Following Portugal’s handover of the colony of Macao to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1999, the city has undergone an intense period of transformation. The PRC liberalized the monopolistic local gambling industry, which comprises the bulk of Macao’s economy, allowing foreign gaming companies to enter the market. These companies are investing approximately $25 billion to construct a phantasmagoric themed cityscape of casinos, hotels and entertainment zones that is a marked departure from Macao’s extant colonial architecture. This article analyzes the production of this new transnational landscape in Macao and the pedagogical function of these themed environments in the consumption practices of post-socialist tourists from mainland China, who make up more than half of the 30 million tourists who visited the tiny city in 2008. A socio-semiotic methodology reveals the way themed environments provide a spatial syntax and semantics that indexes consumption, making Macao a didactic laboratory of consumerism.
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