188 1 year, Oswald chadwick, a British engineer, wrote in the report on the investigation of Chinese settlements such as Taiping Mountain: "In Hong Kong, the traditional excrement treatment method in China is adopted, and excrement diggers handle the excrement by hand without disinfection or deodorization." At this time, the European residential areas in Hong Kong have been equipped with flushing toilets and sewage systems.
Poor sanitary conditions and crowded houses provide soil for epidemics. 1894 the black death broke out in Taiping mountain area, killing 3000 people. The Hong Kong government abandoned all the houses in Taiping Mountain, moved the Chinese into the new block of Buhua Park, and built the first modern public toilet and bathroom in Hong Kong.
However, when Europeans walk through the streets of Hong Kong with their noses covered, they may forget the sanitary conditions they are used to, which have only been implemented for decades. Before the19th century, the phenomenon of throwing excrement directly out of the window in Paris had been eradicated for a long time, and the toilets erected on the Thames embankment made pedestrians and ships in lower places suffer from "scattered flowers".
A medieval painting satirizes the behavior of Europeans dumping urinals in the window.
A brief civilization
The earliest toilets appeared in Mesopotamia. This is a fairly simple facility: a hole in the ground leads to a movable jar placed underground. Compared with the field solution, this simple facility has completed a leap: the excrement is placed in an operable range and the settlement environment is improved.
Around 2000 BC, more complex equipment appeared in Crete. In the palace of Knossos, Minoan civilization left an ancient toilet with a wooden seat on the drain pipe, and servants poured water into the ditch to wash away the dirt. This device has produced a second leap in toilet thinking: excreta is transported by water, not manually. However, this facility was quite expensive at that time and only the royal family could enjoy it.
(Restoration diagram of sitting toilet with drainage in Knossos period)
The Romans went one step further than Minos' palace. Toilets are built near theaters or venues and generally have more than ten seats. Unlike our current concept of attaching importance to privacy, the Roman toilet is a social place. It has no compartment, regardless of gender. Citizens talk to each other in their seats, plan activities, and then clean their private parts with a wooden stick with a sponge wrapped at one end and water from a small canal. Of course, for friendly and sociable Romans, this stick must be shared.
(Ordinary people use pots and pans)
However, this kind of canal is very expensive, and it can only connect public places and dignitaries. Ordinary people use more pots and pans, and then throw them away. This is similar to the cities of the same period in China.
Rome's innovative tradition of public toilets was interrupted by the invasion of northern Germanic barbarians. The barbarian didn't understand the function of the ditch, and the toilet became rough again. But they offered some new ideas about toilets. A painting in Yorkshire, England, shows pirates wiping their bottoms with a piece of moss after going to the toilet. In the later developed temples, monks chose coarse wool.
In the Middle Ages, people built toilets on the protruding part of the city wall for public use. The excrement fell from a height and was carried away by rakes at night. The urban drainage ditch is an open ditch, which has problems in design. Garbage and dirt often block it and sewage overflows. Although people didn't learn the water supply technology of the Romans, they followed their bad habit: dumping chamber pot from the window. In the17th century, the mayor of Versailles issued a serious decree:
It is forbidden for anyone to throw human excrement and other rubbish directly out of the window.
East Asian green civilization
Densely populated East Asia is another situation.
Because manure is regarded as an important source of restoring land fertility, the toilet civilization in East Asia is green and environmentally friendly, and there has never been a wasteful invention of western-style water flushing toilets.
Besides being used for land, human excrement is also used as food for pigs. In ancient China, toilets were built on pigsty. This concept of environmental protection was even reflected in the early emperors. In the early Han Dynasty, the cesspit under the royal toilet was still connected with the pigsty. When Emperor Liu Qi (188- 14 1 years ago) accompanied his wife Jia Ji to the toilet, the wild boar rushed into the toilet and disturbed Yu Jia. Tragically, in 58 1 year BC, Gong Jinuo was seriously ill, went to the toilet and fell into a cesspit, only to be discovered by his subordinates after drowning.
