Closestools, crappers, and horse buckets
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Big news from China yesterday:
"2,200-year-old flush toilet — oldest ever found — unearthed at palace ruins in China"
Aspen Pflughoeft, Miami Herald / Yahoo
Thu, February 16, 2023 at 5:37 PM EST
What a gift to humanity!
All the terms in the title of this post mean one or another kind of toilet, but function differently and date from different times and places. We've talked about many types of toilets on Language Log before (for a few see "Selected readings" below). Here I want to focus on two Chinese models, one dating to two millennia ago that was recently discovered archeologically, so we don't have a proper name for it yet, and an archaic-sounding one, mǎtǒng 馬桶 ("horse bucket"), that is the current, conventional, common term for the toilet across China.
I begin by deflating the Chinese claims that this is a flush toilet and that it is the first of its kind. For starters, the archeological reports do not provide sufficient information to draw any conclusions about what was above the stool part. At best, as reconstructed from bits and pieces, we have a receptacle for the waste with a pipe leading from the bottom through which the semi-liquid waste could be washed away.
Remarks from Elizabeth J. W. Barber:
Interesting– but I'd like to see the top of it before accepting their claim of "earliest"! They SEEM to assume that a servant had to POUR the flush-water– in that case they aren't even close to first. The Minoans had that kind of flush-toilet going into a special sewer pipe by 1600 BCE in the Palace at Knossos. And the fresh water to flush it was also piped in close by! :)) (The Minoans were amazing hydraulic engineers–I just taught my landscaper a lesson or two thanks to the Minoans.)
Observation from Miriam R. Dexter:
There were also toilets and sewer pipes in the mature Indus Valley culture, 2600-1900 BCE.
I have always pondered the improbable Mandarin word for "toilet", namely, mǎtǒng 馬桶 (lit., "horse bucket"). Turns out that it has to do with a naming taboo, a practice that was so common in premodern China that many good and important words were no longer usable because they had been occupied / claimed by some royal personage, leading to the proliferation of circumlocutions and substitutions.
During the Han Dynasty, the emperor's commode was called 虎子 (hǔzǐ). However, the grandfather of Emperor Gaozu of Tang was called 李虎 (Lǐ Hǔ). Because it was forbidden for common items to contain the given names of members of the imperial family (see Naming taboo), 虎子 was changed to 馬子／马子 (mǎzi), which morphed later into 馬桶.
(source) — follow the links for additional edification
Well, now, China has had a love affair with its ordure for millennia. According to this article by Rose George in Slate "In One End and Out the Burner" (10/10/08),
Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields. China’s use of “night soil,” as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations—the Maya, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust.
Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecal-phobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields. It has featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years.
This is a fascinating article, one that is warmly recommended for all who are interested in the history of Chinese crap up to the present century.
For the vexed etymology of the word "crapper", see the last paragraph of "Closestool encounters" (3/14/09), also the last two paragraphs of this Wikipedia article; Thomas Crapper (1836-19110) really was a 19th-century plumber and sanitary engineer who produced flush toilets worthy of kings and queens, but not because his surname has anything to do with the verb "crap", a word that existed with the meaning "defecate" from 1846, and derives
from a cluster of older nouns, now dialectal or obsolete, applied to things cast off or discarded (such as "weeds growing among corn" (early 15c.), "residue from renderings" (late 15c.), underworld slang for "money" (18c.), and in Shropshire, "dregs of beer or ale"), all probably from Middle English crappe "grain that was trodden underfoot in a barn, chaff" (mid-15c.), from French crape "siftings," from Old French crappe, from Medieval Latin crappa, crapinum "chaff." Related: Crapped; crapping.
(source)
As for the "Crapper" surname, it finds its "origins with the ancient Anglo-Saxons of England. It was given to one who worked as a mower, or field laborer. The surname Crapper was originally derived from the Old English word cropp, which means cut, which was quite common in Lancashire."
(source)
Selected readings
- "Closestool encounters" (3/14/09)
- "Toilet Revolution!!" (11/26/17) — see particularly the last comment for numerous articles on this subject in the Chinese press
- "How to use Eastern Latrine: Wilbur Sargunaraj" (12 years ago) — a genuine classic
Frans said,
February 20, 2023 @ 7:42 am
> For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields. China’s use of “night soil,” as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations—the Maya, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust.
But what about hookworm?