Organised by the Archives of Macau (AM), under the auspices of the Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC), an exhibition entitled “Pirates in the Waters of Macau (1854-1935)”, will be held from next Wednesday to January 31, “presenting the phenomenon of piracy in the surrounding waters of Macau and the multiple meanings it had for Macau,” the bureau said in a statement yesterday.

“The word ‘pirate’ [“hoidouh” in Cantonese] conjures up the stereotype of adventures, romances, cruelty and barbarities, which is a set of social representations cultivated fundamentally by literature and the film industry, the statement said.

“However, with a deeper study, one can see that ‘piracy’ is a particularly complex subject,” the statement said, adding that the exhibition aims, on the one hand, to encourage the public and researchers’ interest in the study and investigation of this subject and to give an account of the different dimensions of piracy as a social practice in a much wider political, economic, social and cultural system; and, on the other hand, to showcase a particularly rich collection of documentation preserved in Macau Archives.

According to the statement, the exhibition features a selection of over 100 documents, maps and photographs from Macau Archives’ collection that addresses the issue of piracy in the Pearl River Delta, “thereby revealing the diversity and thematic amplitude of the documentation, as well as developing knowledge about the multiple meanings of the phenomenon of piracy for Macau in the second half of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century.”

The exhibition will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily except on Mondays and public holidays. The Macau Archives is located at 91-93, Avenida do Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida. For more details visit www.archives.gov.mo or phone 2859 2919 during office hours.

This file photo released by the Macau Archives (AM) yesterday shows suspected pirates flanked by two police officers after their arrests in Coloane in 1910.