Introduction

Commercial sex has been an available and important part of Singapore’s economy and society since Sir Stamford Raffles—representative of the British East India Company (e.i.c.)—negotiated Singapore’s acquisition in 1819. Before this, it was a small Malaysian fishing village ruled by the Johor Sultanate and used by the Temmenggong, the sultan’s military leadership, as a personal getaway from politically tumultuous court life. The island retreat would certainly have included a population of slaves to attend to both the domestic and sexual needs of its residents. ¹ Until the late eighteenth century, women were inconspicuous commodities in Southeast Asian slave markets, and native, Arab, and Chinese merchants sold them throughout ancient trading networks. Since at least the fourteenth century, the southern tip of the Malayan Peninsula was a vital artery of trade for merchants in Southeast Asia, which connected the eastern and western hemispheres. Stopping between the silver mines in Latin America and the spice and luxury markets in Asia, Spanish and Portuguese merchants traded with local chiefs for women in ports throughout the Philippines and along the Malayan coast to solidify business relationships in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ² During this period, merchants frequently negotiated for a local “wife” or concubine to gain access to local markets; these women were important assets because, in addition to providing domestic labour and serving sexual desires, they functioned as intermediaries and formed critical connections within the community necessary for successful trade. ³ The Dutch maintained this practice for hundreds of years and by end of the eighteenth century they had formed vital relationships with local women of influence in the region, which allowed them to reap remarkable profits in Indonesia and build a global empire. However, these relationships were eroded by emerging ideas of nationalism and racial degeneration. Eventually, concubinage, and the resulting métis/métisse, or “mixed-blood” children became a threat to imperial power and the colonial government strongly discouraged marriages with indigenous women. ⁴ Moreover, in addition to these more permanent relationships, there were also taverns, inns, and opium dens in which men could purchase more temporary encounters with slave girls or local women who performed sex work as an income supplement. By the nineteenth century, individual entrepreneurs, businessmen, and women from around the region capitalized on the growing demand for domestic and sexual services from increasing populations of migrant male labourers and began to import women and girls to supply a growing commercial trade for colonial centres throughout Southeast Asia.

Britain’s development of Singapore into an international entrepôt during the first half of the nineteenth century changed well-established trading patterns and brought both a demand for and supply of commercial sex to the island. Singapore’s development as a hub for British power in the latter half of the nineteenth century offered employment opportunities for millions of unattached male labourers from around the world; at the same time, the colony became a primary distribution centre for the trade in women and girls who provided these labourers with highly sought after domestic and sexual services. ⁵ By the 1870s, at the height of the controversy surrounding Britain’s Contagious Disease Ordinances, the colonial state had grown large enough to enforce its legislation and Singapore’s government attempted to regulate the local sex industry. However, Singapore was already a key centre for what was a sophisticated, intricately organized, and highly prosperous underground network, and colonial officials struggled unsuccessfully to curb it. By this point, women regularly travelled to, or were smuggled into, the colony’s notoriously accommodating brothel districts from around the globe.

Singapore’s separation from British authority and the establishment of an independent government and legislative code in 1959 once again brought local officials’ attention to the commercial sex trade. Then, a new surge of economic growth and prosperity between the 1960s and ‘80s initiated a transition in the market. An explosion of economic excess increased inequalities and initiated an expansion of Singapore’s sex industry. The country’s new government took what Jin Hui Ong, Director of Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore, describes as a “puritanical approach” and attempted to push the sex industry out of the city. ⁶ This new administration created a campaign against “yellow culture” in order to expel all forms of vice. ⁷ Still, regardless of official policy, brothel owners, women, and law enforcement officers eventually negotiated unofficial systems of regulation and control in response to the realities of an entrenched trade that to this day remains intact.

This study examines the development of Singapore’s sex industry from 1600 to the present and by focusing on the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, explores the most important influences that inhibited and propelled its expansion. The island’s position as a strategic trading and military centre located between the Pacific and Indian Oceans has been the root of its political importance and caused the population to swell, which meant that over the years colonial officials, military commanders, and corporate investors were, and still are, keenly interested in local affairs and governance. In the past two centuries, colonization, war, and unprecedented economic growth drove waves of unattached male labourers, soldiers, seamen, and businessmen to take up temporary residence in Singapore. Simultaneously, women from around the world have voluntarily travelled, or were trafficked against their will, to supply these men with domestic and sexual labour. As a result, urbanization and the development of Singapore as an international maritime power fuelled the formation and expansion of its current multi-billion dollar sex industry. ⁸ As a result, for the past 200 years Singapore’s officials have taken a variety of approaches to manage—or eliminate—the sale of sex in this city, but ultimately have had little success.

Historiography

While Southeast Asia is a relatively understudied region, there are a few important studies that demonstrate the critical connections between prostitution, the trade economy, and the implementation of political power in Singapore. ⁹ Until the last decades of the twentieth century, scholars working on Southeast Asian history had largely ignored the influence of women and gender on its past. Focused on the paths of emerging independent nations, the bulk of historical research about Southeast Asia sought primarily to describe developing nationalisms, and the influential men that drove these movements, which fuelled and shaped later independence movements. Women, as primary subjects of historical enquiry, did not enter the discourse until the late 1990s. ¹⁰ Since then, like most other fields of history, Southeast Asian scholars have begun to incorporate women into their analyses and expand theoretical applications of gender within established narratives. This historical investigation of the sex trade in Singapore is a direct result of this increased focus on women in Southeast Asian history. At the same time, current research on prostitution has primarily used undercover journalism, government reports, and ngo records to explain the demographic and sociological aspects of the region’s modern sex trade. Yet, historians such as Anthony Reid, Barbara Watson-Andaya, James Warren, Philippa Levine, and Eric Tagliacozzo have highlighted the historical connections between sexual services, the trade economy, and the execution of political and legal power. These foundational works create a new understanding of the commercial sex trade’s history in Southeast Asia and the country of Singapore, and set a high standard for future scholarship. Nonetheless, there is still a need for further research.

