"All slaves who are guilty of designedly striking their masters shall, without making any distinction between principals and accessories, be beheaded.
"If accidentally they kill their master, they shall suffer death by being strangled."
In China, and wherever Chinese live, slave girls and women are subject to two forms of slavery, domestic slavery and brothel slavery. Every respectable Chinese family has one or two house slaves. The brothel slave is a literal slave, bought and sold like a sheep or cow. Traffic in Chinese girls for wicked uses extended to Hong Kong as soon as the island became prosperous and populous after being ceded to Great Britain in 1841. From Hong Kong the horrid trade reached to California, and to Singapore and other places.
Commissioners appointed by the governor of Hong Kong made a report in 1880, from which the following accounts are taken:
"Young girls, virgins of thirteen or fourteen years of age, are brought from Canton or elsewhere and deflowered according to bargain, and as a regular business for large sums of money, which go to their owners. The regular earnings of the girls go to the same quarters, and the unfortunate creatures obviously form subjects of speculation to regular traders in this kind of business, who reside beyond our jurisdiction. Mr. Lister speaks of the brothel-keepers as a horrible race of cruel women, cruel to the last degree, who use an ingenious form of torture, which they call prevention of sleep, which he describes in detail."
"Two girls were brought before the registrar general, both of whom pleaded for protection against their owner, stating that she intended to sell them to go to California. One of these had been bought by this woman for eighty dollars; the girl saw the price paid for her. The other said her mother was very poor and sold her for twenty dollars. The inspector said: 'There has been at times a number of women residing in the house, and I do not know what has become of them. I believe that they have been sent to California by the defendant.'"
The poor slave girls, as shown by court proceedings at Hong Kong, had the same terror of being "sold into California" that the negro slaves in this country had of being "sold down the river." One of the girls testified that she had seen several women sent away to California. She had been present when bargains were made, the price varying. In Hong Kong the price was from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars; they would bring in California from two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty dollars.
Owing to the restriction of Chinese immigration, and the penal laws against importing women for evil uses, the value of a slave girl on the Pacific Coast has greatly increased; it is now $3,000.
The system of Chinese brothel slavery differs from the white slave trade, in that the Chinese brothel slaves are not weak or wicked women who have fallen into the clutches of traffickers, as so many of our European and American white slaves unquestionably are, but are good girls who have been sold by their actual owners into a life of shame for money, sometimes sold by their own parents. Some are not sold outright, but are mortgaged to pay off a loan. So much is credited each month until the debt is canceled—unless fresh debts, real or fictitious, keep the victim indefinitely, as with the white slaves. On the marked differences between the white slave and the yellow slave, the commissioners previously quoted say: "Prostitutes in Europe are, as a general rule, fallen women, the victims of seduction, or possibly of innate vice. Being the outcasts of society, and having little, if any, prospect of being admitted again 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 in 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 that life and trained in various accomplishments suited to it. They frequently know neither father nor mother, except what they call a pocket-mother, that is, the woman who bought them from others." There are 18,000 such slaves in Hong Kong, if the estimates accepted by the commissioners are correct.
In China the yellow slave has hope of escape from her bondage. If she is pretty and accomplished, some rich man may buy her for his first, second, third or fourth wife. If she is homely some honest working man may take her. Or she may sing or play an instrument and thereby add to her earnings until she can buy her own freedom, if dissipation and disease have not killed her first.