St. Dominic’s Church: From Timber Chapel to Treasury

St. Dominic’s Church was founded in 1587 by the Dominican Order and is described as its first church in China. The building’s name in Chinese, commonly associated with “Plank Shrine” or “Plank Barrier,” points toward the early structure and the way local speech recorded it. The names that accumulated around the church are part of its urban history.

The church stands on its own square, near Senado Square. Arcaded buildings around the open space lend it a southern European character, but it remains a Macao neighborhood setting, shaped by daily movement between streets, shops and places of worship.

The Treasury of Sacred Art occupies three floors beside the church and holds more than 300 works of Catholic art from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Among them are silver and gilt vessels used for Mass, wooden, plaster and ivory images, old paintings, Bible-story prints and embroidered vestments. One painting of St. Augustine is more than three centuries old; two nineteenth-century church bells are also part of the collection.

Visitors reach the treasury from the church’s side entrance, then climb a wooden stair through a connecting corridor. The route turns the small adjacent building into a quiet continuation of the church, with objects that show how devotional practice relied on metalwork, painting, print and cloth.

Dominicans at St. Dominic’s printed A Abelha da China in 1822, Macao’s first Portuguese-language newspaper and the first in China. An original copy is held in the library of the former Leal Senado building. The church’s history therefore reaches from worship into the city’s early print culture.

The church also houses a treasury of sacred art, with more than 300 works from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Paintings, vessels, prints and vestments preserve another record of Catholic life in Macao.