Selling Sex in Precolonial Singapore and Southeast Asia

The southern portion of the Malayan Peninsula connects the eastern and western hemispheres and has long been a vital artery of trade for merchants in Southeast Asia. Before British colonization at the end of the eighteenth century, the small island of Singapore, or “Singapura”, was merely a small fishing village and private retreat for Malay royalty and officials. ¹¹ Long before the arrival of Europeans, women were an important commodity in Southeast Asian slave markets and sold by native, Arab, and Chinese merchants throughout trade networks that by the beginning of the seventeenth century encompassed the globe. ¹² In the late seventeenth century, Spanish and Portuguese merchants travelling between the silver mines in Latin America and the spice and luxury markets in Asia began trading with local chiefs for women in ports throughout the Philippines and along the Malayan coast to solidify business relationships. ¹³ These merchants often negotiated for a local “wife”, or concubine. Here women were important assets because, in addition to providing domestic labour and appeasing sexual desires, they also functioned as important intermediaries and formed critical connections linking them to, as Southeast Asian historian Barbara Watson-Andaya describes, “a network of kin” within the community that was necessary for successful trade. ¹⁴ At first, because these relationships were still rare, the women also acquired a great deal of prestige by having a foreign husband or lover. ¹⁵ In fact, this system allowed the Dutch to reap remarkable profits in Indonesia; they formed relationships with local women with influence in the region, which allowed them to dominate trade for nearly 300 years. ¹⁶ However, during the end of the eighteenth century, changes within the indigenous elite and the encroachment of European imperial centres caused a shift in attitudes towards these women and their sexuality. Additionally, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, European ideas were also changing. Emerging nationalist perceptions of European superiority and fears of racial degeneration initiated a shift in opinions about colonial societies and Europeans began to denigrate and castigate these intercultural relationships. ¹⁷ Europeans believed that concubinage, and the resulting metis/se, or “mixed-blood” children threatened imperial power and colonial governments strongly discouraged interracial intimacies. ¹⁸ Consequently, as Watson-Andaya explains, “foreigners increasingly preferred slaves, or ex-slaves who could act as both servants and sexual partners, [and] the status of the temporary wife was permanently eroded.” ¹⁹

The Colonial Period

Although Europeans were well established in Southeast Asia by the beginning of the nineteenth century and had already explored a variety of intimate relationships with native women, it is unlikely that the small fishing village of Singapore had more than a few—if any—local women supplementing their incomes before the British arrived. ²⁰ In fact, it was Britain’s colonization of Singapore in 1819 that laid the foundations for the island’s sex market; the Empire’s aversion to interracial marriage combined with shifts in the perceptions of local elites initiated restrictions that encouraged the development of a commercial sex trade. In contrast to other European empires, the British concerned themselves with the sexuality of their subjects early on in their imperial projects, and although they were relatively ineffective, the authorities created policies to prohibit the familial connections that were often established in interracial relationships and marriages in other colonial outposts around the globe. ²¹ Much earlier than the French or the Dutch, the British sought a solution to the complications and challenges caused by the intimacies of concubinage, such as interracial children, unconventional family loyalties, and challenges to imperial policy. Fearing racial degeneration, religious corruption, and the collapse of social constructs, the British began defining themselves in opposition to the “others” far beyond their shores. ²² Eventually, the Empire outlawed interracial marriage “among the higher ranks” throughout all of its colonies. In response, officials in India and the e.i.c. supplied British military encampments with a contracted labour force of prostitutes regulated by colonial authorities. ²³ Within this setting, British officials believed that prostitution was a solution to, and a preferable alternative for, either homosexuality or long-term relationships with indigenous women. Since Singapore was a colony administered first by the e.i.c at the India Office and then by the Colonial Office, these perceptions offer some insight into why officials initially attempted to regulate rather than prohibit prostitution altogether.

Established as a trading station, Singapore initially had very few female immigrants and colonial officials worried about the disproportionate ratio of men to women. An 1830 census revealed that there were only 4,121 women compared to 12,213 men in the colony. ²⁴ Although the colonial government banned the slave trade in British territories, there is evidence that local authorities may have overlooked the import of women and girls, because it reduced the disparity between the sexes and provided both domestic and sexual labour. ²⁵ In the British colonial records, Chinese traders were often blamed for the illicit traffic from local islands like Batta, Balli, Nias, and the interior of Borneo; Malay and Bugis traders also brought Batak women from the east coast of Sumatra into the Straits Settlements and Singapore. ²⁶ Existing flows of women and girls that supplied other Southeast Asian maritime centres like Malacca, Manila, and Batavia, combined with professional prostitutes seeking new markets immigrating from poverty or entrenched systems of brothel-prostitution in places like Japan, China, and South Asia, poured into Singapore’s developing sex trade.

Anthony Reid argues that the prohibition of slavery and slave trading in European centres “increased the traffic in many of these independent corners of Indonesia.” ²⁷ Indeed, most of this new traffic consisted of women and girls imported to service the increasing male migrant labour force pouring into the region. Arab and Chinese merchants brought girls from China and South Asia who had either been sold outright, or whose poverty-stricken families had contracted their sexual labour for a specified period. In colonial Singapore, these women were often black-market commodities; some became the wives or concubines of wealthy merchants while many others did not. However, not all of the women working in the sex trade were forced or coerced. In some cases, women already working as prostitutes in other cities heard about Singapore’s prosperity and negotiated their own passage. ²⁸ Although some women went to mining camps and plantations, most worked within the community in a variety of capacities and provided both domestic and sexual services to transient merchants, sailors, and soldiers accumulating in the growing international port.

