A Tesco spokesperson said the chain, 'shocked' by the message, immediately halted operations at the Chinese facility

“We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organization.”

That’s the desperate message a six-year-old girl from London, England found written in a Tesco Christmas card she recently opened, the Sunday Times has reported.

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Florence Widdicombe’s mom had purchased Christmas cards from a Tesco grocery store in the U.K., so that Florence could give them out to her classmates as the holiday neared.

“We didn’t open (the cards) on the day that we got them, we opened them about a week ago,” Florence said, the Times reported.

“We were writing in them. About on my sixth or eighth card, somebody had already written in it.”

The short plea inside Florence’s card suggested the buyer reach out to Peter Humphrey, a former reporter, along with other human rights organizations.

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After discovering the message, Florence’s father, Ben Widdicombe, contacted Humphrey. As it turned out, Humphrey had spent years imprisoned at the same Qingpu facility, for breaking Chinese privacy laws. Humphrey said that the packing of Christmas cards has been forced upon inmates at the facility for two years, the BBC reports.

China’s Zhejiang Yunguang Printing made the card, which is sold by the U.K. retailer. Tesco donates proceeds from the cards in question to British charities each year. A Tesco spokesperson said the chain, “shocked” by the message, immediately halted operations at the facility that produces the cards.

“The foreigners cellblock in Qingpu prison had about 150 foreign prisoners when I was there,” Humphrey told the BBC . “Today, it has about 250. These prisoners are living a very bleak daily life.”

He went on to describe the conditions at the facility, where 12 prisoners at a time are placed in grey cells. Each has an iron bed with a mattress no more than an inch thick. In the winters, it gets extremely cold as there’s no heating. Paint chips from the walls.

Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images

The inmates follow “highly regimented” programs of work and over the past year, Humphrey said, manual labour has become mandatory so that prisoners can earn pennies to buy basic necessities, like soap.

Tesco said that in November an independent audit of Zhejiang Yunguang Printing had concluded there were no signs of forced labour involved in their manufacturing processes.

“We have a comprehensive auditing system in place and this supplier was independently audited as recently as last month and no evidence was found to suggest they had broken our rule banning the use of prison labour,” said a Tesco spokesperson. “If evidence is found we will permanently delist the supplier.”