Ah-Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore 1880-1940

Among the many groups of workers whose labor built Singapore in the twentieth century, there may be none as marginalized in memory as the women who traveled from China and Japan to work in Singapore as prostitutes. This study sketches the trade in women and children in Asia, and focuses on the details of the prostitutes' lives in the colonial city: the daily brothel routine, crises and violence, social relations, leisure, mobility, disease, and death.