About Asia Adult Guide

Asia Adult Guide is an independent reference site about adult-travel laws, safety, scams and health resources across 13 Asian countries. It is written for adult travellers (18+) who want factual information rather than promotion, nostalgia, or moral panic. The site takes no position on whether sex work should exist, be legalised, or be suppressed — it reports what the law says, what enforcement looks like in practice, and where harm-reduction resources can be found.

Editorial methodology

Every country and city page on Asia Adult Guide is built from a defined sourcing stack, applied consistently across jurisdictions. The intent is to separate three distinct things that are frequently conflated in adult-travel writing: what the statute says, what enforcement looks like on the ground, and what harm-reduction options are available. Each requires a different type of source.

Primary statutes

Statute citations — name, year, section numbers, and the disposition of the four core offence categories (buyer, seller, brothel-keeping, soliciting) — are drawn from primary legislative databases and official government sources: the Thai Law Online portal for Thailand, the Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, Vietnam's National Assembly legal portal, Indonesia's JDIH (Jaringan Dokumentasi dan Informasi Hukum) database, Japan's e-Gov legislative database (e-gov.go.jp), Singapore's Singapore Statutes Online (sso.agc.gov.sg), Hong Kong's Bilingual Laws Information System (elegislation.gov.hk), Korea's National Law Information Centre (law.go.kr), and India's legislative department portal (indiacode.nic.in). Where a statute has been amended, the amendment year and instrument are noted alongside the parent act.

Enforcement reality

Enforcement reality — which is explicitly described as distinct from statute — is sourced through cross-referenced journalism and civil-society reporting. Primary journalism sources include: the Bangkok Post and Khaosod English for Thailand; the Phnom Penh Post for Cambodia; the Japan Times and Asahi Shimbun English for Japan; the Korea Herald and JoongAng Daily for South Korea; the South China Morning Post for Hong Kong and China; the Straits Times for Singapore; the Times of India and The Hindu for India; and the Jakarta Post for Indonesia. Where a specific enforcement event is referenced, it is dated to the publication record, not generalised.

Civil-society and academic sources

For harm-reduction framing, health-service availability, and sex-worker rights context, the site draws on publications from UNAIDS country reports, the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) country briefings, the Empower Foundation (Thailand), SWASH (Sex Work and Sexual Health, Japan), the COSWAS collective (Korea), the DMSC (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, India), Zi Teng and Action for REACH OUT (Hong Kong), and Project X (Singapore). Academic literature is cited where it is peer-reviewed, dateable, and specific — not used as vague authority for contested claims.

Travel advisories

Embassy travel advisories from the US State Department, UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Canadian Global Affairs Canada (GAC) are used as a triangulating source for practical safety assessments and emergency contact information. Where advisories conflict with each other or with journalism sources, this is flagged.

Sourcing principles

Statute verification

Every statute citation is checked against the primary legislative database for that jurisdiction before publication. Section numbers, penalty ranges, and offence definitions are verified against the current text of the law, not secondary summaries. Where a statute has been amended since the site was last reviewed, the amendment is noted and dated. The table on the legal comparison page reflects the law as in force at the date of last review, not the law as it was at enactment.

Enforcement claims

Claims about enforcement reality are always attributed to a dateable source and stated as observations about a specific time period, not as permanent facts. Enforcement reality can change rapidly — Korea's demolition of Cheongnyangni 588 was complete within two years of sustained enforcement; Indonesia's KUHP 2026 commencement is expected to shift the enforcement baseline materially over the first year of operation. Any enforcement observation older than 12 months is treated as provisional until the quarterly review can cross-check it.

Time-sensitive information

Information with a shorter shelf-life — embassy phone numbers, clinic addresses, NGO contact details, current visa-stamping practice, active crackdown waves — is flagged with a review date and a note that it should be cross-checked against a primary source before being relied on. The site does not attempt to maintain a real-time picture; it provides a researched baseline that readers can update from official sources.

What this site is not

The following are explicit editorial exclusions, not accidental gaps.

• Not a venue-listing service. Asia Adult Guide does not name bars, clubs, agencies, massage establishments, soaplands, room-salons, KTV venues, or any other individual venue in any context that could constitute a recommendation. The reasons are practical (named venues date immediately — bars close, agencies reorganise), legal (naming venues edges from reference into promotion with attendant liability), and editorial (the harm-reduction value of naming a specific bar is near-zero; the value of explaining the legal framework and scam patterns applies to every venue in the district).
• Not a price guide. No prices for any paid encounter or adult-entertainment service appear anywhere on this site. Prices are irrelevant to the harm-reduction mission and their inclusion would constitute promotion.
• Not legal advice. Statute summaries are provided for orientation, not as the basis for legal decisions. The law changes; enforcement diverges from the statute; jurisdictional nuances that matter for an individual case require a lawyer admitted in that jurisdiction. The legal disclaimer sets this out in full.
• Not medical advice. Health information — STI testing clinic locations, PrEP access pathways, PEP availability — is provided as factual reference. It is not a substitute for consultation with a qualified clinician and should be checked against current clinical guidelines.
• Not moralising. Asia Adult Guide does not express a view on whether sex work should be legal, decriminalised, abolished, or left as it is. The site reports on facts. Where multiple policy perspectives exist — for example, the debate between the Nordic/Swedish model and rights-based decriminalisation — these are described as perspectives, not evaluated.
• Not an encouragement to break the law. Factual description of a legal framework — including the parts of it that are rarely enforced — is not encouragement to break the law. Readers remain responsible for their own compliance with the laws of any country they visit.

Editorial conventions

Language

This site uses “sex worker” rather than “prostitute” as the default term where context allows. “Prostitute” is used where a statute uses that term and the statutory language matters (e.g., when quoting the Women's Charter or the ITPA directly). “Prostitution” appears in statute names and in references to formal policy debates where the term is standard. “Sex work” and “sex worker” are not used as euphemisms for any specific type of activity; they are used to describe the range of activities covered by the statutory frameworks on this site. Where a local term is in common use (fuzoku, KTV, room salon, lorong, papakatsu, yuán jiāo), it is defined and used with the local orthography alongside the English gloss.

Statute naming

Statutes are cited with their full name in English and, where relevant, in the original language, together with the year of enactment (not ratification or gazette date, which differs in several jurisdictions). Amendment years are noted in-line. Where a statute has been replaced (e.g., India's IPC replaced by the BNS in 2024), the replacement and its date are recorded and the superseded instrument is noted for historical reference.

Review cadence

Country and city pages carry a “last reviewed” date at the bottom of each. Reviews happen quarterly. Legislative changes, embassy contact updates, and NGO status changes are the items most likely to drift between reviews. Readers are encouraged to cross-check time-sensitive information against primary sources and to submit corrections via the contact page.

Editorial team

How to contribute

If you have spotted a factual error — a statute year that is wrong, a phone number that has changed, a clinic that has closed — or if you have a correction from primary knowledge of a jurisdiction, use the contact page. Corrections are reviewed, cross-checked, and credited if published. The site does not accept venue recommendations, price submissions, or promotional content.