Maria Antonia Nicolau Espaninha, a Portuguese professor in Macao, will spend the coming Christmas in Macao as she has done in the last five years. If there is any difference, it is that Macao will be six days into Chinese rule when she celebrates the holiday with her family.

China resumes the exercise of sovereignty over Macao on December 20.

Her daughter will fly to Macao from Portugal and her son hates to leave Macao. Maria and her children choose to celebrate the most important western holiday in Macao.

"It is both special and normal," said Espadinha, director of the Institute of Portuguese Studies of the University of Macao,for whom December 25 will be the first post-handover Christmas.

Espadinha said she would go to church on Christmas Eve and then prepare Christmas dinner for the family. She would also invite some colleagues to join in the celebrations.

"It is very harmonious and beautiful for people to sing in chorus in Chinese and Portuguese or English," she said. "I like to spend Christmas at home, and I feel Macao is my home now."

"When the (Portuguese) flag goes down, and you know it is down for ever, I'm sure I'll feel something," she said.

She said Macao's return to China is an established fact, which all people have acknowledged. "You choose either to stay or leave, " she said. "I've chosen to stay."

Espadinha believed that there will be some changes after Macao's return. For an educational institution such as the university where she works, she said, teaching and learning has to face constant changes. One change being planned by her Institute is to offer a new course of comparative Sino-Portuguese studies to "help people know more about the other".

"I think Macao is a very good place for this," she said, " because it is here that two cultures meet."

In the eyes of professor Donald W. Cruickshank from the United States, the University of Macao is rather small with some 3,000 students.

"This is a local university with an international focus," said Cruickshank, associate dean of the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities of the university. "The university is a unique educational institution in Asia since it mixes Chinese culture with Western culture."

"It is very important for the university to attract students, scholars and speakers from many cultures," he said. "That also makes an important component in the bridge between China and Europe."

Both professors believe that academic freedom in Macao will not be affected in the future.

Agreed historian William Bruce Guthrie, also a faculty member of the university: "I cannot imagine such freedom ever affected at all. This is an international university."

Guthrie said that academic freedom and freedom of speech are a basic condition that makes a university competitive internationally.

"Macao is a much more important place historically than people in the east and west know," said Guthrie, adding that Macao has been playing the role of a bridge linking the east and west. Modern education was introduced to China right from Macao, he said.

Macao is home to the first Western-style college in Asia. The University of St. Paul established here 400 years ago offered courses such as theology, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Clergymen from the west who received education here played an important role in the fusion of Chinese and Western cultures.

The birth of East Asia University in 1981 ended Macao's history without an institution of higher education.

The university was renamed University of Macao in 1991 with students from Macao, Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland, Southeast Asia and Africa. (Xinhua)