I recently travelled north to the Mongolian border and south to Guangzhou and Macao, working on separate stories about human trafficking and China’s African population. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing some short postcards from each of the cities, since I think they provide interesting snapshots of China today. This one is about Erlian, a Gobi desert boomtown straddling the China-Mongolia border, known for dinosaur bones and brothels.

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ERLIAN, CHINA—In the city’s centre square is a statue of a naked woman with flowing hair holding a globe in an extended palm, the paint chipped and yellowing. It’s the kind of kitsch one expects to find in China’s myriad of forgotten cities, but this one stands apart from the statues of Mao and other Chinese heroes. Locals say it’s meant to symbolize the beauty of Mongolian woman, and in Erlian, there’s no shortage of Mongolian women.

I came to Erlian with a fellow journalist, a photographer, and a Mongolian translator to work on a feature about the trafficking of Mongolian women to China to work as prostitutes. The story idea came to us through simple observation. In Beijing there are several bars that are frequented by Mongolian working girls and the mostly middle-aged foreign businessmen that solicit their services. Last spring, the best known of these clubs, Maggie’s, was abruptly closed and rumours surfaced about murdered Mongolian women.

It seemed like a story waiting to be written, and it didn’t take much searching to find that human trafficking from Mongolia is a serious and growing problem. According to NGOs, between 3,000 and 5,000 Mongolians are trafficked every year, most of whom are women and children brought to China to work in the sex trade. Many end up in the bars of Beijing, many in the casinos and saunas of Macao (more on that in a future post). Some are deceived by gang members posing as job recruitment agents; others lured by relatives. They are promised work in bars and restaurants only to be sold and have their passports confiscated. They are told they must pay exorbitant fines to secure their release. Many become victims of rape and violence, and, upon returning home, are shunned by their families.

We took the night bus from Beijing to Erlian to find out more. The bus reeked of feet and farts and the air freshener people sprayed to mask the smell. We suffered a sleepless night crammed into rows of bunks small enough for a child. There were about fifty travellers on board and the majority of them were either Inner Mongolian or Mongolian. Most had placed in the cargo space beneath us large nylon sacks, wrapped in masking tape, packed with goods bought from Beijing markets that they would sell back home.

We arrived at five am and checked into a hotel, and it didn’t long for signs of the sex industry to emerge. Each of our rooms contained a sex kit with condoms and various pleasure enhancing ointments and lotions. Later, when we set off for the town market, we were approached within minutes by Inner Mongolian women asking us if we wanted some girls. It was before noon.

Erlian is known for dinosaur bones discovered in a dried up salt lake in 2006, and it’s also the city in which the Trans-Mongolian train en route to Ulan Bataar and Moscow stops to switch gauges. But it’s clear that prostitution is the town’s main draw. Our cab driver, a 41-year-old Chinese named Hu Ying, says that are “many, many” Mongolian girls working here as prostitutes. “Many Chinese men come here for Mongolian girls because they are nice,” he tells us, adding that they cost on average RMB 300 ($55) a night.

In early afternoon, Hu drives us to the town’s red light district. Women in small glass-fronted rooms are just waking. Some sweep the floors and others smoke and watch TV. With the help our our translator, I manage to get in one of the brothels and interview a girl. She’s overweight and pale, wearing a large black t-shirt, no pants, and blue slippers. She’s got rosy cheeks, a faded tattoo of a heart on her shoulder, and bruises on her arms and legs. The the room itself is filthy: stained furniture, cigarette butts and ash all over the floor. A puppy plays with a chipped piece of drywall and drinks from a bowl of curdled milk. On the wall is a poster of half-nude woman posing on a beach.

She tells us how she got there: In 2006, she met an Inner Mongolian man and moved with him to Hohot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, and lived there for over a year before things went bad and she went back to Mongolia. “Life was not good,” she says. Still, she decided to get back together with the man and return to Hohot. When things didn’t improve she came to Erlian, broke, and began working as a prostitute to raise money. She says she hoped to work for a few days but ended up staying for several months. Her family thinks she’s with her boyfriend in Hohot. She usually has several customers a night and gives 30% of what she makes to her boss, a little Chinese man who walks in and out of the brothel throughout our interview (he doesn’t seem to mind my notebook). When I ask if she feels trapped or regrets getting into it, she says, “I started this life. It doesn’t matter. I’m just looking for money. It doesn’t make it bad or good.”

As we talk two of her co-workers come in and we ask about their stories. One of them had indeed been trafficked into China. I’ll call her Mukuli (the girls would not give us their names and asked for pseudonyms). Two years ago, when she was 21 and living in Ulan Bataar she and a friend were recruited by two men to work at a Karaoke bar in Beijing. When she arrived, the men said she would have to work as a prostitute. “They took us to different rooms in the hotel and showed us Chinese girls who had been raped,” she says. “They said, ‘Take a look, this is what will happen if you don’t do this.’” Mukuli hid her passport in her boots and, later that night, escaped from her captors. For two days and nights she hid at a construction site before a Mongolian contact in Beijing brought her to Erlian, broke and with no place left to go. Mukuli started working at this brothel, and she’s been here ever since.

Mukuli’s is a story confirmed by several Mongolian NGOs we’ve interviewed. There are about 300 girls working in Erlian, many more in China’s mainland cities, specifically Beijing, and about 500 or more in Macao. Erlian, however, is where much of the trafficking occurs. The next day at the market, two middle-aged Inner Mongolian woman approach us offering women. When we pass they ask our translator, who used to work as a journalist in Ulan Bataar and now lives in Beijing, if she’d consider going to Mongolia to recruit girls. They offer to pay her RMB 2000 per girl. She declines.

Photographs by James Wasserman Read the full story at www.scmp.com.