By the end of the Han dynasty, the cesspit disaster of the emperor's slip no longer appeared. Emperors often use closed toilets, and their modeling and etiquette are constantly reaching the peak. The emperor and the dignitaries need to change clothes and burn incense when they go to the toilet. There must be many followers beside them. More charcoal ash made of fragrant wood is spread under the toilet, which exhausts the imagination of deodorization and silence. Squat toilets that occasionally appear in historical materials are often used to describe their extreme luxury, such as feather bedding and even butterfly wings.
In the history of China, Meng Changjun (9 19-965), the king of subjugation after Shu, was the most particular about toilets. His bedpan is made of gold inlaid with colored gems. After Song Taizu and Zhao Kuangyin seized Meng's early taste, they once felt how the emperor could not subjugate the country.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, western toilets were introduced to China, but they were not the royal family, but the wealthy businessmen in Shanghai where China and foreign countries were located. After Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor, he was not interested in western toilets. He thinks it stinks, but he still thinks China wooden bucket is more enjoyable.
In the densely populated cities of ancient China, there were rickshaws or ox carts dedicated to collecting excrement and drowning. They regularly go door-to-door along the streets and lanes, take away the wooden toilets in women's hands, transport them to the suburbs and resell them to farmers who need feces.
As early as the Northern Song Dynasty, public toilets appeared in the capital and other big cities. This kind of toilet managed by special personnel appeared in Europe hundreds of years later. Many of these public toilets are charged. In order to attract customers, some people even put up calligraphy and painting on the wall. The income from feces and toilet tickets makes it a profitable business to invest in building toilets.
The situation in Japan is similar to that in China. /kloc-in the middle of the 0/8th century, Osaka has produced the property right, lease right and resale right of excrement. Residents' excrement ownership belongs to the landlord, and urine ownership belongs to the tenant.
Before the industrial revolution, the population of big cities in East Asia was much larger than that in Europe at the same time. Because the manure is collected and fertilized, although there is no sewage system, big cities can still manage dry toilets. Diseases that are easily transmitted by feces in Europe rarely appear in big cities in East Asia.
However, in the Qing Dynasty, in Beijing and other cities with water shortage and large population, the fecal problem began to become a disaster. Because toilets are charged, people from dignitaries to vendors are used to urinating everywhere. Despite the official campaign, Beijing has actually become a huge open-air toilet.
(Qing Dynasty toilets collected in the Forbidden City)
In rural areas, this has never been a problem. Every household has a simple toilet. For families with many fields, their own feces are not even enough, and people who specialize in collecting feces can only collect dog feces and cow dung. In the intensive farming society in East Asia, it is difficult for feces to bring large-scale environmental disasters. Mao Zedong's "Thousand Thunder Legacy" has never been the norm in East Asia.
Toilets connecting the whole city.
The long-term small scale of European cities was broken by the industrial revolution, and a large number of people poured into cities, and human and animal manure began to become an environmental disaster. Crowding and filth provide soil for the spread of diseases.
In the meantime, the toilet appeared. Like the flushing equipment in Minos Palace, the toilet was originally a plaything of nobles.
/kloc-At the end of the 6th century, Sir John Harington made two toilets, one for himself and the other for Queen Elizabeth. His design is to empty the urinal by draining the water in the water tank, but there is no water valve, no design to stop the odor of water, and no supporting pipes. At that time, aristocrats preferred a closed toilet-put chamber pot in a wooden box and cover it. King Louis XIV of France likes to sit in a luxurious closed toilet to meet ministers.
(Louis XIV sits on a closed toilet)
1775, Alexander Cummings invented the first modern toilet patent. Through the continuous improvement of Jenyus, Krapl and Duaifu, the toilet has become convenient and cheap. At this time, London, which experienced diseases such as the Black Death and cholera, realized the importance of hygiene. People of insight constantly call for improving urban sanitation conditions, underground pipelines continue to expand, and toilets replace dirty urinals and cesspits and enter ordinary citizens' families.
