On a bright November afternoon, Golden Bridge Street is showing signs of life. In glass-fronted rooms, young women in pyjamas curl up on couches, yawning and watching television. Some sweep the floor and clean windows lined with dolls and stuffed animals; others nip outside to a grocery store to buy cigarettes and bottles of green tea.
On the street, groups of men in leather jackets smoke and chat. Periodically, a taxi pulls through a tall archway next door to the police station, dropping off a girl who has worked through the night. This is Erlian, a Gobi Desert boomtown on the Chinese side of the Mongolian border.
In a room littered with ash and cigarette butts, Alimaa (not her real name), 23, rests before another long shift. She wears heavy makeup and green nail polish and has dyed auburn hair. A puppy plays with a chunk of chipped drywall beside her and drinks from a bowl of curdled milk. Sitting on a couch under a poster of a half-naked woman, Alimaa chain smokes Esse Lights and chats with two colleagues who, like her, are Mongolian prostitutes.
With remarkable calm, Alimaa explains how she came to be here. Two years ago, when she was living in Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital, she and a friend were recruited by two men to work in a karaoke bar in Beijing. When she arrived in the Chinese capital, the recruiters told her she would have to work as a prostitute.
'They took us to different rooms in a hotel and showed us Chinese girls who had been raped,' Alimaa says. 'They said, 'Take a look, this is what will happen if you don't do this.''
Alimaa hid her passport in her boots and, later that night, escaped. For two days and nights she hid on a construction site before a Mongolian contact in Beijing brought her to Erlian. Broke and with no place to go, Alimaa resigned herself to her fate and started working in a brothel.
Alimaa's is a story familiar to thousands of Mongolian women, from the brothels of Erlian to the bars of Beijing and the casinos of Macau. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Mongolians are trafficked every year, the majority of whom are women and children recruited by deceit into the sex industry.