through the metal detector for a peek under the hood at the engine that drives modern Macau.

The Opium Wars of the mid-19th century brought a sea change for Portuguese influence in Asia as Britain forced Beijing to open its markets, and the brash new British colony at Hong Kong, just 40 miles east of Macau, quickly became the dominant gateway for trade with China. With the wind out of its sails, Macau slipped into relative obscurity, later reinventing itself as a gambling destination for weekenders from Hong Kong. Instead of competing head to head with the Brits, Macau learned to live off the fat of its rich new neighbors by extending an open invitation to drop in any time and misbehave. Inside the cavernous Casino Lisboa — Macau's largest — I watched the ranks of gamblers joylessly struggling to beat the odds, their fierce concentration leaving no doubt that the games played here are serious business.

Revenue from the successful gaming industry is not Macau's only source of foreign earnings, but casino gambling has allowed the territory to prosper in the 20th century, despite its diminished role as an international manufacturing and trade center. The casinos have fueled much of the territory's recent infrastructure growth, including the new airport at Taipa Island, a new passenger ferry terminal, new bridges and highways and massive expansion of commercial and residential property on reclaimed land facing the Outer Harbour. On one corner of this appended real estate sits the gorgeous new Macau Cultural Centre, encompassing three auditoriums and a museum displaying a permanent collection of Western and Asian art. Nearby, a 338-meter waterfront observation tower and restaurant is under construction, scheduled for completion in the spring of 2000. Much of the costly restoration of colonial architecture undertaken in Macau over the past decade has also been underwritten by the wages of sin.

The peculiar cityscape that has emerged from this convergence of well-funded historic preservation, freewheeling real estate development and adult-oriented entertainment makes much of Macau seem like a mildly wicked amusement park, at once futuristic and anachronistic, with a soupçon of lawlessness that occasionally erupts into gruesome gang violence. Macau is a duplicitous place, to be sure, uniquely balanced between its Portuguese past and its Chinese future, neither fundamentally sinister nor altogether wholesome, a bubbling Eurasian gumbo with a poker face and a distinctly pragmatic outlook on the impending political transition.

I left the Lisboa without wagering a single pataca, saving my money instead for a dinner of spicy African chicken washed down with full-bodied red wine at Restaurante Litoral on the Inner Harbour — a very safe bet indeed.

Throughout the colonial period, Macau has never really let go of its Chinese roots, and on the final morning of my visit, I made a pilgrimage to the most enduring symbol of that unbroken link to the past, A-Ma Temple. This complex of hillside shrines overlooking the Inner Harbour predates the arrival the Portuguese, whose name for their colony was derived from the Chinese "A-Ma Gau," or "Bay of A-Ma." Five centuries ago, fishermen on their way out to sea would stop here and make offerings to the goddess A-Ma, protector of mariners, and even now, new boats are brought here for blessing before their inaugural voyages. These days, the constant stream of worshippers includes a mix of Macau Chinese, who make up 95 percent of the territory's current population of 430,000, and jolly tour groups from the People's Republic who enthusiastically add their coins and joss sticks to the offerings and endlessly pose for snapshots on the temple grounds.

Preparations for Macau's reunification with China have not generated the kind of political protests and international media attention that accompanied Hong Kong's handover in 1997, and in many ways the change of administration already feels like a fait accompli. Relations with Beijing have been cordial throughout, and, as in Hong Kong, the territory is slated to maintain a separate government and market economy for at least 50 years after the transition. Meanwhile, tourists from the mainland have been arriving in dramatically increasing numbers for a preview of their new possession, and China has been assembling a new road and railway link between Macau and Guangzhou via a bridge that will connect Taipa Island in Macau to Hengqin Island just across the border.

Gazing out over the Macau Maritime Museum from the uppermost shrine of A-Ma, I could see the not-so-distant shores of China, a deceptively ordinary scene transected by an invisible line, which from this vantage point seemed altogether inconsequential. Already I was more intent on my second pilgrimage of the day, to Balichão, a lovely Macanese restaurant in a park on Coloane Island, where I would order up a savory seafood lunch and lick the plates clean before catching a ferry back to Hong Kong.