Vegas Plays to the World

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Despite the influx of big spenders, Macau is still a far cry from America's glamorous Sin City. For the past four decades, the government endorsed the casino monopoly run by local tycoon Stanley Ho, 82, who failed to fully modernize even his flagship Hotel Lisboa. In the run-up to the 1999 handover, rival loan sharks inspired many of the turf wars in the gangster-ridden colony. Violence escalated to the point that in 1997 Macau's Secretary of Security reassured tourists that they were unlikely to get caught in the crossfire because the city had "professional killers who never miss their targets."

In an effort to clean up the territory's casino culture--and to profit from it--China ended Ho's choke hold on the industry in 2001, launching a bidding war for two additional casino licenses and slapping a 39% tax on all three. One of the new license holders is Steve Wynn, who is credited with reinventing the Strip in Vegas. "Right now, Macau is for the gambler--period," Wynn told TIME last month before breaking ground on a $705 million wonderland to be flanked by the old Lisboa and a planned joint venture between Ho and MGM Mirage. "The trick is to add other dimensions to the town, open the door to more people."

The other American licensee, Las Vegas Sands, averages more than 30,000 visitors a day at the $240 million Sands Macao, which uses the Portuguese spelling. But the Sands, with its golden facade and shimmering neon-purple fountain, will have some serious sibling rivalry in 2006 when its parent company finishes building an $800 million replica of the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, complete with imitation canals and singing gondoliers. Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson is so gung ho about Macau that he is enlisting partners in a $10 billion project to duplicate the Vegas Strip on a sliver of reclaimed land between two of the territory's islands.

To help establish a beachhead, they have carefully blended all the Vegas pomp at the Sands Macao into an Asian vibe. A feng shui master helped design every detail of the casino to ensure that the elements were in harmony, from replacing the slot machines' winning trio of 7's with lucky Chinese 8's (in Chinese, the word for "eight" rhymes with the word meaning "get rich") to rounding the high rollers' area with beehive curves to encourage its inhabitants to "leave their honey." The staff is more polite than the Chinese have come to expect. "If you don't tip them, they'll still remain friendly," says Gigi Chan of Hong Kong, who notes that some of Macau's less refined dealers "will yell at you or even take your chips away."