The Toilet Revolution of Beijing
When a Qing dynasty official moved through Beijing, he had people in front of his sedan chair carrying incense, so that the foul stench of the dirty hutongs should not reach his nostrils.
Qing dynasty official traveling with incense carriers in front to prevent the stench of the hutongs to reach the nostrils of the dignified traveler
FirThis was not only eccentric theatrics, the smell of old Beijing must quite frankly have been horrible, because the people that worked out of the streets, like the many street peddlers, would simply squad down and do what they had to do out in the open. some shops like the Tongrentang pharmacy was even proud of the impressive amount of fesces that would accumulate outside its doorstep, the pharmacy allegedly saw it as a sign of good luck.
The streets of Beijing in the late 1800s
Inside the grand courtyard mansions of the capital, it was different, designated toilets were allocated, and night soil men would come by regularly and clean out the soil. The smelly cargo was transported to the Andingmen Gate on wheelbarrows, here it would be dried out to be used as fertilizer. The fertilizer was in fact a quite valuable product and interestingly enough the price of manure made from Inner City toilet waste was more expensive than that made from the Outer City toilets, simply because people of the Inner City ate better so the fertilizer was of a higher quality.
One of the first public toilets in Republican Beijing
It took a war to bring public toilets to Beijing. When the eight-allied-nations occupied Beijing in 1900 they did not allow people to relief themselves directly on the ground, instead they built Beijing's first public toilets, Chinese contemporaries like Qirushan commented upon how the foreign occupiers left a city much cleaner than the one they had attacked.
Public Toilets in the Beijing hutongs today
Nevertheless, when the last emperor abdicated in 1912 there were still only 8 public toilets in Beijing, but during the last hundred years this changed completely, when Beijing transformed itself into a modern metropol, and when the city prepared for the Olympics In 2008 a rule was made that there could only be 800 meters between public toilets within the second ring road, meaning that today there are thousands of public toilets in the hutong alleyways.