Night soil and house refuse: the contract that paid the Council, 1875–1934

The short answer. Shanghai’s foreign settlement had no sewers to speak of until the 1920s, and the Municipal Council did not pay to have its night soil taken away: it was paid. A contractor bought the right to collect the Settlement’s ordure and sold it to the farmers of the delta as manure, and the price he paid rose from under 3,000 taels a year in the 1880s to $7,500 a month in 1910 and 136,500 taels in 1925. House refuse was the opposite problem, something nobody wanted, dumped on creek banks and low land until the Council built two incinerators in 1932. The reports count the boat-loads, the coolies, the cesspools and the contractors’ names, and they show a system that worked only as long as the countryside wanted what the city produced.

1875–1893: boat-loads of night soil

“The work of removal is universally managed in Shanghai under contract with the Chinese,” the Health Officer wrote in 1875, and the market set the standard of service: one contractor, when the farmers stopped buying, was caught “emptying several boat loads of night soil into the Soochow Creek, at no great distance above the Stone Bridge”. The contract was annual and the Council’s income from it small: “the sale of night-soil” brought 2,849.89 in 1880, when “the old contract for the removal of night soil having expired on 31st August last, a new one was made for one year on more favorable terms”, 2,896.52 in 1881, 3,602.12 in 1883, around 2,960 to 2,980 a year from 1887 to 1893. The contractor’s coolies went from house to house with tubs; in 1883 the inspector complained that they “do not provide their coolies with properly covered tubs or pails, much inconvenience and annoyance are caused to residents by the stench”. Public latrines were wanted and hard to place: in 1881 the British assessor at the Mixed Court recommended “the establishment of public privies and urinals in many parts of the settlements”, and the Council found a “disinclination of Owners to allow latrines to be built on their ground”, giving up its own lot between Canton and Foochow Roads when the neighbour objected. In 1880 the inspectors cleared a Woosung Road nuisance of “10 Native Piggeries containing 221 Pigs, kept in the most filthy condition, 26 Cesspools, and 6 large receptacles for storing night soil.”

Garbage was counted by the cart. “English Settlement 25,405 against 25,574 last year” in 1885; 26,211 and 15,460 for Hongkou in 1887; 43,564 in 1888; 46,600 in 1890 with 4,622 loads of sand and mud from the side-channels; 51,699 in 1893. It went “by the boats by which it is carried away into the country”, and when the boats did not come it piled up: in 1887 “a scow has been built by Messrs. Farnham & Co., costing Tls. 380, and is moored in the Hongkew Creek” so that Hongkou’s garbage no longer waited on Fearon Road, and the Council proposed a $5 fine if the contractor did not clear Chekiang Road each afternoon. What the farmers would not take went to the water’s edge. “For the last ten or twelve years” unsold garbage had been “deposited upon the low land on the north bank of the Soochow Creek between the Chekiang road and the Stone Bridge”, the Council admitted in 1888, and because the Chinese authorities were widening the creek it would now go by boat “to Pootung”. In 1890 it went to “some low land three to four miles up the Soochow Creek, which was leased by the contractor for this purpose”, boatmen were caught throwing it into the river and the contractor, Zee Zou Quai, whose contract ran from April 1889 to 31 March 1891, was fined at the Mixed Court; when the creek was closed to boats on 10 December 1890 “the contractor not only loses the 500 to 600 cash per boat-load, which he used to receive, but he has to incur a considerable additional expense for boat and coolie hire”. The 1893 report called the whole arrangement “exceedingly unsatisfactory”, because owners of foreign houses used their own contractors and the Council could not arrange the collection of all night soil; it closed “21 night-soil pits” east of Hongkew Creek, made a new contract with Su-Kes from 1 July providing 58 more coolies, spent 7,160 taels on land for latrines, and put 600 taels in the next budget for “an experimental destructor furnace for burning garbage”. The furnace does not appear again for forty years.

