ALL THAT GLITTERS

Designed to appeal to mainland Chinese visitors, City of Dreams opened June 1 on Macau’s fast-developing Cotai Strip

Since Stanley Ho’s three-decade long monopoly of Macau’s gaming industry ended with the ’04 opening of Sands Macau, Vegas has invested heavily in the special administrative region’s casinos and hotels. New development is focused on a strip of marshland 9km from Macau’s traditional gambling district, known as the Cotai Strip. Right across the street from two-year-old Las Vegas Sands’ Venetian Macao, the June-opened City of Dreams (pictured here) is the strip’s latest and greatest development, co-owned by Lawrence Ho, son of Stanley and CEO of Melco Crown Entertainment Ltd.

The US$2.4 billion, 39,000m2 development is gradually rolling out 500 gambling tables, three hotels, a shopping mall, a domed multimedia theatre and an electronic aquarium with digital fish. Last year, Macau’s gambling revenue exceeded that of the Las Vegas Strip and Atlantic City combined, though March ’09 figures show the former’s gross gambling revenue fell 5.9 per cent from a year earlier to US$1.2bn.

Although Macau’s casino hardware is identical to that in Vegas, visitors have been struck by gambling culture divergences. As a Wall Street Journal reporter put it recently: “Here, Chinese men sip tea and intently concentrate on the numbers of spinning wheels. [In Nevada], drunk boisterous crowds pull levers and roll dice and shout…”