What Hygiene Was Like For Peasants in Imperial China

Most people picture the past as simply dirty. The reality in imperial China was sharper and sadder: cleanliness was divided by class, and the cost of being "clean" fell hardest on women. This is the true story of everyday hygiene for ordinary people under the Han, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties, told through the real life of Ning Lao Taitai, a poor girl from Shandong whose feet were bound at the age of nine. We cover soap-bean pods and public bathhouses, the bristle toothbrush found in a tenth-century Liao tomb, the daily ordeal of washing bound feet, the postpartum confinement month with no bathing, lead-white face powder, the silence around menstruation, and the night-soil economy that spread parasites to rich and poor alike. Accurate, sourced, and centered on the women history left out. Who was really the lucky one: the refined woman, or the woman left alone? 📌 Chapters and key topics: peasant daily life, footbinding and hygiene, Song dynasty bathhouses, zuo yuezi confinement, Chinese women's history, schistosomiasis, history of the toothbrush. #ChineseHistory #ImperialChina #WomensHistory #Footbinding #QingDynasty #SongDynasty #History #Documentary SOURCES Scholarship Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (University of California Press, 2005) Laurel Bossen & Hill Gates, Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China (Stanford University Press, 2017) Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960–1665 (1999) Barbara Pillsbury, "Doing the Month: Confinement and Convalescence of Chinese Women After Childbirth," Social Science & Medicine (1978) S.L. Cummings et al., on bound feet and mobility in elderly women, American Journal of Public Health (1997) Primary sources and memoir Ida Pruitt, A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (Yale University Press, 1945) — the life of Ning Lao Taitai Sun Simiao, Beiji Qianjin Yaofang (Essential Formulas Worth a Thousand Gold, Tang dynasty) Wu Zimu, Mengliang Lu (record of Southern Song Hangzhou) F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911) — night-soil and the closed-loop fertilizer system Marie Haslep, "Notes on Foot Binding," China Medical Missionary Journal (1893); J. Preston Maxwell, "On the Evils of Chinese Foot-Binding," China Medical Journal (1916) Archaeology and medicine Hui-Yuan Yeh et al., "Early evidence for travel with infectious diseases along the Silk Road," Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2016) — Xuanquanzhi latrine parasites Mawangdui Han Tomb No. 1 findings (Lady Dai / Xin Zhui), Changsha — schistosomiasis and intestinal parasites Zhou Zongqi (1956) and the Liao tomb (Chifeng, dated 959 CE) bone toothbrush excavation reports Collins et al., "Schistosomiasis control and the health system in P.R. China," on mid-twentieth-century infection estimates