{"id":2140,"date":"2026-11-08T16:28:24","date_gmt":"2026-11-08T16:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2026-11-08T16:30:53","modified_gmt":"2026-11-08T16:30:53","slug":"the-fate-of-a-shanghai-sanitarium-and-the-subtleties-of-spatial-hygienic-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/2026\/11\/the-fate-of-a-shanghai-sanitarium-and-the-subtleties-of-spatial-hygienic-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"The fate of a Shanghai sanitarium and the subtleties of spatial-hygienic imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

Browsing through the Shanghai Municipal Police Archive with an eye to materials related to health and hygiene, and influenced by my ongoing research interest in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, I decided to zoom in on the Archive\u2019s dedicated sections concerning the period of Japanese occupation in Shanghai. And I came across an interesting Special Branch report on the fate of a Chinese-owned sanitarium in 1939.1<\/a><\/sup> In the aftermath of the Japanese takeover of Shanghai, a sanitarium owned by the Chinese doctor Ting Wei Kong at No. 310 Hongqiao Road underwent a change in proprietorship. Located outside the International Settlement and the French Concession, which were exempt from Japanese occupation, Dr Kong leased the original premises to an Italian doctor, Dr Muto-Nardone, while the institution itself was relocated to No. 990\u2013992 Foch Avenue in the French Concession. Perhaps to obviate Japanese suspicion regarding the legality of the lease, the contract was made to appear as though the lease had taken place \u2018before the hostilities\u2019. Dr Muto-Nardone, despite never occupying the house or taking a single penny in rent, flew the Italian flag from the premises so that it would not be occupied by the Japanese. While a Russian proposal to take over the sanitarium in July fell through because of Japanese prohibitions on patients being taken to the premises, in September the lease was transferred to the Italian Consulate after Dr Muto-Nardone moved to Switzerland to attend to his ill children. By the time the report was compiled in December, the Japanese had struck a deal with the Italian Consulate to take over the sanitarium in exchange for payment. The anecdote of this sanitarium on Hongqiao Road forms an interesting conversation with the works of various authors who have addressed the idea of hygiene and its relationship with space. Specifically, it complicates the close identification of colonial administrative space with hygienic excellence, as illustrated by the existence of hygienic institutions outside Shanghai\u2019s foreign concessions.<\/p>\n

In the Asian \u2014 and very often colonial \u2014 context, conceptions of cleanliness, health, and hygiene were heavily regulated by colonial authorities and therefore conceptualised through frameworks of racial categorisation and spatial segregation. More specifically, white populations and the areas inhabited by them were often privileged in hygienic policies and imagined as spaces of modernity, civility, and cleanliness. In contrast, native quarters were characterised as filthy hotbeds of disease, while their populations were deemed inexorably retrograde, impervious to civilised reasoning, and incapable of hygienic behaviour. The idea of hygiene, far from being a neutral and innocent enterprise of progress, was closely bound up with racialised colonial thinking and the racially skewed spatiality that it produced. In the case of Singapore, Asian communities were stigmatised by colonial authorities as the prime culprits in spreading zymotic diseases because of their supposedly savage and unhygienic behaviours.2<\/a><\/sup> The Chinese, in particular, were castigated for their habits of huddling together and promiscuous spitting, while the dense neighbourhoods of Chinatown\u2014characterised by overcrowding and inadequate ventilation\u2014became an anathema to colonial hygienic sensibilities. A similar spatial-hygienic conceptualisation manifests itself even more lucidly in the French Indochinese city of Hanoi, where the stark juxtaposition between the European and indigenous quarters of the colonial city came to be seen as one of the most powerful proofs of France\u2019s mission civilisatrice. As Michael Vann vividly puts it, \u2018With its wide avenues lined with shady trees, large and luxurious villas with ample rooms, and regular\u2014even stiflingly rigid\u2014grid structure, the white (or European or French) quarter stood as a contrasting example of modernity in the face of the dirty, overcrowded, and backward native quarter, the Vietnamese neighbourhood of the Thirty-Six Streets\u2019.3<\/a><\/sup> Hence, as Vann traced later in his work, the enormous backlash when rats came to be discovered in the fine European sanctuaries in Hanoi.4<\/a><\/sup> What we can take from the cases of Singapore and Hanoi is that conceptions of hygiene and colonial space corresponded closely with one another. European quarters were characterised by clean streets, healthy environments, and, above all, an adherence to hygienic sensibilities and behaviours; indigenous quarters, on the other hand, represented their antithetical opposite, characterised by a lack, or even absence, of health and hygiene. While not a full-fledged colony like Hanoi and Singapore, Shanghai was nevertheless a city characterised by extraterritoriality and a pseudo-colonial social hierarchy. The apparent lack of direct colonial authority should not blind us to \u2018an entire social system and lifestyle that came to East Asia\u2019, one characterised by social and commercial hegemony and a privileged foreign presence.5<\/a><\/sup> It might therefore appear attractive to apply a similar spatial-hygienic framework to Shanghai: supposedly, the concessions represented spaces of superiority and cleanliness, while indigenous Shanghai represented a space of backwardness and ill health.<\/p>\n