The colony also functioned as a depot for large volumes of imported products and a stopping point for migrant labourers making their way in and out of the East Asian markets. ²⁹ At the same time, floods of migrant men created demand for a secondary stream of innkeepers, tailors, interpreters, prostitutes, and other service providers ready to bring them the “comforts of home”. ³⁰ There were no laws prohibiting prostitution or brothels in early Singapore, and since slavery had been legally abolished, colonial officials labelled most of the women they encountered working in Singapore’s brothels as slave-debtors. In the eyes of the colonial state, these women were indentured labour, but not true slaves. This superficial label allowed officials to overlook circumstances they knew to be illegal slave trading in order to accommodate their perceived need for more women in the colony and avoid uncomfortable international legal disagreements with regional leaders. With very little power to actually enforce them, British officials established perfunctory regulations that legally nullified any financial obligations if a debtor’s master or mistress were in “any manner an accessory to her prostitution.” ³¹ The reality, however, was that these women and girls were debtors only in name; most were bought or traded as slaves and their masters expected them to deliver whatever type of labour requested. Some worked as cooks, maids, and laundresses in addition to providing sexual services for their master’s clientele. Others worked exclusively in taverns, opium dens, and brothels offering sexual services for the rest of the developing entrepôt. There is also evidence that some girls were trafficked to Singapore after being purchased as young slaves at the age of 4 or 5. Then, while working as household servants, their masters trained them to work as prostitutes upon turning 14, the age at which girls were legally able to “choose” prostitution as a profession. ³² This was a legal parameter established by the colonial authorities at the end of the eighteenth century in an attempt to curb the illegal trade in women and girls for the purposes of prostitution. Nonetheless, even after debt-slavery was abolished in 1830, the demand for women was so great that supply continued to flow into Singapore’s commercial sex industry relatively unimpeded. By 1855, Singapore’s officials followed the model of the colonial authorities in Hong Kong and included an early form of brothel registration in its business registry, becoming among the first colonies in the Empire to regulate its brothels. ³³ By the time Britain’s Parliament passed the Contagious Disease Acts between 1864 and 1869, making the regulation of prostitution an imperial policy, Singapore had already started the process of categorizing brothels and regulating prostitutes.

There were a variety of women and positions within colonial Singapore’s sex industry. During the first few decades of Singapore’s development, the majority of prostitutes were Chinese, Indonesian and Malay women, and residents complained in local newspapers about prostitutes working in public; they did not complain about the existence of prostitution, just that prostitutes performed sexual acts in public spaces. ³⁴ However, by the 1870s there was much more diversity among the prostitutes and most business was conducted in brothels. As scores of brothels profited from selling sex to this flood of immigrants, local merchants and traders made a killing by furnishing the women with essential commodities like fabric for dresses, perfumes, make-up, soaps, and liquor. ³⁵ As the city grew, Chinese secret societies already in control of sophisticated underground networks of human traffickers imported a variety of women and girls—primarily Chinese—to satisfy the exploding population of male labour. ³⁶ In fact, studies by scholars such as Philippa Levine and Phillip Howell illustrate that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Singapore had clearly identified and geographically segregated commercial sex districts that were organized according to the ethnicity of the clientele. ³⁷ By the last decade of the nineteenth century, both the wealthy and poor areas of the city had their own red-light districts, and this system lasted well into the twentieth century. ³⁸

Much of what we know about prostitution in Singapore after 1860 comes from Warren’s research on the Chinese Ah ku and Japanese Karayuki san who worked in the city’s sex industry during the height of British regulationism between 1864 and 1888 and the two world wars. ³⁹ In addition to the Ah ku and Japanese Karayuki san, Warren’s work also provides important insight into Singapore’s commercial sex trade and describes the environments of its eastern and western sectors. The eastern district contained almost as many European prostitutes, and the “respectable colonial female population [was] living in nearby residential areas.” ⁴⁰ Since the colonial government maintained a strict ban on British women working as prostitutes in its eastern colonies, most were poor women from central and eastern Europe, mainly from Hungary and Poland. There were some Russian Jewesses as well as a few French and German women as well. ⁴¹ Yet, according to Warren, European women had a “notorious reputation” for being loud “foul-mouthed” street-walkers whose assumed privilege as “courtesans of a superior race” made them behave in a manner that appeared gross and vulgar to local authorities. In contrast, one colonial officer lauded the “quiet charm of the native women.” ⁴² European women generally arrived with their souteneur, or pimp, who sold their “wares” to passers-by. ⁴³ They solicited from doorways and street corners; five or six girls worked in a brothel servicing a variety of clients, primarily British or other Europeans, in narrow cubicles. The demand for these women was created almost entirely by European residents, merchants, or tourists visiting the port. ⁴⁴

Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, Chinese women formed the largest portion of sex workers in Singapore. Internal conflict, expansion of external trade, poverty, and famine in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries initiated a flow of Chinese into Southeast Asia who quickly established themselves as merchants, shopkeepers, and plantation owners, which provided an external boost to the Chinese economy. ⁴⁵ By the 1780s, there were at least 100,000 Chinese men working work in tin mines and on gambier plantations throughout Southeast Asia. ⁴⁶ At the same time, Chinese law prohibited the emigration of married Chinese women, so the mines and plantations were filled with a multitude of unattached men and very few women. However, wealthy merchants, and the Secret Societies to which they belonged, had direct connections to China’s supply of poverty stricken, famine driven, or kidnapped slaves. ⁴⁷ As previously mentioned, when Raffles acquired Singapore from the Sultan of Johor in 1819, an entrenched traffic of indigenous and Chinese women and girls already circulated throughout the region. ⁴⁸ By 1868, a year after the e.i.c officially transferred control of the colony to British Parliamentary rule, 2,061 prostitutes worked in the 349 brothels operating in the tolerated districts in Singapore; there were nine Europeans, 408 “native” women, and 1,644 Chinese. ⁴⁹ In 1877, the colonial government established the office of the Chinese Protectorate in order to curb Chinese organized crime, alleviate the abuse of poor migrants, and, as Philippa Levine explains, to bring the Chinese under the “control of the administration”. ⁵⁰ Supervision of the colony’s numerous Chinese brothels was one of the Protectorate’s many responsibilities. Although a few indigenous, South Asian, and European women provided sexual services, the majority of prostitutes before the 1880s were Chinese Ah ku.

Japanese women started to arrive in Singapore during the 1860s, after Japan opened its port in Nagasaki to international trade and began sending coal to Southeast Asia. By the 1880s, many—if not most—ships leaving Nagasaki had women hidden on board. ⁵¹ Along with increased mobility, Bill Mihalopoulos explains that “the movement of young Japanese women into sex work occupations abroad was one spontaneous reaction by the rural poor to the radical social restructuring unfolding in Japan from 1850 onwards.” ⁵² In fact, food shortages, heavy taxation, and corveé systems strained the peasantry to such a desperate point that between 1865 and 1867 there were seventy-five peasant uprisings. ⁵³ Poverty and famine pushed young girls to seek a living overseas at a time when expansion of exports established new connections between Japanese communities in the Amakusa Islands, the Shimabara Peninsula, and Nagasaki. At the same time, newly developing colonies like Hong Kong and Singapore had a deficit of women and the promise of prosperity. Japan’s transition to a money economy in the 1870s, and the falling price of rice in the 1880s, led to the bankruptcy and eviction of many farm families. As Hane explains, “in 1883 there were 33,845 such cases”; by 1885, 108,050 families were homeless and without a means to support themselves. ⁵⁴

According to government reports, in 1878 there were only two Japanese brothels open for business. However, by 1905, “37 years after the Meiji Restoration, and the year of the advent of the Russo-Japanese War”, there were 109 Japanese brothels and 633 Japanese prostitutes, or Karayuki san, registered in the colony. ⁵⁵ In 1906, Tanaka Tokichi, the Japanese consul in Singapore, argued that thousands of women were pouring into the city; he estimated that approximately twenty women each week arrived from Moji, Kuchinotsu, and Kobe with the intention to work as prostitutes. Fleeing desperation and violence, Karayuki san used what Mihalopoulos described as “subterranean economies” to make their way out of Japan. ⁵⁶ However, while some went with their parents’ permission (they likely received between 300 and 500 yen for a five-year contract), and with full knowledge that they would be working as prostitutes, Hane reminds us not to ignore the fact that many were, “sold into slavery or tricked into their situation through their sense of responsibility toward their poverty-stricken parents and siblings.” ⁵⁷ In fact, the parents and procurers often prearranged the amount of money to be remitted to the family once the girls were sold and working. Local “procurers” (zegen), employment agencies, and third party brokers promised young girls “a better life overseas” and stability for their families. ⁵⁸ In some cases, former prostitutes at the end of their contracts returned to Japan and visited villages describing the luxury and success that awaited them. Unfortunately, as Mihalopoulos asserts, “the journey from Japan to Hong Kong or Singapore transformed the women into a basic commodity for everyday usage.” ⁵⁹ Once they arrived, brokers immediately sold them to brothels for between 200 and 300 yen, from which they subtracted between forty-five and fifty yen for personal and travel expenses. Then they sent another thirty to fifty yen to their parents—a sum their parents pre-arranged with the broker based on the woman’s attractiveness and earning potential—while earning between seventy and 100 yen for themselves. ⁶⁰ Of course, the young women became responsible for the entire cost of the journey, which the brothel keepers withheld from their earnings. As a result, the Karayuki san who arrived in Singapore during this period were already straining under the debt for money “loaned” to their families: the cost of their journey, food and lodging, as well as any clothing or personal items before meeting their first customer.

Prostitution was a lucrative business in colonial Singapore, but not all brothels, or prostitutes for that matter, were the same. While Europeans generally visited the eastern side of the city, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Indian, and Javanese men tended to frequent the western quarter. Serving a second-class clientele, these women also divided their services by ethnicity. As Warren explains, the Ah ku, Malay, and European prostitutes worked in “all-nationality” establishments, but Cantonese women accepted only Chinese clients. ⁶¹ However, the Karayuki san, who did not arrive in significant numbers until the 1880s, also accepted foreign patrons. Poverty and famine pushed some families to sell daughters they were unable to feed; at the same time, Singapore’s booming economy drew people from poor regions in search of prosperity. Clients looking for overnight stays with Chinese prostitutes visited the larger, cleaner, and better-decorated loh kui chai brothels; the cheaper brothels, or pau chai, were poorly ventilated, cramped, and dirty. The bigger houses had as many as seventeen to eighteen girls working in them. ⁶² The Ah ku lived in “two-, three-, or four-storied buildings with large numbers painted or affixed to the fanlights over the doors, with a red (or some other colour) lamp behind the number.” ⁶³ The Karayuki san did not generally discriminate between clients; their primary goal was to make as much money as possible to send home to their families, who knew they were in Singapore doing sex work. Like the Ah ku, there were higher and lower grades of Japanese prostitutes; some took appointments and never left their lavish apartments, while others waited behind screens for clients and worked in dingy though less cramped conditions. ⁶⁴

