of Canton and the farms of Quan-tung.  All the bareness, dirt, and squalid atmosphere of home they had sought to bring to the South Seas.  They saw the other nationals here as objects of ridicule and spoilage.  The amassing of a competence before old age or against a return to China, and the marrying there, or the resumption of marital relations with the wife he had left to make his fortune, was the fiercely sought goal of each.

Loti wrote nearly fifty years ago, a decade after their influx: 

“The Chinese merchants of Papeete were objects of disgust and horror to the natives.  There was no greater shame than for a young woman to be convicted of listening to the gallantries of one of them.  But the Chinese were wicked and rich, and it was notorious that several of them, by means of presents and money, had obtained clandestine favors which made amends to them for public scorn.”

Had Admiral Julien Viaud returned now to Tahiti, he would have found the Chinese stores thronged by the handsomest girls, their restaurants thriving on their charms, and the Chinese the possessors of the pick of the lower and middle classes of young women.  Ah Sin is persistent; he has no sense of Christian shame, and as in the Philippines, he dresses his women gaily, and wins their favors despite his evil reputation, his ugliness, and his being despised.

At the Cercle Bougainville I saw more than one Chinese playing cards and drinking.  These were Chinese who had made money, and who in the give and take of business have pushed themselves into the club of the other merchants, who feared and watched them.

Women were not allowed in barrooms in Papeete.  The result was that they went to the Chinese restaurants and coffee-houses to drink beer and wine at tables, as legalized.  A concomitant of this was that men went to these places to meet women, and further that women were retained or persuaded by the Chinese to frequent their places so as to stimulate the sale of intoxicants.  The Chinese restaurants naturally became assignation houses.

Walking back, late in the afternoon, from the joss-house, we met Lovaina in her automobile, with the American negro chauffeur, William, and Temanu, Atupu, and Iromea.  She invited me to accompany them to swim in the Papenoo River, a few miles towards Point Venus.  Other guests of the Tiare Hotel came in hired cars, and twenty or thirty joined in the bath.  The river was a small flood, rains having swelled it so that a current of five or six knots swept one off one’s feet and down a hundred and fifty feet before one could seize the limb of an overhanging tree.  We undressed in the bushes, and the men wore only pareus, while the girls had an extra gown.  They were expert swimmers, climbing into the tops of the trees, and hurling themselves with screams into the water.  They struck it in a sitting posture making great splashes and reverberations.  Their muslin slips outlined their strong bodies, so that they were like veiled goddesses, their brownblack hair floating free, as they leaped or fought and tumbled with the tide.  We stayed an hour at this sport, joined when school was dismissed by all the youth of Papenoo.  Under twelve they bathed naked, but those older wore pareus.