Ordinary heritage of the ordinary people: Hong Kong's public bathhouses

Abstract

As early as in the late nineteenth century when bubonic plague was severe, public bathhouses had appeared in the form of matshed and accommodated in rental tenements by the government in the City of Victoria. With a view to providing a desirable public health environment, the first public bathhouse was constructed in Wan Chai in 1903, in which time the amended Public Health and Buildings Ordinance came to effect. Numbers of public bathhouses serving the poor working Chinese in the City of Victoria followed. Not until 1925 public bathhouses were built beyond the Hong Kong Island, constructions reached its peak during the post-war years of 1950s – 1960s. As at 2012, a total number of 28 public bathhouses are managed to survive in Hong Kong.

According to the statistics provided by the government reports, average daily attendance of a public bathhouse was high before the wartime. Today, though many members of the society find odd on their existence, they remain servicing in some older districts where poor housing accommodation still exists.

This dissertation aims at, by desktop study on the public bathhouse in urban Hong Kong (those on the Hong Kong Island in particular) and the referential instances of the development of public bathhouse in history and it in the Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the Imperial China (Chapter 1), to trace the development of the public bathhouse in Hong Kong, how it reflects the development of the society and the community (Chapters 2 & 3), to provide a list of inventory of the general design and basic information for those surviving on the Hong Kong Island (Chapter 4) and to raise questions on the cultural significances and the means of conservation of such changing (and disappearing) heritage item that relates to the way we live (Chapter 5).

The scope of the research is confined to the public bathhouses managed by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (The Sanitary Board and Urban Council as the forerunners) on the Hong Kong Island (7 nos. in total) where the first public bathhouse in Hong Kong was built and some long-standing ones still exist, meanwhile post-war constructions in various phases are available.