The kwai po, who were at the top of the social hierarchy in Singapore’s commercial sex industry, managed brothels’ business affairs. The kwai po was responsible for guarding the owner’s “property” and often policed the women mercilessly. This is the person who quantified the value of the women’s bodies and was often the liaison between prostitutes and local authorities. More than just brothel managers, kwai po were interpreters, bookkeepers, parental figures, debt-collectors, and prison guards for the girls working inside. In fact, the majority of women in these brothels were their “virtual prisoners” because working prostitutes were rarely able to pay off their compounding debts. As debtors enslaved in exchange for money given to them or their families, many prostitutes owed money for their passage in addition to loans they may have taken out; the kwai po added this debt to any personal costs above and beyond their room and board, which accumulated quickly. ⁶⁵ Moreover, if the kwai po learned that a woman planned to run away without paying her debt, she was often drugged, taken away, and sold to another brothel. Regardless of how much of her contract she may have already worked off, she incurred an entirely new debt and contract that she had to repay. ⁶⁶ Warren estimates that in the 1880s, “80 per cent of young Chinese girls brought to Singapore” worked in brothels within this system. ⁶⁷ Although it is clear that not all of these women were completely victimized, their “choices” were regularly shaped by poverty, famine, abuse, or neglect and the disposition of their kwai po. For some migrant women, prostitution could be a means to relatively lucrative employment, but it regularly required a relinquishment of their personal rights.

Chinese prostitutes in Singapore were generally ranked according to their financial relationship to the house; they were “sold”, “pawned”, or “voluntary.” ⁶⁸ The kongchu or “sold” women were particularly helpless; the kwai po purchased them from traffickers, so they were considered property of the brothel. These women were in essence “the adopted daughters” of the brothel owner. ⁶⁹ The house provided for the kongchu’s basic necessities but the kwai po retained all of their earnings. The pongnin, or those “pawned or hired to a house”, were prostitutes like the Karayuki san who were working off a debt. ⁷⁰ Indentured for a minimum of six years, the pongnin had to give half their profits to the kwai po in return for room and board. The other half of their income was theirs to either send home or pay down their original debt. However, as previously stated, the cost of needs beyond room and board were added to their totals, which regularly created a debt-cycle that kept many perpetually indentured. Moreover, if she felt so inclined, a kwai po could sell off or transfer a pongnin’s debt towards the end of her term and obligate the woman to a new term of service. Both the kongchu and the pongnin depended upon the good nature of the kwai po. The tap tang were women that had not been bought and did not owe a debt to the house, but they still had to give half of their earnings to the kwai po for food and rent. If they were truly free agents, they kept the remainder of their earnings for themselves. However, it was not unusual in the 1920s for a tap tang to send money to a “pocket mother”, usually ex-prostitutes who purchased or indebted young women to provide for them once they were no longer able to work. ⁷¹ Although the kongchu, pongnin, and tap tung all—to some degree—worked under the thumb of the kwai po, their independence and autonomy was in direct correlation to the amount of debt they carried with the house.

As one of the easiest ways to accumulate capital before the turn of the century, brothel prostitution in Singapore funded many Japanese and Chinese businesses during this period; they played an important role in Singapore’s economic development. ⁷² Brothels made money from both prostitutes and their clients. Receiving well over what they initially paid for the women, brothel owners often sold girls after a few months of work and made money on the sale in addition to receiving a portion of her earnings. Warren explains that there would have been a daily profit of $1,650 if every Ah ku listed in the 550 houses registered in Singapore. Each worked “at the standard rate of $3” per night; this converts to approximately us$131, which would be $267 today. ⁷³ Extrapolating that amount with the minimum of 288 days that he avers they worked, Warren contends that the profits from these prostitutes, “would have easily been over $475,200 a year”, which would have been a staggering $37,805,400 today. ⁷⁴ The Japanese houses worked “24 hours a day, 7 days a week” and the average prostitute grossed “about 250 yen a month”, which meant exorbitant profits for the more than 100 registered brothels in the city. Although the Women’s Protection Act in 1880 officially prohibited the illegal traffic in women and girls, the misguided ordinance actually caused an increase in prices and certainly did not stop the trade. The value of the women changed according to demand and went up as Chinese immigration increased. Brokers sold girls for as much as $500 each, “depending on the woman’s ‘virginity, age, beauty, and origin.’” ⁷⁵

Regulationism

In response to an epidemic of venereal diseases that began in the 1860s, the colonial government began legislative efforts to contain and regulate the commercial sex industry in the name of public health. The passage of Singapore’s local Contagious Disease Ordinance (cdo) in 1870 marked the beginning of Singapore’s enduring legislative struggle with the realities of a thriving commercial sex industry and the social, ethical, and political consequences of maintaining it. The colonial authorities had already created a system to catalogue the various brothels within their business registry in the 1850s. The cdo granted colonial officials the legal authority to interrogate, examine, and detain women known for or suspected of working as prostitutes. Initially, women and brothel owners throughout Singapore resisted and avoided the government’s system of examinations and detainment; but within a few years, incidences of disease diminished and prostitutes began going to their examinations voluntarily. ⁷⁶ Moreover, officials noticed a levelling off in the opening of new brothels. Many argued that regulationism was noticeably successful in reducing incidences of syphilis and gonorrhoea and it gave officials the authority to offer assistance to victims who had been trafficked or were being abused. Still, there was overwhelming evidence showing that in parts of England and in some British colonies there were officials who misused the authority granted by the cd Acts to terrorize middle- and working-class women. ⁷⁷ Consequently, anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking activists fought hard to abolish what they saw as a blatant exploitation of working women and girls, and in 1888 Parliament repealed the imperial cdo.

