Ruins of St. Paul's

The Ruins of St. Paul's are the surviving facade of the Church of Mater Dei, built by Jesuit missionaries on Rua de São Paulo on the Macau Peninsula between 1602 and 1640 and widely regarded as the finest monument of early Christianity in East Asia. The church stood beside the College of St. Paul, the first Western-style university in the Far East, which trained missionaries bound for China, Japan and Southeast Asia. A fire during a typhoon in 1835 destroyed the church and college, leaving only the granite front, the stone steps and part of the foundations. The facade rises in five tiers, a mixture of European Baroque and Mannerist forms with unmistakably Asian detail. Carvings were made by Japanese Christian artisans who had fled persecution, and by Chinese craftsmen, which explains why a Portuguese-style statue of the Virgin is accompanied by a seven-headed hydra labelled in Japanese characters, a chrysanthemum, a peony and a Chinese inscription warning of the devil. Bronze statues of saints stand in niches, and a dove, the Holy Spirit, crowns the pediment. A broad flight of 68 steps leads up to the open space where the nave once stood. Archaeological excavations carried out in the 1990s uncovered the foundations, the original floor and, beneath the site, a crypt and ossuary that now form part of the Museum of Sacred Art and Crypt, reached through a modern entrance behind the facade. The ruins were stabilised and a steel structure installed to allow safe viewing from behind. Today the monument is the best-known emblem of Macau and a centrepiece of the UNESCO-listed Historic Centre of Macao, inscribed in 2005. It stands at the top of a pedestrian route from Senado Square lined with food shops and souvenir stalls, and beside Mount Fortress, which makes the two sites easy to combine on a single walk. The facade is lit after dark and remains open-air, with free access at all hours.