Hydrofoils from Hong Kong depart for the island of Macau every day of the year, every hour of the day, every fifteen minutes. The ride across the South China Sea is remarkably smooth and pleasantly scenic. But the hundreds of passengers who take this train-on-the-water aren’t interested in the craggy shoreline or the lumbering fishing boats the hydrofoil leaves in its wake. Like children in the backseat of the family station wagon, they just want to get there.

Because Macau, a Portuguese protectorate for more than 400 years until it was handed back to China in 1999, has something you can’t find in Hong Kong: casinos.

These are not genteel European parlors or spacious American-style ballrooms, outfitted with plush carpets and ersatz chandeliers. They’re gambling factories. A few of the island’s eight casinos are the size of a decent Wal-Mart—and most have about as many “shoppers.” Even on an otherwise tranquil Sunday afternoon, the casinos of Macau are easily the most crowded gambling joints you’ve ever seen, with bettors three and four deep at every table, elbowing their countrymen aside to get some money on the sacred green felt. An uninitiated visitor from, say, Las Vegas might presume the casinos had some sort of generous promotion in force—blackjack pays 2-1, perhaps—or that they had momentarily lost their finely calibrated sense of larceny and were simply giving away money. But closer inspection reveals the action at the tables is merely business as usual. The thousands of patrons clamoring to get their bets down just really like to gamble.

That is to say they really like to gamble. I mean, they are stone-cold-out-of-their-minds crazy about gambling.

The casinos of Macau are easily the most animated wagering palaces you’ve ever seen. On hands of chemin de fer (known as “baccarat” along Las Vegas Boulevard), opposing sides shout friendly curses at each other in Cantonese, trying vainly to change the spots on a fateful card. Applause and groaning accompany the outcome of each hand—and it’s not polite routine-par-on-the-PGA-Tour applause, or mock I-didn’t-really-need-that-money groaning, either. This is the real stuff. The actors in Macau’s quotidian drama emote so convincingly because they care so profoundly about every hand. Which is understandable, since most bets here seem to represent a sizable portion of the protagonists’ life savings.

The minimum wager at most tables is between $15 and $25. But nobody bets the minimum. Even young men, very young men, in their late teens maybe, who proudly wear “American Original Playboy Spirit” windbreakers and have cultivated something resembling a moustache above their tender lips—even these lads wager sums that would make the typical Vegas high roller feel like a candidate for the all-you-can-eat buffet line. The prevailing thinking among the gamblers here seems to be, “Small is bad; big is good.” The nearer your wager to the house maximum (US$100,000 in the VIP rooms), the nearer, it seems, to nirvana. Even the chips, laminated plastic discs the size of your kitchen sink drain, seem to suggest that bigger is indeed better.

This compulsion to plunge it all away on the bounce of a ball or the turn of a domino, according to several residents of Hong Kong, can be explained as an obscure symptom of the city’s absurd real-estate market. One young professional, a bond trader who pays more than $100,000 a year in rent for his high-rise apartment, says, “Even if you have a decent job, you can’t afford to ever buy a decent apartment. So you gamble. In Hong Kong you have to gamble if you want to keep up.”

Then there’s the no-nonsense point of view. “We Chinese, we just love to gamble,” says Tony Liu, Vice President of Oriental Marketing at the Trump Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City. “Win or lose, we don’t care. We just love to play. And as long as we have some money in front of us, we won’t stop.”

Though most ethnic generalizations are about as trustworthy as loaded dice, anyone in the gaming business will tell you there are no more “dedicated” players than the Chinese. Indeed, most Chinese gamblers will tell you the same thing. “We’re born to gamble,” says Danny, a “dedicated” gambler who works in management at a Hong Kong hotel. “Chinese don’t fool around. We come to win, to make a big score. It’s in our blood.”

According to Larry Clark, the Taj Mahal’s Executive Vice President of Casino Operations, whose Dragon Room caters to high-rolling Asians, casinos across America would love to capture even a small slice of the Oriental market. Outside of California, where special Asian-games sections draw concert-size crowds, the Taj’s Dragon Room is among the largest Asian gambling arenas outside of Asia. “I was inspired by the Asian games I’d seen in Macau, and I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of excitement and mystique,” Clark says.

In one respect he’s been hugely successful. The Dragon Room, like its antecedents in Macau, is always packed. On a typical weekend night or early morning, every seat at every table is occupied, with an eager crowd waiting for space to become available. Not surprisingly, Tony Liu, the marketer, says he has more than 20,000 names in his database of invited guests.

Fifteen times a year, the Taj puts on Asian-themed shows in its convention-center showroom, featuring the Madonnas and Tony Bennetts of China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. These extravaganzas, which consistently attract audiences of 4,000, usually don’t begin until 2 a.m., when most Atlantic City revelers are contemplating the charms of a final cognac and a down pillow. Tony Liu explains, “Many of our customers close their shops and restaurants around ten or eleven. We have to give them time to drive here.”

This preference for late-night revelries is just one of the stylistic differences between Occidental and Oriental bettors. Most Western gamblers like the casino’s complimentary booze; Asian gamblers prefer coffee. Most Westerners are mildly health conscious; players in the casinos of Macau (and the casinos that would imitate them) smoke like overheated engines. Most Westerners play for three or four hours at a stretch; Hong Kongers in Macau bet for up to 48 hours straight—or until they’ve gone bust. Westerners generally like slots and craps and blackjack; the Chinese players love an inscrutable domino game called Pai Gow. If a Westerner has $20,000 to his name, he might be willing to play with $5,000 of it (and that’s if he’s a wild man); if a Chinese guy has $20,000 to his name, he’ll bet at least that much, and more if he’s got a good line of credit.

