Ah San 阿三

The following text is extracted from 

Inside Beijing's mind: How China really sees India

https://www.inkl.com/a/EkBPRGfWlBl

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Some of this trolling curdles into something uglier, carrying a term most Indians have never heard: Ah San. Understanding it means going back to the treaty ports of late-19th and early-20th c. Shanghai, where Sikh policemen - recruited by the hundreds from Punjab from 1885 onward - made up a third of Shanghai Municipal Police.

They were cheaper than European officers and considered more reliable than local recruits, which slotted them into a colonial hierarchy as the enforcer's enforcer. Shanghainese called them 'hong tou Ah San' - red-headed number three: red for the turban, 3 for their rank beneath the British (No. 1) and Chinese (No. 2). The term hardened into shorthand for Indians generally, the willing instrument of the White man against fellow Asians