In spite of vocal objections by Singapore’s officials, residents, and the medical community, the colonial government—wary of public censure—ordered that mandatory registration and examination systems be dismantled and all women detained in lock hospitals be released. However, to mitigate the effects of the repeal, from 1889 to 1927, unbeknownst to the British public, Singapore’s officials expanded the role and authority of the Chinese Protectorate through “legal measures pertaining to the Protection of Women and Girls Ordinance” to allow for the maintenance of an “extra-legal system of publicly recognized houses”. ⁷⁸ This period of “quasi-regulation” allowed the city to profit from brothels’ services through taxes and it gave local police the authority to close or tolerate a brothel at their discretion. An unofficial list contained the names of brothels and prostitutes regularly seen by private physicians and those not on the list were not allowed to operate. This system primarily focused on controlling brothels, particularly the Japanese houses that serviced European clientele; but as Warren explains, in the Chinese brothels venereal diseases spread “as immigrant labour kept on increasing right up to the First World War.” ⁷⁹

In 1912, public scandal about “white slavery” made popular by Mrs. Archibald MacKirdy and W.N. Willis’ book, The White Slave Market, resulted in intense scrutiny of Singapore’s extra-legal system, forced officials to address the illegal trade in women and girls more seriously, and motivated officials to push the commercial sex industry out of public view. ⁸⁰ Anti-trafficking activists quickly took notice of Singapore’s “tolerated houses” and began a vitriolic public campaign for their abolition. ⁸¹ Exaggerating an already dismal situation, abolitionists offered up public descriptions of miserable, drug-addicted European women who had been stolen from their homes and were in need of rescue. Even though European women were the minority in Singapore, the campaign focused on the trade’s degradation of “white European daughters”. Social reformers used every avenue at their disposal to bring attention to the fact that British officials had allowed Singapore’s authorities to tolerate the system of brothels, which were notoriously responsible for the sexual exploitation of women and girls. The political pressure eventually forced the Colonial Office to take action and authorities used an emergency amendment to the Women and Girls Protection Ordinance to expel all European prostitutes from the city; by 1916, there were no officially-known European prostitutes in Singapore. ⁸² Of course, the campaign against the “white slave trade” did not bring about the end of prostitution in Singapore, as some may have wanted, but the movement did make it more difficult to own and run a brothel in the city.

In the late 1920s, an increasingly powerful nationalist movement and political tensions motivated the Japanese government to make efforts to have all its citizens removed from the city and sent back to Japan. With the help of the British Parliament, the Japanese Consul took steps to deport all Karayuki san from the colony. Although Japan had profited from their sexual labour for more than twenty years, Karayuki san were forced out of Singapore and went back to generally unwelcoming communities in Japan. Some Karayuki san protested and challenged the local government’s authority to force them out; others stayed due to outstanding debts or because they had a venereal disease, while others disappeared into the city and sold sex privately to earn a living. Those taken back to Japan were left on the docks with no financial assistance or means of support. With few economic options left open to them, some followed the Japanese army as they prepared to invade China; many committed suicide as a result of shame from discrimination and lack of opportunity. ⁸³ Nonetheless, neither the efforts of the British authorities nor the Japanese government could completely eliminate the populations of Karayuki san working in Singapore’s sex market. Meanwhile, groups such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene continued to critique the tolerated system, which gained new support as venereal diseases spread rapidly during World War i. ⁸⁴

Increased overhead costs, scrutiny from the local authorities, and the mass deportation of Japanese prostitutes also pushed many Ah ku underground and initiated a dramatic rise in clandestine prostitution in the city. The combination of high fees and taxes required to run a brothel forced many of the Chinese establishments to close. ⁸⁵ At the same time, the removal of the Karayuki san encouraged more Eurasian, Malay, and Thai women to enter into Singapore’s now clandestine sex markets. As a result, many women went to work at coffee shops, teahouses, markets, laundry shops, and eating-houses, and offered sexual services on the side. The surreptitious manner in which they worked also meant that they did not have the same open access to medical services they had during regulationism and many saw regular check-ups as an easily avoidable financial imposition. Thus, the steady stream of military troops that flowed into the barracks and clandestine brothels during and after the war took a variety of venereal diseases back home with them.

Consequently, rates of venereal infections in Singapore reached epidemic proportions and by the 1920s local authorities scrambled for ways to control it. Appealing to the Colonial Office, Singapore’s officials once again proposed a system of brothel regulation reminiscent of the 1870 Ordinances. However, changes in the political leadership and sentiment resulted in little support for state-sanctioned and controlled prostitution; seizing the opportunity, social reformers called attention to the epidemic and pushed for abolition. By 1927, officials attempted to eliminate “professional prostitution” in Singapore without actually prohibiting the practice, but by implementing a ban on the immigration of known prostitutes. ⁸⁶ Additionally, authorities made brothels illegal and by 1930, Singapore’s notorious brothel districts were closed. Many women returned home to their countries, found jobs as servants, cooks, or washwomen, or married former clients. Others tried their luck in the underground market, since the act of selling sexual services was still legal in Singapore. ⁸⁷

Postcolonial Singapore

The Second World War brought another influx of military battalions onto the island and generated a dramatic increase in the number of brothels, prostitutes, and yet another outbreak of venereal infections. This revitalization of the industry led Singapore’s authorities to once again rethink their policies on prostitution. Between 1930 and 1960, local officials changed their focus from abolition to containment in an effort to curb the spread of diseases and the abuse suffered by women working in illegal clubs and houses. ⁸⁸ Underground brothel prostitution had survived, and by the time Singapore gained its independence from British rule in 1959 and formed an independent government in 1963, the old colonial red-light districts thrived and serviced men from around the world. Regulations against maintaining brothels, soliciting, and zoning ordinances, which quarantined the commercial sex sector in specific parts of the city, pushed Singapore’s sex trade out of public view but made way for a new extra-legal system that accommodated the persistent demand.