“There’s no bigger gamblers than the Chinese,” Larry Clark says. “Any culture with a Judeo-Christian background, gambling has a stigma. With the Chinese it’s accepted. It’s a way of life.”

Nothing illustrates Clark’s assertion better than a visit to the Happy Valley racetrack, wedged surreally beneath a field of skyscrapers in the heart of Hong Kong. A typical Wednesday night of horse racing draws close to 50,000 screaming patrons; weekend programs at the Sha Tin horse-racing complex, in a nearby suburb, draw as many as 90,000 spectators. And they’re not just watching the ponies run around in circles. In 1997, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which manages the racetracks, handled more than HK$93 billion in wagers.

That’s about US$12 billion.

According to Henry Chan, the Jockey Club’s Director of Betting, “Horse racing is a way of life for us. It’s entertainment and it’s sport. But even more it’s like an art. Chinese people love to study the forms, to handicap the races. It’s really our national sport.”

As the only legalized form of gambling in Hong Kong beside a national lottery, the racetracks are highly regulated—and, of course, highly profitable. (Hong Kong’s one-day betting record is currently US$326,810,000.) Each year the Jockey Club donates HK$1-$2 billion to the community. Proceeds from horse racing helped build the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Castle Peak Hospital and the Hong Kong Football Stadium. In fact, the Hong Kong Jockey Club is among the top-ten charitable foundations in the world.

This becomes possible when, in a country with a total population of 6 million, 750,000 people have telephone betting accounts and a million people bet each race day at one of 125 off-course outlets.

The Chinese cultural stereotype—highly superstitious, fascinated by the concept of luck—may have some truth to it, Chan concedes. “But horses are a game of skill. And besides,” Chan adds, “Chinese don’t see betting on horses as ‘gambling.’ It’s playing. We work hard and we play hard. Here in Hong Kong we have small homes and little leisure time. A day at the races is a most civilized relief from our hectic lives.”

Given this kind of nationwide equine fervor, casino gambling is hardly necessary, Chan says. “The government doesn’t want to encourage additional gambling in Hong Kong. We wish Macau was even farther away,” he says, laughing.

Chan’s dream notwithstanding, millions of other residents of this frenetic city find their escape across the water, far from the exactas and quinellas of Happy Valley. They go to Macau, where an instant fortune is only a turn of a card away.

Many of the games in the casinos here are difficult for Western eyes to decipher. Some, like Pai Gow, are played with dominoes, which the locals slap, fondle, and when they really need a winner, caress like small birds, reading the dots with their fingers instead of their eyes. Others, like Dai-Siu, employ dice, and players bet if the total of three die will be “big” or “small.” The odds, you can be sure, are skewed worse than the prop bets on a crap table, not that anyone in Macau seems to mind terribly.

The most peculiar of these casino games is called Fan Tan, an ancient Chinese diversion made modern by the presence of croupiers, pit bosses, and hordes of eager gamblers. The dealer covers a large pile of porcelain buttons with a silver cup, pushes the shrouded pile toward the center of the table, and removes the cover, like a waiter in a classical French restaurant. He then divides the pile of buttons into groups of four. Players bet on whether, after the division, there will be 0, 1, 2, or 3 remaining buttons.

Much frivolity is enjoyed by all, especially the studious types, who keep dense detailed charts of the results, which, they suppose, help divine a pattern in the sublime randomness of the button pile.

Whereas most casinos in America are wall-to-wall slot machines, few of what the Chinese call “hungry tigers” line the walls of Macau’s casinos. They seem like so many forlorn afterthoughts, homely girls waiting to be asked for a dance. The handful of video poker machines are even lonelier, and for good reason. Most gamblers here have no concept of basic strategy, and even if they did it would do them no good. The pay tables are laughable—6 coins for a full house, 5 for a flush—and most machines have a “war” feature that encourages players to double their winnings by challenging the machine to a game of “high card wins.” This being Macau, most players gladly do battle until they blithely convert their profits into nothing.

Blackjack games are rare. On a recent visit, the Casino Jai Alai, a warehouse-size emporium near the ferry terminal, had one blackjack table. The Mandarin Oriental had two.

The rules are surprisingly good—dealer stands on soft 17; surrender available against a dealer 10—but card-counting is ineffectual, since the dealer burns a card on every hand and three of the eight decks in play get cut off, drastically reducing penetration. Not that professional card counters would want to ply their trade here, anyway. The casinos of Macau, operated under a government franchise by the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau, are controlled by a man named Stanley Ho. It is widely rumored in both Hong Kong and the States that Mr. Ho has intimate relationships with plenty of unsavory characters. “The last place you would want to try anything clever is Macau,” one professional blackjack player, based in Nevada, says. “Ho is richer than God, and almost as powerful.”

White-skinned gamblers, do, in fact, stand out from the crowd, if only because of sheer novelty. Most of the Chinese gamblers, Scotch-taping their chips into tidy stacks before firing off $20,000 bets on a hand of baccarat, are too busy tempting fate (and bad odds) to pay attention to a stray “ghost.” At Casino Lisboa, a four-story gambling emporium with higher limits the farther up you ride the escalator, the only denizens of the place that seem interested in Western visitors are dozens of hookers, who have mastered the rudiments of roulette, as well as the English phrases “happy time” and “go to my room.”

The pungently charged atmosphere in Macau is redolent of the old Vegas: fast money, fast women, reality blurred by the intoxicating clatter of chips and dice and dominoes. But lest a daydreaming visitor imagine he’s been magically transported to Nevada back when gangsters called the shots and hedonism flowed as freely as wine at a bacchanal, signs posted on the casino’s walls announce in no uncertain terms that this isn’t the Fabulous Flamingo circa 1946, but a wild gambling-drunk island off the coast of China. In three languages they say, “Please do not spit on the floor.”