(Alexander Cummings invented the toilet in 1775)
But history has played a big joke on people. People use newer technology to clean up indoor dirty things, but they are discharged into the Thames without treatment. At the same time, the Thames is still the source of drinking water for citizens, which provides an opportunity for cholera bacteria to "expand their reproduction" across regions, but promotes the epidemic.
It was not until the late19th century that the epidemiology in Europe developed that people realized the connection between germs and drinking water. The British began to treat sewage pipes and arrange them downstream of drinking water pipes. The toilets are connected by these invisible pipes.
It is the sewage system engineering of urban integration that makes the toilet revolutionary and become a symbol of modern western civilization.
After 1870, toilets quickly became popular in the United States. In the next century, with the strong position of European countries and the United States in the world, toilets and sewage systems, as the standard facilities of modern public health, expanded to cities all over the world, and the agricultural "natural fertilizer" treatment methods in East Asia shrank because of the emergence of chemical fertilizers and agricultural changes, and finally unified into European health habits.
The modern public system to solve the fecal problem originated in Europe, and the number of livestock is also a special reason. There are few large livestock such as cattle and horses in densely populated East Asia, but in Europe, the manure of cattle and horses is the protagonist of land fertilization.
Because of its huge number of horses, the fecal pressure on European cities is far greater than that on East Asian cities with similar populations. /kloc-At the end of 0/9th century, there were about 200,000 horses in new york, and the amount of excrement they excreted each year was as high as 400,000 tons.
Where can I find a toilet?
After 1949, the phenomenon of defecation in China has been greatly improved. May come from China leaders' habit of paying attention to hygiene. In the Yan 'an era, when Mao Zedong went out for a walk, the guard Li Yinqiao would walk behind him with a shovel. China's solution is different, which is a combination of public toilets and the whole people collecting excrement. Judging from the official propaganda, the latter seems to have played a greater role.
After 1949, for a long time, manure collection was pulled to an unimaginable height. 1959 10, Liu Shaoqi is not only called Shi Chuanxiang as a dung digger, but also a "people's orderly". He also sent his 13-year-old daughter to Shi Chuanxiang to experience life, and Wan Li, vice mayor of Beijing, even carried the dung himself.
In Shanghai, before 1952, sanitation workers in urban areas pushed wooden wheel dung trucks, so they went to the toilet to collect toilets. Since 1958, cadres and the masses have actively participated in fertilizer accumulation activities and supported agricultural production. In order to collect the lost fertilizer (that is, the feces of people poured into the sewer) and avoid new pollution, the sanitation professional team mobilized the residents' spittoon feces on the bus, or built a urine storage pool and a small feces dumping port next to the urinal to let the residents dump the spittoon feces. 1960, the sanitation department of Jing 'an District of Shanghai built a comprehensive toilet in Meijiaqiao, which can not only relieve urine, but also allow residents to empty the toilet.
During this period, Lei Feng once created an incredible miracle of collecting dung, collecting 300 kilograms of dung every day in Fushun and Yingkou. Before the end of 1970, most students in small and medium-sized cities had the task of collecting manure every winter vacation.
(Workers push wooden wheels by hand to dump excrement on the dock)
(once a shit ticket)
At that time, the floating population in China was restrained, and the whole people were enthusiastic about collecting manure. There are not many public toilets in the city, mainly concentrated in units with walls. Most families in China do not have toilets, so public toilets in enterprises and institutions have become the standard configuration of socialization.
In addition to office areas and residential areas, toilets are easy to find, and there must be toilets near the guest house inside the unit. In the1970s, there was a big jar in some small towns, even in front of the unit guest house, for residents who didn't want to use a flashlight to find a toilet to urinate at night.