1905–1914: ordure becomes revenue

By 1905 the word was “ordure” and the business was municipal. A notification of 9 December 1905 reorganised house refuse from 1 January 1906: iron boxes on wheelbarrows, refuse to be out by 6 a.m. in summer and 7 in winter, “Trade Refuse will be removed at a charge of $5 a month per daily barrow-load”. The Health Department took over the sweeping and dumping from the Engineer; 129,377 loads were collected in 1905 “as against 159,907 loads in 1904”, and the cost of “collection and removal of garbage from the streets and barging it away, averages about Tls. 0.87 per ton”. Public latrines were built at Dent Road, Chekiang Road and Bung Tong Loong with 12, 20 and 36 seats, and “more public conveniences are urgently needed”. The ordure contractor was now a name in the accounts, Chu Chi-woo, “his contract has been renewed, under the provision of Clause 12 thereof, for a further period of two years, i.e. to the 31st December 1907”, and the receipts from the sale of ordure were 46,057 against 2,961 twelve years earlier.

The 1909 report explains why. “The amount paid monthly by the contractor in the sequence of agreements was in 1899 $3,200, 1902 $4,100, 1905 $5,300, 1908 $6,000 and for 1910 $7,500,” it says, “a source of considerable profit to the community”, sustained by the demand for manure from the indigo fields and market gardens. The tonnage was large: “77,914 tons of ordure was removed from the Settlement” in 1908 with 116,858 tons of house refuse; 91,414 tons of ordure in 1914; 104,153 in 1917. Chu Chi-woo’s contract was renewed again in December 1910 on the Watch Committee’s and Health Officer’s recommendation; the monthly payment reached $10,050 in 1913 and $14,800 in 1916. House refuse, by contrast, cost money, “$8,305, as against $5,399 last year and $10,152 in 1906”, and the Health Officer found “no decent contractor offering his service for the work”; 58 per cent was still sold to countrymen and the rest rotted in heaps, which the Health Officer defended as science: “experiments extending over ten years on the natural disposal of organic matter in house refuse, with frequent observation of the garbage heaps, tend to show that within a year all the decomposable organic refuse disappears by oxidation, which is tantamount to slow combustion”, leaving “an innocuous mass, without smell, which forms a suitable material for filling in low-lying ground and stagnant pools in outlying neighbourhoods”. Public latrines went up a few at a time, “one in Batavia Road, just west of Dalny Road, with 20 seats, and another in Wetmore Road, with 14 seats” in 1914, built by the department’s own men. The Council’s one serious attempt at engineering the problem stayed on paper: “it may be advisable to have refuse destructors, especially in the neighbourhood of the Hongkew Creek,” the 1915 report said, but “a destructor leaves some 30% of ash still to be disposed of” and would cost “some 50 cents a ton for disposal as against 2.5 by the present method”. The night-soil trade depended on the creeks. When the French and the Council filled the Yangjingbang in 1914, “the closing of the Yangkingpang disorganised the work of ordure collection from adjacent districts, leading to a strike of the coolies and serious inconvenience to the public”: the contractor had sub-let “that part of the Central District south of Hankow Road and all the ordure goes to the Yangkingpang” from the Shanse Road and Fokien Road loading stations, and shifting to Suzhou Creek would cost “between Tls. 10,000 and Tls. 12,000 annually”.

1915–1923: water-closets against the contractor

The flush toilet was the contractor’s enemy, and the Council’s. In the Kalee Hotel arbitration the umpire found that “for many years the Council have undertaken through a contractor the removal of nightsoil throughout the Settlement and that the ratepayers as a body have accepted this arrangement which brings in a considerable yearly sum to the municipal revenue”, and that the Council could refuse to carry “the diluted nightsoil produced under the watercloset system” in the contractor’s boats. The contractor complained of “serious progressive deficiency in the monthly payments made”, and water-closet effluent, the 1917 report noted, “actually it has been seen being discharged into the waterways”. The 1919 contract was made at $15,050 “but the number of tenderers was much smaller than when last called for”; “in the Central district the volume of watercloset effluent is to nightsoil as 1 to 8”, the 1918 report reckoned, and the methods of disposal recommended by Professor Fowler were “desirable to put into practice” soon. By 1921 the contract allowed “a deduction for emptying water-closet cesspools at the rate of $1.50 per mensem per watercloset”, and “1,037 waterclosets were being dealt with by the contractor, as against 800 in December 1920”; effluent now stood to night soil “as 3 to 4”. The Health Officer still preferred the farmers to the furnace: “destructors will not be required for some time, if at all”, and “return to the soil is certainly the slogan for dealing with house refuse”. In 1922 the whole business of refuse and ordure was transferred to the Public Works Department, refuse landed at the depot fell to 52,867 tons, and the Chinese authorities protested that the refuse boats were silting Suzhou Creek. Municipal Notification 3174 of 28 June 1923 fixed the hours: “the nightsoil shall be removed daily before 7 a.m. from every house and public latrine in the Central district from May 1 to September 30, and before 8 a.m. from October 1 to April 30.”

