Newsgroup: it.scienza.ambiente
Titolo: Re: ***** See my Cam *****

and having little, if any, prospect of being
    again admitted into decent and respectable circles of life,
    deprived also of their own self-respect as well as the regards
    of their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of
    conscience, they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek
    oblivion in excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese
    prostitutes of Hong Kong are an entirely different set of
    people.... Very few of them can be called fallen women; scarcely
    any of them are the victims of seduction, according to the English
    sense of the term, refined or unrefined. The great majority of
    them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women
    in Canton or Macao, have been brought up for the profession, and
    trained in various accomplishments suited to brothel life.... They
    frequently know neither father nor mother, except what they call
    a 'pocket-mother,' that is, the woman who bought them from
    others.... They feel of course that they are the bought property
    of their pocket-mother or keeper, but they know also that this is
    the feeling of almost every other woman in China, liable as each
    is to be sold, by her own parents or relatives, to be the wife or
    concubine of a man she never sets eyes on before the wedding day,
    or liable, as the case may be, to be pledged or sold, by her
    parents or relatives, to serve as a domestic slave in a strange
    family.... They have the chance, if they are pretty and
    accomplished, of being wooed ... and they may look forward with
    tolerable certainty to being made the second, or third, or fourth,
    or at any rate the favorite wife of some wealthy gentleman. If
    not possessed of special attractions or 

and seeing
    the girls sitting at all hours of the day and into the night
    conspicuously in the balconies over the shops of drapers, grocers,
    tailors, silk-merchants, shoe-dealers, &c., &c., and often hearing
    them calling to each other from house to house, and to the men in
    the public streets below. Mrs. Andrew, when in the street, March
    2nd, saw a group of these slave-women calling down to three
    policemen, who were looking up and laughing at them. These are
    daily sights."
The unblushing parade of forms of vice, which have been manufactured
in the Orient especially to meet the demands of renegade members of
Christian civilization, can be seen in a peculiarly painful and brazen
form in the city of Hong Kong.
While we were at Hong Kong, there occured a great celebration in honor
of the repair and rededication of an important Buddhist temple.
There was a grand procession, and many thousands of Chinese from the
mainland came over to witness the celebration. The parade formed in
the early morning and went at once to the residence of the Governor to
do him honor, after which it marched through the principal streets of
the city. It was a curious, interesting, and withal a painful sight,
in some regards not unlike industrial parades in our own country. At
night we saw something totally unique and difficult to describe to
those who have not witnessed the same in China. Men bore aloft great
dragons and fishes innumerable, of all sizes and shapes, (but very
true to life), given a natural color and lighted up within, like
Chinese lanterns. These were held aloft on the ends of long poles, and
as the men who carried them were invisible, because of the darkness,
and trod noiselessly because of bare,

of Chinese who came to this port last year, either
    as genuine immigrants or for transshipment to other ports, was
    122,029, which is actually more than the entire Chinese population
    of the town. In connection with the immigration of this multitude
    of men and women, speaking many dialects of a language which is
    wholly unknown to the officials of the British Government in the
    Straits, with the exception of perhaps half a dozen persons, it
    cannot be wondered at that many abuses arise, and the suspicion
    has gained ground and is frequently given expression to, in the
    public press and elsewhere, that many of the immigrants do not
    come to Singapore of their free will. Moreover, it cannot be
    denied that the circumstances under which the Chinese come to
    Singapore and are forwarded to their destination lend colour to
    this suspicion, so that it may fairly be inquired whether the
    efforts made by the Government of the Straits Settlements to
    control the Chinese coolie traffic and to prevent a secret form
    of slavery have been attended with any success, or are at all
    adequate to the requirements of the case.
    The Annual Report for the year 1892 on the Chinese Protectorate in
    the Straits Settlements which is the department charged with the
    control of immigration, was published on the 5th of May, 1893, and
    states that of the 122,029 Chinese deck passengers who arrived in
    Singapore from China during the year, 111,164 were males, 6,867
    women and 3,998 children. The circumstances under which the men
    and the women are brought to Singapore are in many respects the
    same, but inasmuch as a large number of the women and