The dead body of a Chinese woman was found last Tuesday morning lying across the sidewalk in a very uncomfortable position. The cause of her death could not be accurately ascertained, but as the top of her head was caved in, it is thought by some physicians that she died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type. In the summer of , when Chinese women remained relatively scarce in California, writer Ambrose Bierce penned this acerbic dispatch for the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser.
Killing two birds with one stone, the consummate cynic offender was calling out an epidemic of callousness regarding the often sad fate of Chinese women out West. From the latter half of the 19th century through the early 20th century thousands of Chinese men left their homeland to seek their fortune amid the California Gold Rush and in its aftermath.
As their stay in the United States was to be temporary, they left wives and family at home. That dearth of female companionship created a natural market for prostitution, and Chinese girls soon began to flood into San Francisco. Sworn brotherhoods of immigrants who offered protection and opportunity to new arrivals, the tongs were also notorious criminal enterprises.
To furnish the burgeoning sex trade, its members kidnapped and bought Chinese girls. Business proved highly lucrative, and with their profits the tongs were able to extend their power, dominate immigrant neighborhoods and further expand the sex trade and other criminal activities.
Although some girls were kidnapped in China by bandits during such political upheavals as the mid-century Opium Wars and the —64 Taiping Rebellion , other girls were sold into bondage by their own families. As daughters in Chinese households could neither furnish the hard manual labor required to support the family nor carry on the ancestral name, they were considered inferior to sons.
