Coloane Village, like many sections of this outpost established by Portuguese traders in 1557 and handed back to China in 1999, is an intriguing fusion of European and Asian cultures. It follows the contours of the harbor, with the vivid red Tam Kung Temple (a Taoist shrine to the god of the seafarers) at one extreme, shops selling a curious array of dried salted fish at the other, and, somewhere in the middle, Lord Stow's Bakery, home of exceptional egg tarts. But when I look past the fishing pier at the far end of the harbor, I can see the cluster of cranes that marks the Cotai Strip, which has been hailed by its developer, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, as "the biggest tourism project in world history.""Cotai" is a coinage for the three-quarter-mile sliver of reclaimed swampland that connects Coloane to Taipa, the next island over. If there's no traffic, it's a swift five-minute drive from the Macau airport and roughly the same distance from the border from Zhuhai, China. The concept—which supposedly came to Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson in a dream—is simple: "We want to replicate the Vegas strip," Medardo "Mikki" Estrada, the Sands Corporation's director of Cotai design, explains, "but with a more disciplined approach." Estrada's office on Macau's peninsula overlooks the posh 165,000-square-foot gold glass-clad Sands casino that the company opened in 2004 on Avenida da Amizade (Friendship Avenue), a wide boulevard lined with vintage 1960's and 1970's casinos that tourism boosters sometimes refer to as "the new Macau Strip."