I posted recently about branches of British public schools popping up in China. I’ve visited Shanghai a couple of times in the past few years for work, and picked up a racy (and very well-written) book after my last trip that described some of the city’s dubious past. The Pearl of the Orient was so decadent that in the late nineteenth century that one missionary commented, “If God lets Shanghai endure, he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah”.

A couple of anecdotes might appeal to our pervy readers. The city’s streets were lined with girls from the country, earning their way:

“Fear of a beating by their madam should they fail to secure a customer for the night accounted for [their] aggressiveness. In the late hours of the morning, a customer might find himself seized by the arm by a girl who would desperately plead, ‘Please help me out!’…. Once a girl was in a brothel keeper’s or madam’s hands, she had few opportunities of escaping…

It was not uncommon to see a little slave girl break away from her [male servant] on the street… If she was caught, her body would rack for days from the keeper’s cuffs and lashes””

It wasn’t just Chinese girls who appealed to the city’s “gentlemen”: the Madams “always kept their eyes open for new talent”, including foreign women:

“One madam, the mistress of the chief of police, approached a visiting Margaret Sanger in a tearoom to leave her card: the admiral of the British fleet, the madam informed her, was dropping anchor in Shanghai in the next few days and the demure-looking Sanger happened to be ‘just his type.’”

And then there was the British Vice-Consul in the 1850s, who:

“ran afoul of the Church… by taking as his mistress a pupil at a Protestant girls’ missionary school in Ningpo. When he was transferred to Foochow he took the girl with him, which so outraged the head of the school, an upright Englishwoman named Miss Aldersay, that she reported him to the Bishop of Victoria in Hong Kong. The outraged bishop denounced the Vice-Consul from his pulpit, forcing the errant diplomat to send the girl back to her home.”

One might presume that said young lady would have been especially soundly whipped on her return home. Unless she ended up stopping over in Shanghai en route, of course.

-------

Now you can buy spanking-related gifts with our original designs.