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Prostitution and the Politics of Venereal Disease: Singapore, 1870–98

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Extract

Prostitution in Singapore was linked to economic factors in rural China and Japan. Congenital poverty, weak family economies, and rising economic expectations were all part of a set of prevailing conditions that created a vast source of supply of Chinese and Japanese women and young girls for international traffic. Life in both countries was exceptionally difficult in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although China had considerable wealth, most lived a hand to mouth existence in the over-populated rural areas. Poverty in the villages and outlying districts of southeastern China, where many agrarian families lived on the edge of starvation, not only drove women and girls out of the countryside into the ports but acted as a lever on parents already bowed under financial strain. Privation was a handicap which struck hardest at the daughters of peasants and rural labourers. Unable to feed the many mouths they were responsible for, and suffering from chronic economic insecurity, parents sold their daughters to would be benefactors, totally unaware of the future fate in store for so many of them who were taken to Singapore. Poverty and desperate hungry Chinese families were root causes of brothel prostitution in Singapore at the end of the nineteenth century.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1990

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References

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2 Ah Ku is a general term of address in Cantonese for woman or lady irrespective of age. Ah ku was the polite way to address a prostitute. Loh Kui or “whore” was the opposite denigrating term in Cantonese. Karayuki-san was the word used traditionally by the Japanese of Amakusa and Shimabara, Kyushu Island, to describe rural women who emigrated to Southeast Asia and the Pacific in search of a livelihood. The ideographs comprising karayuki-san literally mean “going to China”, as Kyushu, the place where most of the women were from, was the part of Japan closest to China. Karayuki-san in common parlance nowadays has become a popular term for describing women from the poorest sectors of society during the Meiji period who lived abroad specifically as prostitutes. See Warren, James Francis, “Placing Women in Southeast Asian History: The Case of Oichi and the Study of Prostitution in Singapore Society”, in At the Edge of Southeast Asian History (Quezon City: New Day Press, 1987), pp. 148–64Google Scholar; on Chinese migration see Warren, James Francis, Rickshaw Coolie: A People's History of Singapore (1880–1940) (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 1419, 161–65, 249Google Scholar; Ee, Joyce, “Chinese Migration of Singapore, 1896–1941”, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2 (1961): 37Google Scholar; Hirata, Lucie Cheng, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth Century America”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 1 (1979): 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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32 N.274, Sir F. Weld to the Earl of Derby, August 27, 1882, CO 273/121.

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47 N.552, Sir C. Smith to the Colonial Secretary, December 30, 1887, CO 275/34.

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63 N.569, Sir C. Smith to the Earl of Knutsford, December 20, 1889, CO 273/162.

66 Straits Settlement Association to the Colonial Office, November 8, 1897, CO 882/6.

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81 Straits Settlement Association to the Colonial Office, November 8, 1897, CO 882/6.

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83 N.552, Sir C. Smith to the Earl of Knutsford, December 9, 1889, CO 273/162.

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86 N.113, Sir C.B.H. Mitchell to the Marquess of Ripon, April 8, 1895, CO 882/6; N.227, Testimony of Dr Mugliston in Sir J.H. Swettenham to Mr Chamberlain, August 5, 1878, CO 882/6.

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89 Straits Settlement Association to the Colonial Office, November 8, 1897, CO 273/232.

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