Abstract
The first Chinese-owned modern soap factory was established in Tianjin in 1903, and by the 1930s Tianjin was home to more than 30 large and small soap factories that served markets all over North China. Soap was one of the most important of the new daily use commodities whose import in the late 19th–early 20th centuries triggered efforts by Chinese manufacturers to produce imitations . Frank Dikötter described the process by which factories and workshops in China came to produce such daily use items as “copy culture .” As many of the chapters in this book argue, copying often led to disputes over brand names , and Chinese and other Asian producers were accused of producing “fakes.” The Tianjin soap industry is an unusual example of an industry that developed out of a top-down government initiative to promote light industry in cooperation with a foreign competitor—i.e. Japan. The first part of the paper charts the rise of the Tianjin soap industry, beginning from a government training school that sent apprentices to work in Japanese soap making factories, through the founding of the first soap factory, and the creation over several decades of more than 30 smaller factories. The proliferation of manufacturers and the hyper-competition that resulted led to lower prices, which helped to spread the consumption of soap. The second part of the paper looks at the creation of the market for soap, describing the ways people washed clothes and washed their bodies. Finally it turns to the question of how soap was marketed in North China.
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Notes
- 1.
The lower estimate comes from a 1935 comprehensive report on the Tianjin soap industry TJZGZ. The higher estimate can be found in Sun and Huan (2005, p. 50). A list of Tianjin soap companies during the Beiyang government period, 1912–1928, (Editorial Committee for the Tianjin Shanghui Archives 1992, 3: 2967–2973) includes some 60 firms. The list provides founding dates, but does not indicate whether firms survived.
- 2.
Various dates have been given for the founding of the company: 1903, when Song Zejiu first began to recruit investment capital, 1904 when the first soap was produced, and 1905 when the company was officially registered as a limited liability company (Xu 1999). The Tianjin Soap Company was not the first soap factory in Tianjin. A Japanese firm, Sōmo, had set up a small soap factory employing 10 workers in 1896, but it was not able to make profits and went out of business.
- 3.
The other two included a match factory and a candle factory.
- 4.
Yan (1882–1935) was the second son of Yan Xiu (Yan Fansun), an important education reformer in the late Qing and early Republican period. Yan Xiu was the scion of a salt merchant family. He earned a jinshi degree in 1883, and served as supervisor of education in Guizhou province where he promoted new style education. Retiring to Tianjin, he continued his activities to promote education, visiting Japan and studying the Japanese school system. He went on to found a new-style “family school” and a women’s school. The family school developed into the Nankai High School and Nankai University. Yan sent all of his sons to Japan for higher education. Zhiyi studied engineering, and went on to a very successful career as a proponent of modern industry. He headed the Commercial Products Exhibition Hall, managed the Tianjin Soap Company, served as head of the Zhili provincial industrial bureau, the trademarks bureau, and as head of the provincial educational bureau under the Guomindang government (Tianjin Difang Shizhi Editorial Committee 1987, pp. 132–133).
- 5.
Shina was published by the research and editorial bureau of the Tōa Dōbun kai. This special issue included reports on all of the important commodities in the “miscellaneous goods” trade with China.
- 6.
There were frequent reports in government gazettes (gongbao) and newspapers about legal action over infringement of trademarks .
- 7.
Another rural study by the famous sociologist Li Jinghan on rural villages outside Beijing also reported small expenditures on soap and other sanitation items (Li 1935).
- 8.
Accounts of the bath and shower facilities come from two “diaries” held in the Heng Yuan archive at the Tianjin Municipal Archives. One of the diaries is a record of daily activities of the personnel department and the other is a record of daily activities kept by the dormitory managers.
- 9.
Original field notes from the Nankai Economic Research Institute’s sociological survey of Gaoyang in the mid 1930s note that soap was for sale in small “mom and pop” stores in one of the villages where the research team lived for a short time, and that good quality toilet soap was provided by the town’s bathhouses.
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Grove, L. (2017). Technology Transfer, Imitation and Local Production: The Soap Industry in Early Twentieth-Century Tianjin. In: Furuta, K., Grove, L. (eds) Imitation, Counterfeiting and the Quality of Goods in Modern Asian History. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3752-8_9
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