From Street Stall to Institution
Macau's souvenir trade is a history of family striving. Leung Chan Kwong梁燦光 · Leung Chan KwongFounder of Koi Kei Bakery. He started selling peanut and ginger candy from a street cart, opened his first shop in 1997, and rode the post-handover mainland tourism boom to build Koi Kei into Macau’s leading souvenir brand, with roughly 70% market share.Read profile → started out hawking peanut and ginger candy on the street and built Koi Kei into a market leader; Wong Kit San黃結新 · Wong Kit SanFounder of Choi Heong Yuen Bakery. He opened the shop at No. 20 Rua do Tercena, Macau in 1935, built around the almond cake; his nephew Wong Wing Cheong later took over and refined the recipe, and in the 1980s the firm introduced Japanese automatic packaging machines that reshaped how Macau souvenirs were sold and presented.Read profile → founded Choi Heong Yuen on Rua do Tarrafeiro in 1935 and later pioneered Japanese auto-packaging machines, reshaping how Macau markets its souvenirs; Kou Fong高晃 · Kou FongFounder of Fong Kei Bakery, named after him. Its predecessor was a teahouse already operating on Rua do Cunha in Taipa by 1902 (Guangxu 28); when the tea trade declined the family closed the teahouse and focused on hand-made traditional pastries. The fourth generation, Kou Chi Kei, took over in 2018, and the shop has been Michelin-recommended.Read profile →'s Kou Kei turned from a 1902 teahouse into a bakery devoted to hand-made traditional methods, now in its fourth generation; and Wong Wun Chi黃煥枝 · Wong Wun ChiFounder of Wong Chi Kei. A Dongguan native, he went to Guangzhou in the 1940s to learn bamboo-pole noodle-making from fellow townsman Wong King Tong; in 1946 he founded the business with his wife Lai Yuet Man in Shilong, Dongguan, and in 1959 moved the shop to No. 51 Rua da Felicidade in Macau, where his silver-thread noodles and shrimp-roe soup made the name famous across the territory through three generations.Read profile → carried the craft of bamboo-pole noodle-making from Dongguan to bring Wong Chi Kei's silken noodles and shrimp-roe soup to Macau's Rua da Felicidade.
Flavour as Memory
This series records not just brands but the human decisions behind them: an insistence on a recipe, the adoption of a machine, the choice of a shopfront — and how those choices kept a flavour alive for decades, becoming a shared memory for locals and visitors alike.
