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goes about barefoot all the year through, dons shoes and stockings, the slave has to wear wooden clogs. Considering the deep hold which this system has on the Chinese people, it is not to be wondered at.
This form of slavery is comparatively rare in the Canton Province where it occurs only in connection with very wealthy families, but is said to obtain to some extent among the so-called Tán-Ká or boat population of Canton, many of these families being in the relation of hereditary slaves to wealthy clans under whose protection they live and to whom they pay a portion of their earnings. The slave, however, has nothing in his outward appearance or condition to distinguish him from a free person. Although I spent the greater portion of fifteen years in some inland districts of the Canton Province, I have never, to my knowledge, seen such an hereditary slave. I am told that generally the nearest acquaintances know a slave to be such and that the only outward distinction of an hereditary slave is the rule made by custom that on New Year's day, when even the poorest free man ...
I am sure there is not one such hereditary slave in Hongkong. But suppose one came here and was told that he is entirely free on British soil, it would make no difference to him whatever. For he looks upon his master as a refuge to fall back upon in case of sickness, and anyhow he treats his relation to his master as a family relation and views his adherence to it as a matter of honour. Besides, any such slave has always a chance of purchasing his freedom and if once affranchised, his descendants in the third generation can compete for official honours.
This system of slavery, whilst comparatively rare in the Canton Province, is more frequently practised in the Fohkien Province where, by custom, the third generation of an hereditary slave regains freedom. But the principal seat of this slavery is in the agrarian districts of Shantung and most especially in the Hwai-chau, Ning-kwoh and Chi-chou Prefectures of the Ngan-hui Province. It is also said to exist to a large extent among the fishermen of the Cheh-kiang Province. But in all these cases, the slave is a member of the family to which he belongs, which is answerable for his life to the State, and the law permits all such slaves to redeem themselves by money payment, when the contract which restores liberty to the slave is to be stamped and recorded in Court.
Under these circumstances, I have no hesitation in saying that it seems to me impossible to identify this curious mixture of contract service, family dependence and slavery, which characterizes the Chinese analogue of slavery, with that slavery which the history of European society evolved and to which our law books, Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council refer. To deal justly with the slavery of China, we ought to invent a new name for it.
Domestic servitude occupies an entirely different position. Whilst the hereditary slave and his immediate descendants are excluded from all competition for official honours, domestic servitude does not imply such disability, although the law treats the domestic servant during the term of his engagement as under the entire control - life, of course, excluded - of his master, who is answerable for his misdemeanours and involved in his crime.
In all arrangements, contracts or deeds regarding domestic servitude, there are invariably the elements of a monetary transaction, just as in the case of deeds of adoption. The sale, and especially the pledging of persons, whether adults or children, for purposes of domestic servitude is the ruling custom all over China. The law, although sanctioning the sale of children for purposes of adoption within each clan, and even from without, is here in advance of public opinion, as it expressly allows, by an edict of Kien Lung (A.D. 1788), the sale of children only to extremely poor people in times of famine, but forbids, even in that case, re-sale of a child once bought.
Practically, however, the indiscriminate sale of children for purposes of domestic servitude is not interfered with by the law at any time. On the contrary, the advance of law over custom, here indicated, is but slight, when we consider that the law sanctions the custom of temporarily pledging one's wife, concubine or daughters to another family for purposes of domestic servitude. In the latest edition of the Penal Code, I find, appended to the Section headed "pledging wives or daughters," the following note: "This prohibition refers only to pledging, in return for money received, one's wife or concubine to another man whose wife or concubine she is to be (till redeemed), but the practice, so extremely common at the present day, of poor people pledging, for money received, their wives or daughters to others for purposes of domestic servitude is not included under this prohibition."
A male domestic either himself makes the contract with his employer, which binds him to the latter for a number of years, or the domestic may have been handed over by his parents to the master, who pays the parents, may be, a sum, in advance, so to say, of the wages to be earned. The same is the case with grown-up or elderly female domestics. But the largest majority of all female domestics in China are young girls of more or less tender age, most of whom enter upon their domestic servitude when four or five years old.
The reason for this immense demand for young female domestics lies in the system of polygamy which obtains all over the empire and which has a religious basis. A son being required to continue the family sacrifices, anyone whose first wife proves childless will consider it his religious duty either to adopt a son or to take a second or third or fourth wife until he procures a son. To die without a son is considered a heinous sin against one's ancestors. But in a family consisting of several wives, there is no room for the sort of servant girl to which Western nations are accustomed.
As eunuchs are forbidden to all families below the rank of a prince, the custom of purchasing young girls for the performance of the lighter domestic duties became the general practice of all well-to-do families since time immemorial. Such girls may either be pledged by their parents for a certain time or sold for good. When only pledged, the case is generally this: a family being in urgent distress and requiring immediately a certain sum of money, takes one of their female children, say five years old, who has been sufficiently impressed with the misery at home, to a wealthy family...
...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 betrothed or, as we call it, married. But the child may be sold out and out. In that case, invariably a sum of money is paid and a deed is drawn up called, by a common legal fiction, "a deed of gift." 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 forever as any married woman can be, and no touch of servitude clings to her descendants.
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 deplorably widespread 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 among 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.
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 disreputable 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 maintained 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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