This change initiated an entirely new organizational structure in Singapore’s sex market. The elimination of secret societies did remove much of the coercion that existed in brothels, and the availability of other work made prostitution—at least for local women—more of a personal choice than a last resort. Nevertheless, an underground trade in trafficked women and girls still exists in Singapore and authorities have been only minimally successful at suppressing it. The economic boom that occurred between 1970 and 1990 created another surge in demand in Singapore’s commercial sex trade. A recession in the 1980s brought a new supply of unskilled Malay women unable to find factory or manufacturing work, and women from rural India migrated to Singapore with their children and worked as prostitutes trying to support their families. ⁸⁹ In the urban centre, Chinese women are still the dominant ethnicity among Singapore’s commercial sex workers. However, as Ong’s research demonstrates, an increase in construction, the result of an explosion in tourism in the 1990s, drew in increasing numbers of Korean and Thai prostitutes who made money following the pool of single men working in construction and providing services at job sites. ⁹⁰ Still, the primary centres are the “Designated Red-Light Areas”, where in the 1990s women earned between $7 and $120 per client for a variety of sexual services. ⁹¹

In spite of decades of legislation, there remains a teeming commercial sex market in Singapore. According to researchers Shyamala Nagaraj and Siti Rohani Yahya, since laws prohibit “the use of premises for prostitution, most legal establishments tend to observe the rules and to keep the business of commercial sex independent of their operations.” ⁹² Their study, “Prostitution in Malaysia”, examines Singapore’s sex industry extensively as a part of the Malayan peninsula and describes the development of the “sex sector”. ⁹³ They illustrate the role Singapore’s sex sector plays as a central economic feature of the island. For example, the “freelancers” and “special workers” operate in dance halls, nightclubs, karaoke lounges, and supper clubs, and there are strip clubs and lounges where clients pay for nude dances, touching, and other forms of sexual intimacy. The women might be contracted by the house or work independently, but they negotiate intercourse outside their duties as employees. Taxi drivers are important links for sex workers in an era of increased police raids and underground prostitution; drivers are regularly a client’s connection to clubs, establishments, and streets where sexual services are offered.

This same study explains that commercial sex workers in Singapore are classified by either their means of procurement or their employment status. Using methods of procurement as categories, Singapore’s prostitutes work as “market prostitute[s] (at the lowest rung of the earnings ladder)” in the local markets; “streetwalker[s]” who are more mobile and advertise inconspicuously to avoid solicitation charges; “the employed commercial sex worker”, or those employed by an establishment rather than working independently; “massage parlor, bar or nightclub workers; the freelancers; and the special workers (social escorts).” ⁹⁴ However, the “employment status”, and full- or part-time work are also important factors. Prostitutes in the “primitive labour market”, such as the streetwalkers and clandestine brothel workers who worked full-time, earned the least and were at the bottom of the hierarchy. ⁹⁵ The “enterprise labour market” included women working at massage parlours, taverns, and lounges, and they generally worked part-time and had more autonomy in stipulating their prices and choosing clientele. ⁹⁶ Finally, those who were “self-employed”, the call girls and special escorts, generally earned the most. Ranging in age from the early teens to seniors, many of these women according to Nagaraj and Yahya willingly entered prostitution, while others were sold or forced into the business by family members, spouses, or boyfriends. While the above categories are certainly problematic, they are descriptive categories that give us an idea of the ways sex workers have adapted to legislative prohibitions, while continuing to accommodate customer demands.

There are a few women in Singapore who are full-time employees, with “specified duties, leave and other employment benefits”, and whose sexual labour is contracted on the side. However, most prostitutes in Singapore work in brothels or as independent agents and, according to a 1992 study, averaged about us$28 per client and us$1,400 per month. ⁹⁷ Still, there was a remarkable disparity between the highest earners, making us$11,200 per month, and the lowest, making a mere pittance of us$40 per month. As one would imagine, the same contingencies of youth, beauty, and ethnicity determine the value of these women’s bodies, just as for their nineteenth-century counterparts. Older prostitutes are not able to charge as much as younger women, but young women who are deemed unappealing are also limited in how much they can charge. Additionally, Nagaraj and Yahya explain that “transvestites and transsexuals form a special category because they cater mainly to homosexual clients” and generally use prostitution as a primary means of support. They are outcasts of a still predominantly Islamic society, where homosexuality is a punishable crime and they are often subject to even more harassment and abuse by the authorities. ⁹⁸ The researchers also found that there is a small population of male prostitutes in Singapore who are generally frequented by wealthy women, work in exclusive locations, and charge exorbitant rates. As one of the only studies even making mention of male, transsexual, or child prostitution, it is clear that these areas need further investigation.

