🚀 go-pugleaf

across the top in Chinese characters a statement that inmates
    could not be confined against their will. (The question was
    whether, in our absence, the girls would be allowed to take this
    bag down, open it, and read the sentence of liberty inside.) We
    showed this to the girls, and asked them if they could read the
    Chinese written thereon, and they all, even to the brothel-keeper,
    said they could not. We then asked them what was the _meaning_ of
    the words, and none of them could tell. One girl said, 'We cannot
    read them, but the great man at the Protectorate can read them.'
    We asked them if they had tickets, and they showed us little
    square pieces of paper exactly similar to one which we hold in
    our possession. The tickets were all so blurred that the educated
    Chinese gentleman who accompanied us tried in vain to make out its
    full meaning. It is by means of these things, put in the hands of
    Chinese women who are utterly unable to read a word of Chinese,
    that their liberty is professedly given them."

Now as to the case of Ah Moi, of whom the Inspector spoke as
illustrating the beneficent work of the Protectorate. He had little
idea how much we knew of the case or he would never have brought it
up. There is at Singapore a Refuge for girls, managed by the Chinese
Society, the Po Leung Kuk, organized originally at Hong Kong and
Singapore to put down kidnaping. The Inspector one day, January 4th,
1894, sent a girl of fifteen over to the Refuge with a note to the
Matron, and on the following morning