The Shanghai Steam Laundry & the Municipal Politics of Laundries in the International Settlement

I know the title of this post sounds like the most boring Phd on China ever but as temperatures in Shanghai hit 102F with 94% humidity think yourself lucky you’re not working in the Shanghai Steam Laundry. However, if you’re running out of clean shirts in the long, sticky days you might glad of these guys….the Shanghai Steam Laundry was on Thorburn Road (now Tongbei Road) out east, just past Tilanqiao, in Yangtszepoo. Of course, if you needed their services, you didn’t have to drag yourself out to Thorburn Road in person – they sent someone round to collect your laundry. Presumably, as a worried tourist in a strange city, you could rest easy in the knowledge that the establishment was “under European management”.

You could also trust the Shanghai Steam Laundry because all laundries in the International Settlement were required to be registered with the Municipal Council and were regularly inspected. If they were found to be unsanitary then they were prosecuted – most were Chinese-run and cases did come up before the Mixed Court and laundries did lose their licenses. The Shanghai Steam Laundry had been around since the start of the century – certainly it was licensed in 1907 by the SMC. Not sure about that European Management claim though – the laundry’s license was issued to a certain Y. Tarui. Originally the laundry had premises out at 451 Weihaiwei Road (Weihai Road) in western Shanghai before moving to Thorburn Street (where it also moved premises up and down the street a few times over the years – No.8 in 1930, moving to No.537 in the late 1930s). Weihaiwei Road was Shanghai’s laundry district – in the early 1900s over half a dozen large scale laundries were registered on the road. The other major street of laundries was Chungking Road (now Chongqing North Road) – indeed most of Shanghai major laundries were clustered at the corner of these two roads (right about where the Four Seasons Hotel is now).

No less an authority on Shanghai than the great Arthur de Carle Sowerby noted that the Shanghai Steam Laundry was probably the city’s first modern (that is to say completely steam operated) laundry – by the time of the First World War it was already in larger premises in Thorburn Road and employing 120 workers. (BTW: if you really do want more on laundries in Shanghai see de Carle Sowerby’s article “Shanghai’s Dirty Linen” in vol.23 of the China Journal from 1935 though I cannot imagine anyone but myself spending time perusing this article!)

When your washing was picked up by the laundry’s “coolie” you were issued with a “Municipal Distributing Ticket” which proved the laundry was registered with the SMC and not one of the notoriously unhygienic illegal laundries that were mostly out of the Settlement over in Pootung (Pudong).