1925–1934: 136,500 taels, and the incinerators

The ordure contract was now one of the Council’s larger revenues and was let by tender. In January 1925 the Commissioner recommended “the tender of Dan Yah Kee, Tls. 136,500 be accepted”, “the highest offer from any contractor who has previously done this work satisfactorily”, over the protest of the rejected Zee Yung Chong; the receipts that year were 136,500.45 taels. The previous contractor had been released from $13,750 “which was payable in September and has since remained in abeyance” for his losses during the fighting of September and October 1924. From September 1925 the collection was the Public Works Department’s own, and its coolies “are entitled to a maximum charge of 20 cents per mensem, small money, for each commode emptied above the ground floor”, raised to 40 cents under the 1928 contract, which went to Yung Mow & Co. for 148,500 taels. House refuse was a different economy: in 1925 “a total quantity of 101,918.6 tons of refuse was brought to the various shoots. 58,161 tons of refuse were taken away by Contractor’s boats to the dump. 43,757.6 tons were taken away by country boats for agricultural purposes, and 1,680.8 tons were passed through the pulverizer.” On 4 January 1928 the department “took over the collection of house refuse and disposal thereof”; 109,703 tons, 47 per cent, went to fill ponds and creeks, a tipping site “on the right bank of the Whangpoo opposite to Loongwha” was cancelled in March, and the Health Officer again suggested incineration.

The furnaces came in 1932. “Other works of special importance, which have been completed during the year, are the Refuse Incinerators in Penang Road and Muirhead Road,” the Works report said; in December “the Penang Road plant dealt with an average of 163 tons per day and Muirhead Road with 122 tons per day”. “The total amount of house refuse collected during the year was 285,776 tons,” of which 38,502 went to the incinerators at the year’s end; their working expenses were 70,673.57 taels against an estimate of 45,000. The same year the night-soil trade failed for the first time: “it was found necessary to cancel the contract for the collection of ordure, as the contractor has defaulted in his payments to the Council”, receipts came to 184,750 taels against an estimate of 198,000, and the next budget allowed for less. By 1934 house refuse was 308,688 tons, the incinerators burned 91,054 tons, 81,626 filled low-lying land and the rest was barged away, and the ordure contract, extended “for a further period of one year as from November 1 on the same terms as before”, was still worth collecting. Sewers had abolished 441 cesspools by 1932; the commodes of the lanes went on being emptied before seven.

What the sources disagree on

The 1885 night-soil receipt prints as 8,896.20 where the neighbouring years are 3,602 and 2,968; it is probably 3,896 and is left out. The 1915 report dates the $14,800 payment to 1910 where the 1917, 1918 and 1921 reports give 1916. The monthly payments of 1899–1921 are in dollars and the annual receipts of 1905–1932 in taels, and the Council never prints both for the same year. Dan Yah Kee’s two area tenders add to 136,590 against the 136,500 accepted. The 1908 ordure tonnage is 77,914 in the text and 77,94 in the table, and the first column of the quarterly tables repeats 20,580 in 1914, 1915 and 1917. The 1893 budget’s experimental destructor is a line item only; no report says it was built, and the Health Officer’s figures of 1915 and 1921 argue against building one. The reports give no count of public latrines or night-soil boats and no cholera case traced to the trade.

What to look for

The north bank of Suzhou Creek between Zhejiang Road bridge and the Xinzha bridge, where the Settlement’s unsold garbage was dumped for a decade, is now the creek-side walk below Guangfu Road. The mouth of Hongkou Creek, where the garbage scow was moored in 1887, is the small inlet beside the Jiulong Road bridge. The Yangjingbang, with its night-soil stations at Shanxi Road and Fujian Road, is the middle of Yan’an Road East, filled in 1914 and now carrying the elevated road. The Penang Road incinerator stood on today’s Anyuan Road in Putuo and the Muirhead Road incinerator on Haimen Road in Hongkou; nothing of either remains, and the districts’ refuse goes to transfer stations. The commode is gone from the lanes within living memory; the hour before seven, when the carts came, is the one habit the reports describe that older residents still remember.