Shanghai has officially said goodbye to chamber pots, bringing an end to residents who lacked private toilets needing to carry their bedpans to communal waste disposal locations each morning, often before dawn.

At the end of October, state-owned media announced that its campaign to install indoor plumbing in almost all residences, which had been ongoing since the 1990s, was completed in September. By 2023, 14,082 households in the city still relied on chamber pots.  

For decades, many households in Shanghai’s old inner-city lanes lived without running water or flush toilets, despite persistent efforts to tackle the issue. The dense, labyrinthine layout of Shanghai’s shikumen or “stone-framed doorway” neighborhoods, as well as concern for preserving cultural sites, often meant that officials had to devise highly individualized solutions for each household.

When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the average living space per person in central Shanghai was just 3.9 square meters. Roughly four-fifths of the city’s 5 million residents at that time relied on chamber pots.

After the “reform and opening-up” period began in 1978, Shanghai accelerated its public housing initiatives for governmental workers, ushering in a major wave of relocations. During the 1980s alone, some 830,000 households moved into new apartments equipped with flush toilets. But according to Shanghai-based newspaper Jiefang Daily, there were still an estimated 800,000 chamber pots in use across Shanghai in 1993.

Locals have jokingly called the completed citywide indoor plumbing project “making a grand hall out of the shell of a snail,” reflecting the extreme spatial constraints in many old Shanghai homes.

Shanghai officials tailored their approach to installing plumbing according to specific situations. For example, flush toilets were installed in some houses after reconfiguring interior spaces. In others, small extensions or lightweight steel-framed structures were built outdoors to house toilets and kitchens. Some residences were demolished entirely.

Cheng Jinxin, a Shanghainese who has lived with his parents in their 14-square-meter home since his birth in 1949, spoke to Jiefang Daily about what life punctuated by chamber pot use used to be like. 

He recalled how every day at 4 a.m., still half-asleep, he would hear the cry, “Empty the chamber pots!” from a man pulling a large cart down the alley outside their house. Neighbors would then hurriedly bring their chamber pots downstairs, some preparing them as early as 2 or 3 a.m., fearing that missing the collector would mean waiting another day to rid their homes of the smelly waste.

After dawn, they would retrieve the now-empty chamber pots, giving them an additional cleaning with long bamboo brushes.

Such a scene is now relegated to history.

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: A man carries a chamber pot in the morning through an old neighborhood in Shanghai, Feb. 10, 2018. VCG)