Hong Kong, since the first Opium War (1839-42), as the East-West center, has been well-known across the world, while much fewer people have realized that Macao had been the first European base in East Asia from the mid-16th century to the 1840s and onward. This panel thus aims to bring attention to Macao by examining its rich and diverse history through a few case studies. The first paper focuses on the rich and diverse sources concerning Macao created by various agents, including the Portuguese Empire, the Roman Catholic mission in Asia, and Chinese authorities, and raises the question of whether these sources present different narratives of Macao’s past or contribute to a cohesive understanding of its history. The second paper turns to both Chinese and Portuguese texts to examine the 1749 homicide of two Chinese men by Portuguese soldiers at Macao and illustrates that Macao was a vital nexus connecting local, regional, and global processes in the early modern world. The third paper pays attention to the “oriental” paintings of Macao created by European artists, and discusses how pictorial Macao played a significant role in creating, circulating, and reproducing “Chinese knowledge” in the West. The last paper in the panel, based on solid archives and oral history, examines the return of Burmese Chinese to Portuguese-administered Macau from the 1950s to the 1980s, thus shedding some new light on the dynamic role of Macao in the Cold War politics.