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The issue of death has loomed large in Chinese cities in the modern era. Throughout the Republican period, Shanghai swallowed up lives by the thousands. Exposed bodies strewn around in public spaces were a threat to social order as well as to public health. In a place where every group had its own beliefs and set of death and funeral practices, how did they adapt to a modern, urbanized environment? How did the interactions of social organizations and state authorities manage these new ways of thinking and acting?
Recent historiography has almost completely ignored the ways in which death created such immense social change in China. Now, Scythe and the City corrects this problem. Christian Henriot's pioneering and original study of Shanghai between 1865 and 1965 offers new insights into this crucial aspect of modern society in a global commercial hub and guides readers through this tumultuous era that radically redefined the Chinese relationship with death.
— Matthew Sommer
"Henriot probes the question of how the city treated its working masses when they became dead bodies. The industrializing city steadfastly pushed graveyards out while the Sino-Japanese War witnessed numerous 'bodies without masters,' disproportionately of children dying in public places. This is a powerful work and a must-read for all readers enamored with Shanghai's famed splendor."
— Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California
"A city of death: though grim, this is Shanghai in the early twentieth century. Henriot's excellent book shows the unexpected intersections of modernity and traditional custom, whether in the rise of the coffin industry or local guilds' handling of funeral rites. This volume breaks ground as powerfully as the shovels that created Shanghai's modern cemeteries."
— Rana Mitter
"Based on extensive archival research, Christian Henriot's groundbreaking book Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai offers an original perspective on the subject of death—a previously overlooked aspect by which Shanghai modernity deems to be re-defined....The breadth and depth of archival research on historiography of death in modern Shanghai that the book presents is unmistakably pioneering."
— Lei Ping
The introduction offers various paths on the study of death in China and Europe, while it also sets the stage for the study of death in Shanghai proper.
This chapter is an attempt to take the measure of death in the city through the reconstruction of demographic series and a study of the causes of death. It establishes not just the quantitative parameters of death in the city. It also unveils the dramatic condition in which most urbanites lived, their lives and hopes cut short by disease, malnutrition, work conditions, and so on. The chapter demonstrates Shanghai was a gigantic whirlpool that drew its vitality from the masses of migrants that moved into the city.
The second chapter examines the role of community organizations, especially the guilds and charities, in the management of death in the city. Up to the 1920s, before the emergence of commercial funeral companies, community organizations were the sole social actors that took care of the disposal of dead bodies. This chapter also studies the earlier forms of regulation by the imperial administration and the foreign municipal authorities.
. This chapter takes up the new trend commercial funeral companies set in motion from the mid-1920s, when an American company established the first funeral parlor, to the extraordinary boom during the Sino-Japanese War and its problematic legacy, a full-blown ghost city in the midst of Shanghai, in the postwar and early Communist period.
Due to the particular political and spatial configuration of the city, the space devoted to the final resting place was sharply divided and fragmented. This chapter focuses on the process of transformation of Chinese burial grounds and the rise of modern cemeteries in the twentieth century. It examines the role of private companies in the light of the official prescriptions from the state and the inability of local municipal authorities to respond adequately to social demand.
This chapter addresses the specific issue of the colonial space of death that private individuals and communities, but mostly the two foreign municipal councils, created through the establishment and management of cemeteries reserved to foreigners, with only very few exceptions. In pre-1949 Shanghai, foreign cemeteries established a trail of permanent and temporary burial grounds in the core urban area.
This chapter examines the issue of the invisible deaths, those of the most destitute, especially infants and children, whose bodies ended up in back alleys, vacant land, almost everywhere in the city. This was the most gruesome aspect of death as despite its unthinkable magnitude it dissolved under a veil of social invisibility.
Death had a price. From the performance of funeral rituals, to funeral apparels, and to funeral processions, death (re)created a complete hierarchy in even sharper lines than among the living. Funerals were a central rite of passage in which families invested considerable amounts of money, as much as they could afford, sometimes beyond their means. This chapter provides keys to situate the importance of funeral ceremonies in Chinese death culture and to establish the parameters of inclusion/exclusion of various social groups. It also examines the fundamental issue of the price of death and the economy of death in Shanghai.
Earth burial was the fundamental way of disposing of the dead. Yet other forms emerged, for example, cremation. This chapter is devoted to the introduction of cremation in Shanghai and its slow diffusion until the war made it a compulsory measure to dispose of the unclaimed bodies of the poor. The image of cremation as a curse goes a long way to explain the strong resistance of the population and the cautious approach the authorities took, even after 1950, in promoting it. Yet, by the Cultural Revolution, this had become a standard practice.
All through the late imperial and Republican period, customs and practices changed along with the emergence of new funeral organizations and the effect of official regulation. Yet the core set of beliefs and practices evolved slowly until the new Communist regime challenged the whole death culture. The final chapter examines the measures through which the CCP took over the control of all organizations involved in the management of death and reorganized drastically the funeral social landscape.