Sleeping over at Cristiano Ronaldo's

Like most people in our region, I knew little about Portugal and tend to associate it with egg tarts, port wines, Malacca and Macau.

A quick check revealed that the small country established the first global empire stretching from Brazil in the west to India in the east and as far as Timor in the south and Macau in the north. This southern European country on the Iberian peninsula administered 22 jurisdictions as early as the 15th century, much earlier than England, France, Holland and Spain.