Slave trade in Yunnan

This description of the slave trade in Yunnan is over 130 years old.

Tali-foo, as well as Yunnan-foo, were also famous as slave markets to which dealers from Canton, Soo-chow, near Shanghai, and even Pekin itself, resorted for the purchase of female children, numbers of whom were brought for sale by the different tribes visiting the annual fairs, who in their wars look upon women and girls as valuable booty. Caravans, sometimes numbering several hundreds of girls purchased in the neighbourhood of these cities, started regularly every year for the different places I have mentioned, and so great became the traffic in girls, that the authorities in every large town along the routes from Tali-foo to Yunnan-foo appointed officers whose duty it was to inspect the caravans before they were allowed to enter the towns, so as to guard against the introduction of epidemics to which the human merchandise was too often expressed, as they were exposed in the journey to all kinds of privations, fatigue, and cruelty. Although the laws of China do not countenance slave dealing in the true sense of the word, the caravans of girls which left Yunnan were a source of too great wealth to the mandarins for them to enforce the strict letter of the law.

When a caravan was found to be infected with any contagious disease, admission into all towns and villages was forbidden them, and then, dragging along their weary journey by day in all weathers, ill-clad and ill-fed, the older girls might be seen carrying the smaller ones, who were either sick or too young to walk and keep up with the caravan ; and at nightfall, when encamped under the canopy of heaven, the poor creatures, after a scanty meal, would huddle together, the sick with the sound, and thus day by day the caravan would proceed, leaving behind it a long trail of dead and dying, who, by way of burial, became a prey to the packs of hungry wolves which always followed in the rear of the caravans.

(Geographical Journal, Vol. XV, 1870-71, p. 165).