In China City at that time, although it was difficult to see toilets along the street, there was a trick to find toilets in unfamiliar areas of the city: first, find the nearest unit door, then find the office building or guest house, and the toilets must be nearby.
Only in stadiums, squares and other places where large-scale gatherings often occur, it is easy to find public toilets. But this is not enough in special times. When various celebration gatherings are held in Beijing, many temporary toilets can magically grow near Chang 'an Avenue and Tiananmen Square-some sidewalks are specially slotted for this purpose, and it is easy to build simple temporary toilets on them. When necessary, the temporary toilet can exceed 123.
(The trench design on the east side of Tiananmen Square can be used as a temporary toilet if necessary)
(Japan's post-disaster emergency plan: manhole covers can be quickly turned into public toilets)
Before 1980, public toilets in most cities in China were still dry toilets, although they no longer assumed the function of concentrating farmland fertilizers. 1At the end of the 1980s, the housing conditions of urban residents in China suddenly improved, and toilets began to enter families, which led to the demolition of a large number of public toilets in the expansion of residential buildings.
The rest of the public toilets are generally changed to flush toilets at this time. Its typical design is a tank that can manually control regular flushing or automatic water discharge instead of a cesspit. It was not until the 1990 s that it began to be replaced by squat toilets.
While the number of public toilets in cities has been greatly reduced, the floating population has increased sharply, and the shortage of public toilets has become a frequent public problem. So the first batch of public toilets came into being. However, it is still difficult to see them in densely populated areas of metropolises.
1995 65438+ 10. In October, China Youth Daily introduced the dung diggers in Beijing in The Last Dung in Beijing. A few years later, Beijing announced the plan to build public toilets, and the astronomical cost caused widespread resentment in other places. People who come to Beijing for the first time from a small place have seen the "toilet civilization" with their own eyes, which, like how to find a toilet, is far beyond their experience.
(20 13 Beijing Marathon, many runners "peed on the red wall" due to the shortage of mobile toilets)
The gap of "toilet civilization" also exists in developed countries. Gillian Ted, a reporter from the Financial Times, once compared the "toilet civilization" in Tokyo and new york where she worked: public toilets in Japanese office buildings are clean and open to everyone, while in new york, public toilets in many office buildings are rented and locked.
Her explanation is that Japan is a highly homogeneous mono-ethnic society, and people have highly similar behavior habits, so there is no need to worry about someone who doesn't know the rules and destroys health, while new york is a pluralistic society with extremely different habits. People who pay attention to hygiene will always face strangers who don't know the rules.
The gap of "toilet civilization" in new york is naturally far less than that in China today. Some public toilets in metropolis have evolved to have free toilet paper, toilet paper and dryer, but most people in China still need to remind them to "flush after defecation". There is a big gap in the "toilet civilization" in China society, and perhaps only India, where most citizens have not developed the habit of going to the toilet, is slightly better.
In terms of hardware, Hong Kong may be the place with the highest level of "toilet civilization" in the world.
Lenin once imagined in "On the Role of Gold at Present and after the Complete Victory of Socialism": "After we win in the world in the future, I think we will build some public toilets with gold on the streets of several largest cities in the world." The golden toilet did not appear in Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing, but was born in Hong Kong 200 1. Investor Lin Shirong specially put a complete set of Lenin in the golden toilet.
(Hong Kong Golden Toilet Interior)
After the opening of "free travel between Hong Kong and Macao", mainlanders poured into Hong Kong with golden toilets every day, which quickly enlarged the gap of "toilet civilization" in Hong Kong, surpassing Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou-just like Tokyo's "toilet civilization" suddenly fell to new york.
Shortly after the incident of mainland tourists letting children urinate in the street, some people used Google Maps to prove that there are actually many toilets within 500 meters of the scene, and there is no need to queue up. However, for most people in China today, it is no easier to find other toilets within 500 meters of Sai Yeung Choi South Street in Mong Kok than to find a golden toilet with a linear distance of only 2200 meters.