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TAIPA FORT AND A NINETEENTH CENTURY
Taipa Fort
CANNON
RICHARD J. GARRETT
Throughout Macau's long history, many forts and batteries were built to protect it from aggressors. The fort on Taipa, an island forming part of Macau, is one of the territory's lesser fortifications although, unlike most of the others, it survives largely intact.
Taipa Fort was built in 1847 after the island's population petitioned the governor, Ferreria do Amaral, to station military forces there to provide better protection from pirates. The islanders' main livelihood was fishing and a large fleet anchored there. The governor agreed to the proposal and Pedro Jose da Silva Lourerio was put in charge of constructing a fort. The islanders themselves funded the cost of the building.
The fort was built to guard the strait between the islands of Taipa and D. João and to protect the fishing fleet that used the inlet between two islands which formed Taipa. (These two islands and another very small one are now joined by reclamation.) Located on the western shore, the fort is built on the side of a slope, and before reclamation, the front walls were washed by the sea. Figure 1 shows a plan of the fort dating from the early twentieth century.
The main building of the fort is a single-storey brick-built structure, with the arms of Portugal and the date, 1847, on the side. (Figure 2) Sometime before 1900 the fort was adapted to provide a summer residence for the Governors of Macau. A veranda, supported on six columns that sit directly on the front wall of the fort, was added some time after the governor had adopted the fort as a residence. (Figure 3) This extension shows that by then the fort had no military pretensions.
The plan in Figure 1 shows the other internal buildings and indicates the location of the principal cannon. Apart from some small conventional buildings around the fort, there is a small circular building,