The spread of casinos in Asia has been phenomenal in the last two decades. While there are a handful of casinos that have been operating since the 70s, 80s and 90s – primarily in Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Macau – the bulk of the new casinos appeared towards the end of the 20th century. These new casinos emerged in both the metropolitan centers as well as the borderlands. Of these metropolitan centers, Macau and Singapore are now the most profitable sites of the casino industry, while the border regions of Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar are scattered with “instant” casinos (as well as their premature carcasses), their locations demarcating the new zones of economic development and extraterritorial exception.
My research assistant and I collected whatever we could from the World Casino Directory, Google Earth, the official websites of individual casinos as well as academic papers. While the major casinos in the metropolitan centers are easy to locate and collect information on, those in the borderlands are much more elusive. We will find a casino reported in the news, but might never know if it had already shut down or changed to another use or if it is nothing more than a gambling den – such is the paucity and unreliability of information. We had the benefit of inputs from other scholars who have done fieldwork in the border regions of Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, which helped us corroborate some numbers. Nevertheless, it is likely that what we show in the borderlands of Southeast Asia is indicative rather than precise.
The casino developments indicated in the maps usually have a hotel and hospitality component. Some of the larger ones, such as those in Singapore and Macau, have museums, convention centers, theaters and shopping areas. We did not include small setups like slot or pachinko parlours and private gambling clubs. Neither did we include other forms of large scale commercialized gambling such as sports lottery or horse racing. The size of the casinos ranges from 51,000sqm (Venetian Macau) to 250 sqm (Aristo International Hotel, Vietnam).
Kah-Wee Lee and Adithi Moogoor, 2015
