Europe's oldest and final enclave in East Asia returned to China on Dec. 19, prompting nostalgic reveries of its romantic past. But many Chinese residents of the city sought to exorcise a different ghost, one evoked by the early 20th century poet Wen Yiduo. PNS commentator Susanna Chui-yung Cheung is a correspondent for the Chinese Section of the BBC World Service based in Hong Kong.

"What they kidnapped is only my body,
My soul is still under your safekeeping...
Mother, I want to come back, Mother!"
By Wen Yiduo, an activist in the 1919 May Fourth patriotic movement

MACAU -- As Portugal withdrew from this last and oldest colony in Asia, European residents extolled its religious tolerance. With more churches per capita than any city in the world, many recall fondly how Macau was "close to heaven." But for countless generations of Chinese it was a gateway to hell.

Just 150 years ago, Macau was the export center for coolies, contract laborers sent to the plantations and mines of the Americas to toil for a pittance. In its heyday, more than 800 brokers, or "barracoons," operated out of Macau, recruiting the destitute from a southern China devastated by the Opium War. Between 1850 and 1875, more than 1.2 million Chinese indentured workers were sent aboard Portuguese sailing vessels mainly to Havana, Cuba, and Lima, Peru. Most of them never returned to their motherland, dying unmarried, impoverished and alone in far-off lands.

"The Portuguese reaped a great profit in human cargo, and they knew so well how to take advantage of the cheap labor in their colonies, moving them out to foreign markets," says Christina Cheng, author of "Macau: A Cultural Janus." "That is what we call a world on the move."

The export of coolies was part of an effort to revise an economy suffering from the loss of another grim business -- the opium trade -- which had been taken over by the British in Hong Kong.

Gerald Horne, an African-American historian at Hong Kong University, explains that the coolies were a convenient substitute for New World plantations following the abolition of the slave trade.

"The European colonialists felt the pressure from the anti-slavery movement in their home countries as well as in the United States," Horne said. "The Portuguese were looking for a substitute, and the Chinese became the target. The slave trade continued under another name."

It was, in fact, the Portuguese who brought the first African slaves, as household domestics, to East Asia when they landed in Macau in 1513.

Yet Macau, for a while in the early part of this century, was also home to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China and initiator of the revolutionary storm that eventually swept away the evils of the coolie trade.