Yet it is important to bear in mind that a dichotomous spatial-hygienic conception \u2014 conveying a sense of complete segregation between the two \u2014 is an impartial one, complicated as it was by porous interaction in reality. In her work on Singapore, Brenda Yeoh details British efforts to regulate hygiene in indigenous quarters, first through hygienic surveillance and later through more systematic reconstruction, over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This testifies at least to a British awareness of the need to regulate hygiene in indigenous quarters, regardless of what their motives might have been or whether they were ultimately successful.6<\/a><\/sup> The story of the Hongqiao Sanitarium in Shanghai tells an alternative but related tale. The very fact that there was a sanitarium outside the French Concession and International Settlement, and that it was owned by a Chinese doctor acknowledged as such by the Special Branch, is telling. While the report does not speak to the size or nature of the sanitarium, its subsequent relocation to the heart of the French Concession is suggestive: the sanitarium may have been quite sizeable, while its owner, Dr Ting, may have been well connected with foreign medical personnel or institutions, enabling the sanitarium to relocate to the French Concession and the premises to be leased to an Italian doctor. While perhaps not trumpeting it, this case complicates the spatial-hygienic segregation that the cases of Singapore and, to a greater extent, Hanoi might suggest. Just as British hygienic initiatives in Singapore penetrated the imagined boundaries of hygiene, the Hongqiao Sanitarium offers evidence of how health and hygiene might not have been strictly confined to areas of foreign presence in Shanghai. It has to be noted, however, that a great deal of ambiguity persists in this case. We do not yet know Dr Ting\u2019s background, nor do we know whether the sanitarium was a strictly Chinese or a joint Sino-Western enterprise. I also need to acquire a fuller picture of the specific spatial-hygienic imagination\u2014or imaginations\u2014that developed in Shanghai under circumstances similar to, yet distinct from, those of Singapore and Hanoi. This does not, however, detract from the value of the source. Rather, it provides an interesting perspective on the conceptions of hygiene and space in an Asian (pseudo-)colonial setting.<\/p>\n

  1. Shanghai Municipal Police Archive, 9599[C], \u2018Hungjao Sanitarium – taken over by Japanese Military\u2019, 15 December 1939, Roll 59. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Brenda Yoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment<\/i> (Singapore, 2003), pp. 90-101 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. Michael Vann, ‘Of Rats, Rice, and Race: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre, an Episode in French Colonial History\u2019, French Colonial History<\/i>, 4 (2003), p. 192. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. Ibid., pp. 195-196. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Jeremy Taylor, \u2018The Bund: Littoral Space of Empire in the Treaty Ports of East Asia\u2019, Social History, 27:2 (2002), p. 125. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  6. Yoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore<\/i>, pp. 123-125. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Browsing through the Shanghai Municipal Police Archive with an eye to materials related to health and hygiene, and influenced by my ongoing research interest in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, I decided to zoom in on the Archive\u2019s dedicated sections concerning the period of Japanese occupation in Shanghai. And I came across an interesting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2148,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/2148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spatialhistory.net\/cities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}