Cotai was to be one of a number of bold projects left as a at the close of three and a half centuries of Portuguese rule. Just over 10 years ago, the government published a master plan, a self-contained "new city,'' linked to the mainland by a bridge to Zhuhai and a train line to Guangzhou, where up to 450,000 inhabitants would live, work and play.
But it was not to be. As the master plan was published, Macau's property market was entering a that would last most of a decade. evaporated.
With Cotai in limbo, Stanley Ho and his allies proposed a HK$23.4 billion China Macau World Trade Center to include 10 hotels, a huge exhibition center and a theme park. David Chow backed a HK$6 billion plan called Mega City for a 2,000-room hotel, a golf course and combination indoor ski slope/artificial beach.
Developer Victor Armando Fung proposed a HK$1.8 billion Convention and Exhibition Center with two hotels and conference halls. A fourth HK$1.5 billion proposal envisaged a , two hotels, a driving range and apartments.
Ho and Chow's grand plans went nowhere, but the two more modest proposals received official . The convention center still failed to take off.
Southwest Cotai is also home to a HK$23.1 million track built with government support, and a private golf course opening this year. Other sports fields are going up around the Macau University of Science and Technology, which opened in northeast Cotai in 2001.
With private development otherwise stagnant, Hong Kong-listed eSun Holdings offered four years ago to open a HK$300 million television production center in Cotai called East Asia Satellite Television City by 2003.
ESun on development, missing its first target date, while meantime Macau ended Stanley Ho's gambling monopoly and solicited bids for new casinos. The government in early 2002 selected Galaxy Casino and Wynn Resorts to share the market with Ho's Sociedade de Jogos de Macau. The government bound each to invest billions of dollars in new resorts.