Making Filth Disappear: The Spatial Management of Excretion in Republican China's Public Toilets

To improve the country's public hygiene and civilized national image, state authorities in Republican China implemented a number of initiatives to construct public toilets and prohibit public excretion. However, these efforts often failed because many toilets were unsanitary due to poor design and inadequate management. To address these problems, authorities gradually refined the architecture, siting, and management systems of the toilets. These improvements aimed to consistently keep different kinds of filth, including human waste, stench, and flies, out of public spaces perceptible to people's senses of sight, smell, and touch.

This paper examines this spatial management of filth and its influence on people's everyday bodily practices and experiences through the history of the Type A Public Toilet, a standardized model designed and constructed nationwide by the Nationalist regime's Public Health Bureau in the 1940s. By analyzing the toilet's blueprint and construction scheme together with a digital 3D reconstruction of the toilet created for this study, it investigates how the building’s architecture and automated devices could shape people's sensory experiences and ideas of privacy during acts of excretion. Moreover, by analyzing government documents and news articles, it explores the economic, social, and ideological factors that sustained or undermined the site’s capacity to remove filth in practice. Ultimately, this paper uses the Type A Toilet as a case to examine how modern society's public spaces impacted historical agents' knowledge of and bodily relationship with filth.