There are still several local ordinances and acts that prohibit various aspects of the sex trade in Singapore, but the primary concern at the moment is the active movement of underage girls being trafficked into the market. ⁹⁹ As of 2012, prostitution—the act of selling sexual intimacies—is not illegal; however, soliciting, running a brothel, and profiting from the earnings of someone else’s sexual labour are. In July of 2012, after a series of public scandals about underage prostitution, freelance journalist Paul Fitzpatrick wrote an article for the Singapore Business Review exposing the character of prostitution in Singapore today. Unknowingly, the journalist described what, for Singapore, had become a curiously familiar pattern. He reported that while they are not legal, the “police unofficially tolerate and monitor a limited number of brothels. Prostitutes in such establishments are required to undergo periodic health checks and must carry a health card.” ¹⁰⁰ Other prostitutes, Fitzpatrick claimed, can be found in massage parlours and karaoke bars, while “street girls”, “ding dong girls”, “packaged women”, “second wives”, and “female companions” are some of the many options for commercial sex. ¹⁰¹ Women continue to use prostitution as a means to compensate for the difficulty of finding other employment and Chinese prostitutes are still making a “significant contribution to China’s economy.” ¹⁰² Although he fails to comment on the advantages that Singapore’s sex trade creates for Singapore’s economy, Fitzpatrick does describe a familiar world of extra-legal conditions for unofficial brothels, sex work veiled behind other service industries, and a categorized hierarchy determined by employment status, method of procurement, and potential earnings. He explains that self-employed “second wives”, or “packaged women” make more than “street girls”, and a woman’s youth, beauty, and ethnicity remain key to top profits in the city’s sex industry.

With such detailed descriptions of this underground and seemingly nefarious trade, it is important not to assume that all sex workers have been trafficked, coerced, or forced into the business. As mentioned frequently above, prostitution can be a lucrative business and Singapore’s growth and prosperity, along with the notoriety of its red-light districts, have drawn professional prostitutes from around the world for more than a century. The numbers of men passing through this international entrepôt have promised both security of employment and the potential for prosperity. Nonetheless, Singapore’s authorities have historically battled the illegal trade in women and girls who were unwillingly trafficked into Singapore’s brothels; smugglers have supplied young women and girls, either indentured or sold outright, in Singapore since the beginning of the nineteenth century in spite of local political and legal authorities’ efforts to stop it. In fact, an article in the Jakarta Globe claims that in 2008 officials tightened laws to combat human trafficking and Singapore’s authorities recently uncovered a ring of “vice syndicates” providing patrons with underage girls. ¹⁰³ So, while prostitution itself is still legal in Singapore and there are many women voluntarily working in its booming sex industry, there is also still a thriving illicit trade to accommodate the unfulfilled demands of migrant consumers.

Conclusion

Singapore’s sex industry developed, expanded, and fluctuated according to historical waves of unattached merchants, labourers, soldiers, and businessmen flowing through this international entrepôt. In fact, prostitution has been an important part of Singapore’s culture, politics, and economy since its founding in 1819. Moreover, persistent themes within discussions about sex work in Singapore have shaped public perceptions and occupied the attention of government officials for almost two centuries; the traffic in women and girls has been a concern since the abolition of the slave trade in the Straits Settlements in 1807. From the beginning, officials worried that there were not enough women for the flood of male labourers immigrating to the port city and “turned a blind eye” to the illegal flow of women and girls imported into Malacca, Penang, and Singapore in spite of explicit legislation. ¹⁰⁴ Singapore’s sex industry grew so quickly that the city joined Hong Kong to become the first of Britain’s colonies to include brothels within their business registries and built a system of municipal regulation. However, venereal diseases, the second most important theme in the history of prostitution in Singapore, brought the colony’s brothels and prostitutes into an international discourse. Britain’s passage of the imperial cd Acts between 1864 and 1869 granted Singapore’s government the imperial authority to expand and enforce regulationism as they attempted to gain control of the commercial sex trade. Officials passed the colony’s cdo in 1870 and implemented practical reforms, such as establishing health codes and providing access to health care for women working in brothels. These provisions made noticeable differences in the lives of prostitutes over the following two decades. Another spike in disease and increases in military encampments followed the repeal of the imperial cd Acts in 1888 and forced local officials to find a way to accommodate the obvious demand for commercial sex, while complying with imperial policy. In the early twentieth century, the British public’s reaction to news of Singapore’s extra-legal system of regulationism pushed the trade underground; it is remarkable how strikingly similar this scenario is to the unofficial lists of tolerated houses in the city’s current sex market described by Nagaraj, Yahya, and Fitzpatrick. Since the first ordinance prohibiting the immigration of identified prostitutes in 1927, the authorities in Singapore have worked to contain sex work within designated areas of the city; they have attempted to identify and examine working prostitutes, while continuously fighting a black market element that has been consistently out of reach.

Unfortunately, the historical record contains very little information about the prostitutes themselves; save for a few diaries and oral histories from the latter half of the nineteenth century, their stories almost always emerge from court hearings and legal complaints made to the magistrate. As one might imagine, these are generally the stories of women coerced or trafficked into the trade, or abused and mistreated by a client or proprietor. Written by legal officials, those reports also regularly confirm widespread preconceptions about the violence, exploitation, and degradation of the thousands of women who have worked in Singapore’s sex trade. Without challenging the veracity of these perceptions, those reports do not reflect the existence of women who, for almost 200 years, travelled willingly to the city as prostitutes or with the intention to work as one, in search of a fortune. Like any other migrant labourer, Singapore’s prosperity lured prostitutes in search of work and, although the records are scarce, we know that some were quite successful. Still, historically even the wealthiest concubines and successful brothels have been subject to the scrutiny of local authorities attempting to curb the illicit trade in women and girls or control the spread of venereal diseases. In the end, Singapore seems to be in another period of “extra-legal” regulation; local citizens, authorities, and Singapore’s government officials are—once again—grappling with attempts to control the business of selling sex in the city.