A Henan Business Daily photo shows Vietnamese girl Nguyen Thi Hoa (left), who said she was a victim of trafficking, at a Chinese police station November 2.

A young Vietnamese woman who claims to have escaped from traffickers has turned up at a Chinese police station, a Chinese newspaper reported.

Nguyen Thi Hoa, 19, told police in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, November 2 that she was from Dong Anh District in Hanoi outskirts and had been trafficked two months ago by her own friends, Henan Business Daily said.

She had approached a man named Zhao on the street on November 1, but he could not understand her and called the police.

"It could be seen that she was in distress," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

A police officer said Hoa speaks some English and told them her age and that she is from Vietnam.

She did not have a cell phone or personal papers, and seemed to be illiterate, the police told the newspaper.

On a map of Vietnam she showed the police how, after leaving Hanoi on September 4, she and her two girl friends went to Ha Long near the China border.

Then they crossed over by boat into China's Fangchenggang city in Guangxi, and took a train to some place she did not know.

The local Zhengzhou University sent a researcher from its Vietnam studies center to speak with Hoa.

Hoa told the researcher she dropped out of school early since her family was poor and worked as a laborer since 2010.

Her two friends, who also worked with her, had tricked her into going to China, she said.

She had fallen asleep on the train and woken up and saw signboards along the road in a strange language. Only then had she begun to wonder if she was being trafficked to China.

They went to a guesthouse where the two girls revealed their insidious plan, telling her she would be sold to a local man for 60,000 yuan (US$9,605).

On the night of October 1, almost a month after arriving at the hotel, Hoa managed to untie the rope her friends had tied her up with, escape through a window, and clamber over roofs to finally become free.

A local person who spoke English had bought her dinner and a bus ticket to Zhengzhou.

But she does not remember any words or characters that can help the police find the place where she was held captive.

The police are investigating.

An officer said they would do everything necessary to return her to Vietnam if she really was a victim of human trafficking.

Vietnamese authorities said at a conference in August that since 2009 they have rescued 398 women trafficked to China.

Many trafficking gangs pretended to be marriage brokerages, they said.

Source: Thanh Nien News