Besides the prison in which convicts are confined there is also within the precincts of the _yamun_ a house of detention. This is neither so large nor so strongly enclosed as the common gaol. Generally, in such a house of detention there is a large chamber which is set apart for the reception of prisoners on remand, who have friends able and willing to satisfy the demands of the governor. By this arrangement such prisoners avoid the misery of being shut up in the same ward with men of the vilest character and often most loathsome condition, covered with filth or suffering from various kinds of cutaneous diseases. The arrangement is a great advantage to the governor of the gaol and to all prisoners who can afford to pay for it, but a great disadvantage to other inmates. The space required for the convenience of prisoners who have friends to look after their wants leaves very little room indeed for the reception of the great majority of the poorer criminals, who are huddled together in a common ward sometimes too crowded to allow its occupants to lie down. In the city of Canton, on the streets adjoining the _yamuns_, there are other houses of detention, all densely crowded.
Imprisonment is not the only penalty inflicted; cases of petty larceny are generally dealt with by flogging. The culprit is handcuffed and with the identical article which he stole, or one similar, suspended from his neck, is marched through the streets of the neighbourhood in which the theft was committed. He is preceded by a man beating a gong, and at each beat of the gong an officer who walks behind gives him a severe blow with a double rattan across the shoulders, exclaiming, “This is the punishment due to a thief.” As the culprit has to pass through three or four streets his punishment, although regarded by the Chinese as a minor one, is certainly not lacking in severity, and is often accompanied by a considerable flow of blood.
A thief who had stolen a watch from one of his countrymen was flogged through the Honam suburb of Canton, but the officer appointed to flog him was very corpulent, and from his great earnestness in the discharge of his duty became quite breathless before the various streets along which the culprit was sentenced to pass had been fully traversed. The person from whom the watch had been stolen, seeing that the thief might escape the full severity of his penalty, snatched the double rattan from the hand of the exhausted officer and applied it himself most unmercifully to the thief’s back. Women who are convicted of thieving are in some instances punished in this way. Occasionally a long bamboo is used in cases of petty larceny. When this is the case, however, the culprit receives his flogging in court in front of the tribunal. He is at once denuded of his trousers and the number of blows varies according to the nature of the larceny, from ten to three hundred.