In numerous cases the so-called temples were nothing more than a sanctimonious swindle. Privately promoted as a business speculation, they solicited funds from the public with fraudulent claims of divine or political influence. Abuses of this sort became so flagrant that the colony government, after long delay, enacted the Chinese Temples Ordinance in 1928, which provided for registration of the temples and an accounting of their funds to the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs. Certain long-established temples were exempt from various provisions of the Ordinance, but the founding of temples as a private business venture was forbidden. Surplus funds of the existing temples—the amount remaining after all maintenance and operating costs had been met—were transferred to a general Chinese charities fund.
The Chinese Mui Tsai custom, that of selling young girls as servants, troubled British and Chinese relations in Hong Kong for half a century. From ancient times, Chinese families had purchased little girls from impoverished parents and put them to work as household drudges. The colony officials raised their first strong objections to the practice in 1878, condemning it as thinly disguised slavery. Speaking of slavery, the Chinese retorted, what about the licensed brothels where 80 percent of the inmates had been sold into prostitution?
A committee appointed by Governor John Pope Hennessy (1877-1882) found that hundreds of the Mui Tsai, when they had outgrown their household enslavement, were being resold as prostitutes for shipment to Singapore, California and Australia. A species of Caucasian scum who lived in the colony were active partners in the trade. Governor Hennessy and Chief Justice John Smale forwarded the committee’s reports to the British House of Lords with urgent recommendations for tight corrective laws. The Lords, suddenly revealing an unsuspected concern for the integrity of Chinese customs, killed most of the proposed reforms.
Establishment of the Po Leung Kuk, or Society for the Protection of Virtue, helped to limit the kidnaping of women and girls, but the institution of Mui Tsai was to persist well into the twentieth century. The English eventually outlawed licensed brothels after decades of criticism from many countries.
Covert prostitution continues at a brisk pace in Hong Kong today, with sailors favoring the Wanchai district and the bars of the Tsim Sha Tsui section of Kowloon. The Chinese are more inclined to patronize the western areas of Hong Kong Island. The dance hall and cabaret girls of Wanchai, whose ranks include some spectacularly beautiful women, charge their eager patrons about four dollars an hour for the privilege of dancing with them, sharing a plate of melon seeds and drinking tea. The cabarets are murky dens, furnished in Chinese warehouse modern, with a third-rate jazz band dragging the tempo along in the semidarkness. There is no guarantee of intimacies—emphatically not on the premises—and the prospective suitor is obliged to continue shelling out his money for repeated visits until the girl decides whether he has the kind of bankroll she could care for. If he is too repulsive to her, not even that will do.
A cabaret girl can earn $300 a month or more, or about five times as much as a schoolteacher earns. Few of these girls speak English, but this ability has never been regarded as a prerequisite. Apart from the moral considerations of the job, its competitive aspects are becoming more intense all the time. Bar girls, who have little respect for the traditional preliminaries, may bestow their favors on five customers while the cabaret charmers are fencing with one.
The singsong girls, formerly held in great esteem as entertainers and prostitutes, have almost disappeared from the colony. Many of them were Mui Tsai who had been trained to sing seemingly interminable Cantonese songs in a falsetto voice for their tea-shop patrons, accompanying themselves on a kind of horizontal stringed instrument which they tapped with padded hammers. In the later evening, they moved about from one businessmen’s club to another in the West Point section of the island. Not all were prostitutes, and there is still at least one tea shop along Queen’s Road Central where entertainment is confined to music. Westerners who hear their music often find themselves thinking of older days.
Considering the fact that Hong Kong is a world seaport, the rate of venereal infection is surprisingly low. To a greater extent than in most Western cities, poverty is a basic cause of prostitution, but here too sheer laziness, greed and stupidity play their part in the provision of recruits. As usual, the greatest profits from the trade go to its protectors—Triad gangsters and corrupt policemen.
The entire subject of the status and treatment of women has provided a continual source of animosity and disagreement throughout the colony’s history. The rich Chinese Taipans, with their numerous wives and mistresses lodged in separate establishments, have remained the envy of many a Western man who could not emulate them without violating the laws of the colony and placing himself beyond the pale of polite Western society.