Michael H Deckers wrote:
Decree No 204 of 1904 for Macau says that the switch is done to keep Macau time equal to the time in "Cantão" (Guangdong).
Ah, OK, thanks, I didn't see that.
The decree does give the date ("30 do corriente") for the switch and it is quite clear about the time of day of the switch: it states that the new offset applies since Oct 30, and for the full day of Oct 30. As the offset is increased, this implies that the switch happened at the instant when UT was 1904-10-29T16:00.
That would partly depend on whether the "full day" is the old or the new one. Currently tzdb lists for the Macau transition just "1904 Oct 30" which has the effect of Macau switching at the start of the old day, i.e., at 16:25:50 UT. (Like you I am using modern UT here, not the pre-1925 astronomical GMT.) If the intent was for Macau to switch at the start of the new day, it should indeed switch at 16:00 UT. However, Hong Kong switched at 17:00 UT so if the intent was for Macau to keep in lock-step with Hong Kong, the Macau transition should be at 17:00 UT. If we're lucky, there is documentation (most likely in Portuguese) containing details like what we saw for Hong Kong: a proclamation stating the time of change, or even records from the Portuguese Navy logging the change (and even logging error estimates, wow!). If we're not lucky we'll have to guess.