ENCLOSURE NO.1.
Extract from "Hong Kong Sunday Herald" dated
19th June, 1938.
31
STARTLING REVELATIONS OF SLAVE MARKETS IN COLONY: GIRLS FOR SALE
(By A Special Correspondent)
It sounds fantastic, but one night last week I at- tended a slave market held in a flat on the mainland.
Four Chinese girls, two of ages between 14 to 16 years, one stated to be 19 years old and one 21 years of age, were sold for sums ranging from $150 to $250 each.
I learned afterwards that the three youngest girls were destin- ed for houses of ill-fame near the former Central Market off Queens Road Central, and that the eldest girl was bought to be a concubine for a local Chinese resident.
This was only one of the several similar human markets which are being held in the Colony.
Young Chinese women and girls are being brought into the Colony from North China, Shanghai, Foochow, Amoy, Swatow and Can- ton by organised slave racketeers and sold here to brothel-keepers and to men who desire additional wives.
MOTOR CAR RENDEZVOUS
Information of a forthcoming sale is passed around to those in- terested by Chinese women, who earn commission from the rac- keteers, but the date and where- abouts of the sale is not revealed. Prospective customers are pick- ed up in a motor-car at an ap- pointed time and taken to a house || "somewhere" on the mainland where the girls are assembled for disposal.
The girls are usually disposed of in batches of three to five at different places.
There is no bidding or bargain- ing.
Girls of ages between 16 and 21 years, are priced higher than those below 16 and above 21, and, I was
told, fetch at times $300 each.
BUYERS' PRIVILEGE
Customers enjoy the privilege of having the girls physically and medically examined before mak- ing his or her purchase. They, brothel- however, mostly are, keepers, who purchase the unfor- tunate human beings for the sole purpose of making money through harlotry.
Markets offering young women and girls for sale, I was told, have been existent in the Colony since last December.
Some of them are girls who have lost their relatives and homes as a result of the war, and many are unemployed fac- tory hands who lost their jobs after the Japanese occupied the towns in which they worked. Fearful of being detained in in- women, stitutions for homeless these girls allow themselves to be by racketeers' fed and clothed agents after being picked up and are obliged to follow their com- mands afterwards, even to the ex- tent of ending up in a brothel.
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