Condemned at Home, Detained in Port Townsend: Three Men Offer to Buy Their Way Out of the Axe
Three Chinese men held by the collector of customs for being in the United States illegally were to be shipped home, where desertion from the imperial army is punished by beheading. Local Chinese merchants said a substitute could be hired to die in a man's place.
PORT TOWNSEND, Aug. 30 — [Special.] — Mock Shong, Moca Louu and Lusa Dick Hop, the three Chinese in the charge of the collector of customs awaiting transportation to China for being illegally in the United States, will be sent to the Orient next month. The Chinese are deserters from the imperial army, the penalty of which is death on the guillotine. They do not seem to worry much about their impending doom, but aver, which is also substantiated by local Chinese merchants, that for a consideration and an additional payment to the government they can hire old, destitute Chinamen to take their place beneath the axe.
“They do not seem to worry much about their impending doom, but aver that for a consideration they can hire old, destitute Chinamen to take their place beneath the axe.”
This is the machinery of Chinese exclusion in operation: a customs officer in a small Washington port holding men for removal, and a death sentence waiting at the far end of the voyage. The detail that unsettles most is the market it created — impoverished old men willing to be paid to die in another's place. Detention, removal, and the buying of a way out are not 1894 curiosities.
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