The chapel's origins are commercial before they are spiritual. Traders of the British East India Company conducted business with China from the late 18th century until 1834, and their charter required that company employees have access to religious services and company-appointed chaplains. Before 1821, the Protestant congregation likely worshiped in a room at the East India Company offices. The burial ground — now the Old Protestant Cemetery nearby — was acquired in 1821, prompted partly by the death of Mary Morrison, wife of the missionary and translator Robert Morrison, who worked for the Company. The Portuguese had previously permitted only Catholic burials in the colony. The purchase of land for Protestant burials was itself a negotiation — an acknowledgment that a Protestant minority existed and needed accommodation, if not quite full visibility.

When the East India Company lost its trading monopoly in 1834, responsibility for the chapel passed to the British government. By 1870, a Deed of Transfer handed stewardship to trustees representing Protestant communities of at least two nations — a governance structure designed for permanence. By 1921, the building required complete reconstruction, retaining only the original foundation. The two conditions imposed — no visibility from the street, no bell — amount to a kind of licensed invisibility. Portugal was accommodating a religious minority it had not invited and would not publicize. The current chapel structure has not changed since 1922. Walk through the gate in the wall on Luís de Camões Square and you enter a building the street does not know is there.

In 1941, Japanese forces occupied Hong Kong and large portions of China. Refugees flooded into neutral Macau, swelling the congregation at the chapel. Anglican priests could not travel to Macau. Florence Li Tim-Oi, a deaconess in charge of the chapel, was the only qualified person present. Bishop Ronald Hall and his assistant authorized her to administer the sacraments — a significant step, but not yet ordination. On 25 January 1944, Bishop Hall ordained Florence Li Tim-Oi as a priest of the Anglican Church. She became the first woman ordained as a priest in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The ordination took place not in a cathedral, not in England, but in this hidden chapel in Macau, in wartime, because circumstances demanded it and one bishop decided the demand was legitimate.

Florence Li Tim-Oi's 1944 ordination preceded the Anglican Communion's formal acceptance of women's ordination by decades. The Church of England did not ordain women as priests until 1994 — fifty years after the event in Macau. Her ordination was controversial at the time; she voluntarily surrendered her license after the war to reduce tension within the Church, though she was never formally defrocked. She was eventually fully restored and recognized, and lived until 1992, long enough to see women's ordination become policy in multiple Anglican provinces. The chapel where it happened remains in active use, serving worshipers of various denominational backgrounds through the Missionary Area of Macau. It has no bell. It does not announce itself. It changed the world anyway.