For some, it's a place for a holiday weekend of sightseeing, Portuguese feasts and a jetfoil ride back to HK with a bottle of duty-free vinho and a box of sesame cookies as souvenirs. For others, it's a maelstrom of spinning roulette wheels and tumbling dice'even though most of the HK dollars or Chinese renminbi they bring will likely remain in the former Portuguese enclave.

But Macau became a full-fledged special administrative region (SAR) in 1999, and the expansion of the MSAR's gaming industry under Chief Executive Edmund Ho has brought massive change in the form of land reclamation along with new hotels, casinos and other infrastructure, much of it ongoing. The gaming industry in traditional locales like Monte Carlo and Las Vegas leverages IT applications to an extent seen in few other industries. It's a niche vertical industry, but one that employs a great deal of physical security'much of which remains obscured of necessity.

Gaming has been Macau's premier industry for over 150 years, but the modern era is characterized by Dr. Stanley Ho's creation of Sociedade de Turismo e Divers'es de Macau (STDM) in 1962. Ho also introduced the jetfoil fleet that plies the 60 kilometers of ocean separating the two SARs.

Although gaming provides the bulk of Macau's revenue (and tax gains), there's far more to Hong Kong's sister SAR than 'big-small' and baccarat. Macau's first land reclamation project was over a century ago, but the scale of today's projects is unprecedented'nothing like this has been seen in the region since Hong Kong's 1990s Airport Core Program chopped into Chek Lap Kok Island and leveled an airport platform. The Cotai project (which essentially joins Coloane and Taipa Islands) is one phase: other reclamations on Macau's peninsula have produced the world's largest artificial lakes as well as land for office/residential buildings, hotels and casinos.

Macau outposts