The Venetian Macao

You are about to enter what might be the most extraordinary building in all of Asia. The Venetian Macao is not just a hotel or a casino. It is a city within a city, a staggering monument to ambition that somehow manages to recreate the canals and palaces of Venice inside a thirty-nine-storey megaresort on a strip of reclaimed land between two islands. When The Venetian Macao opened in August 2007, it immediately claimed a string of superlatives. It is the world's largest casino, with over five hundred and fifty thousand square feet of gaming floor. It is Asia's largest single-structure hotel, with three thousand suites. And the shopping mall alone, the Grand Canal Shoppes, stretches over a million square feet and features three actual indoor canals complete with gondolas and singing gondoliers paddling beneath a painted sky that always looks like a perfect Italian afternoon. The building sits on the Cotai Strip, a stretch of reclaimed land that filled in the sea between the islands of Taipa and Coloane. Before 2007, this was essentially empty marshland. Today it is one of the richest strips of real estate on earth, often compared to the Las Vegas Strip but generating even...