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THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 4TH FEBRUARY 1880.
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where the child becomes a member of the family and has perhaps to look after a baby. The father receives a small loan on the security of this child, and when that loan is repaid with interest. the child returns to her father's family to remain there till in the ordinary course she is sold as a be- trothed wife or, as we call it, married. But the child may be sold out and out. In that case invariably a deed is drawn up called by a common legal fiction "a deed of gift. A sum of money is paid and the child becomes the domestic servant of the family and is as entirely under the patria potestas of the head of that family, as if she were a slave, with the exception that an all powerful custom requires the master to find a husband for his servant girl when she is of age, and the moment she is married she is as free for ever as any married woman can be and no touch of servitude clings to her descendants. Considering the deep hold which this system has on the Chinese people, it is not to be wondered at that Chinese can scarcely comprehend how an English Judge could come to designate this species of domestic servitude by the name slavery. On the contrary, intelligent Chinese look upon this system as the necessary and indispensable complement of polygamy, as an excellent counter remedy for the de- plorably wide spread system of infanticide, and as the natural consequence of the chronic occurrence of famines, inundations and rebellions in an overpopulated country. But the abuses to which this system of buying and selling female children is liable in the hands of unscrupulous parents and buyers, and the support it lends to public prostitution are too patent facts to require pointing out.
This system of domestic servitude is very common in Hongkong among well-to-do Cantonese, less common among the Fohkien people and comparatively rare among the Hakkas. The reason is that early betrothals and early marriages are common ainong both the Fohkienese and especially among the Hakkas who have moreover the custom of sending the betrothed, as soon as she is able to walk, say when three or four years old, to the family of her future husband, where she remains till her marriage and has exactly the same position and performs the same duties which the purchased servant girl is required for in a Cantonese family. I must mention, however, by way of explanation, that polygamy is also comparatively rare among the Hakkas.
To foreigners of course it seems very unnatural that children should be sold into domestic servitude. But the Chinaman sees nothing unnatural in it because almost every social arrangement in China, betrothal, marriage, concubinage, adoption, servitude, is professedly based on a money bargain. The roots of this whole system of slavery and servitude are inseverably interlaced not only with the general social organism but with the national character of the Chinese. The British soldier who takes his shilling may be said to have sold himself into slavery. The British sailor, after signing the articles, may virtually be a slave for a period. But these forms of servitude, created by an Act of Parliament, can be swept away entirely by another Act of Parliament. They are not bound up with the social organism and have no root in the national character. But the slavery and domestic servitude of China are institutions which nothing short of the general dissolution of the whole social system of patriarchalism can possibly remove, for they are ingrained in the very blood and brain of China.
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To understand the social bearings of domestic servitude as it obtains in Hongkong, it must be observed that, although the Chinese residents of Hongkong are under British rule and live in close proximity to English social life, there has always been an impassable gulf between respectable English and Chinese society in Hongkong. The two forms of social life have exercised a certain influence upon each other, but the result now visible is, that while Chinese social life has remained exactly what it is on the mainland of China, the social life of many foreigners in Hongkong has comparatively degenerated and not only accommodated itself in certain respects to habits peculiar to the system of patriarchalism, but caused a certain disrespectable but small class of Chinese to enter into a social alliance with foreigners which, while detaching them from the restraining influence of the custom and public opinion of Chinese society, left, them uninfluenced by the moral powers of foreign civilization.
This exceptional class of Chinese residents here in Hongkong consists principally of the women known, in Hongkong, by the popular nickname "hám-shui-múi (lit. salt water girls), applied to these members of the so-called Tán-ká or boat population, the Pariahs of Cantonese society. These Tán- ká people of the Canton river are the descendants of a tribe of aborigines pushed by advancing Chinese civilization to live on boats on the Canton river, being for centuries forbidden by law to live on shore. The Emperor YUNG CHING (A.D. 1730) allowed them to settle in villages in the immediate proximity of the river, but they were left by him and remain to the present day excluded from competition for official honours, whilst custom forbids them to intermarry with the rest of the people. These Tán-ká people were the secret but trusty allies of foreigners from the time of the East India Company to the present day. They furnished pilots and supplies of provisions to British men-of-war and troop ships when doing so was by the Chinese Government declared treason unsparingly visited with capital punishment. They invaded Hongkong the moment the Colony was opened and have ever since main- tained here a monopoly, so to say, of the supply of Chinese pilots and ships' crews, of the fish trade, the cattle trade, and especially of the trade in women for the supply of foreigners and of brothels patronized by foreigners. Almost every so-called "protected woman," i.e. kept mistress of foreigners here, belongs to this Tán-ká tribe, looked down upon and kept at a distance by all the other Chinese classes. It is among these Tán-ká women and especially under the protection of those "protected Tán-ká women that private prostitution and the sale of girls for purposes of concubinage flourishes, being looked upon by them as their legitimate profession. Consequently almost every "protected woman" keeps a nursery of purchased children or a few servant girls who are being reared with a
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