In Papeete the Chinese were, as in America, a mysterious, elusive
race, the immigrants remaining homogeneous in habits, closely united
in social and business activities, and with a solid front to the
natives and the whites. They lived much as in China, though in more
healthful surroundings. Every vice they had in China they brought to
Tahiti; their virtues they left behind, except those strict ethics
in commerce and finance which must be carried out successfully to
"save face." Their community in this island, with a climate and
people as different from their own as the land from the sea, was in
their thoughts a part 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