CHINESE ABOMINATIONS.
The Chinese dens of Maryborough are i thus sketched by the Standard:—"We entered their hovels, their lottery bank, and; their opium shops, turned squeamish at: the dirt and squalor of the former, and inj their opium-honses were horror-struck with the sight we saw. There, lying full-: length on a bunk in a miserable little! dimly-lighted den, lay a young girl of i; iiandubmcir^ltnost-.b^autiful^ featureSv Her age could scarcely have been more i than 15 or 16 ; her dress \vas decent and respectable; her whole appearance that! of a girl of the middle class*, who had but \ recently taken to the mode of life. Opposite and around her were greasy, illdressed celestials, who as her eyes opened and closed under the influence of the opium, gloated with ill-concealed satisfaction over the victim of their sensuality. In an adjoining room was to be heard the clatter of fan-tan players, and throughout the building the dense fumes of opium floated. 'It was in very sooth an infernal region of vice and squalor. This young girl, we were told, weekly consumed over 7s worth of opium, and the vice is fast killing her body, as it has already killed her soul. Elsewhere, in the camp were other women, victims of the Chinese lust, s»me half-dozen or more mixing amongst, the wretched heathen, and the low Europeans who frequent the camp. The case of this camp is not solitary or peculiar. Scores, aye hundreds, of. women and girl-children are living in this awful stale of iniquity and squaUr throughout the Colony—victims of procuration by means of gold and the seductive drug. We do not care to'raise a howl of indignation against the pagans, who simply follow the lusts of the flesh, and act 'after their lights;' but we do say that it is high, time the Government took in hand the question of Chinese government, in order to remove the bad conditions under which -the Chinese population live. Nothing is easier if the institutions, of the.ChUese themselves are adopted in connection with the simple sanitary provisions."
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Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1969, 27 April 1875, Page 3
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343CHINESE ABOMINATIONS. Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1969, 27 April 1875, Page 3
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