CAUGHT BY FINGER PRINT.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 970, 10 November 1910, Page 4

CAUGHT BY FINGER PRINT.

A CHINESE TEICK THAT FAILED. "For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, the heathen Chinee is peculiar," so we are told, but he cannot beat the finger-print system of identification. In the ingenious days of not so very long ago it was quite a common practice for a Chinaman, who had made his little pile in.New Zealand, to leave for the Flowery Land and settle down once and for all near the tombs of bis ancestors. In some cases the final act was to dispose of his papers to HongKohg or Canton to one of his countrymen prepared to try his luck in the Dominion. The trick of using false papers is not so easily worked nowadays, as before leaving New Zealand a Chinaman who takes out papers as an earnest of his intention to return leaves on record his finger-print alongside his signature, so that when the "signature" comes along again the presenter is asked for his fingerprint as well. A case of a Chinaman trying to slip through on another mans papers happened hero last week on the arrival of the Manuka from Sydney. The papers were all in order, but the fingerprint of the newly-arrived failed \o correspond with the impress alongside the signature in the Customs records, lhe result was that the man had to be sent back to Sydney, and the authorities there will probably insist on the shipping company takinjj him back to whence he came.