Agreed, this is quite baffling. The only answer I can think of is that India hasn't been prioritizing education in rural communities. Population is not a valid excuse: do people still shit where they drink in China?
I'm more understanding when it comes to the lack of basic sanitation facilities, but lack of education is inexcusable in this day and age!
China used night soil as fertilizer historically; they don't anymore (when was the practice abandoned, I wonder? And is there any Chinese interest in terra preta?), but it got them into great habits. The same is true for at least Korea and Japan; I don't know as much about Southeast Asia.
Only drinking hot drinks also helped China's health. Fernand Braudel, in The Structures of Everyday Life, discusses this in passing; even 17th-century observers felt that it would be better for the Spanish colonials to adopt Chinese practice in the Philippines rather than keeping their custom of drinking everything iced. (Where did they get the ice?) Braudel also mentions a case where St. Francis Xavier drank a cup of cold water, to the horror of his Chinese entourage, who warned him not to keep up such a dangerous practice...
Many different cities around the world have an "icehouse" street - the origin of the name being obvious. However, I know of an "icehouse" street in Hong Kong and I always wonder "when the icehouse was here, and this street was named for it, where in the world were they getting ice?"
I know you can pack ice in sawdust and straw, etc., and keep it for the summer, but Hong Kong is a very, very long journey from anywhere that freezes in the winter ... where were they bringing ice from ?
The trouble is that the ice trade is 19th-century, but Braudel quoted a source from the 17th century about taking everything iced.
Can any Filipino reader comment on whether snow ever falls there? I didn't see any snowcaps on Google Satellite View, but that's not the best of sources...
The hot water thing was nothing more than a method to kill bacteria AFAIK. In much of Europe the preferred way of doing that was to produce beer.
Many East Asians to this day still believe that hot water is better for your health, even when filtered water is cheap and plentiful. If you ask for water at a restaurant it will inevitably be warm. I've had people express concern when drinking cold water during the winter, or when I'm sick.
"In much of Europe the preferred way of doing that was to produce beer."
In much of Europe the preferred way of doing that was indeed to use alcohol, but in more than one form. Beer's usage, compared to other alcoholic beverages, was higher only in germanic and western slavic regions (like Czech). The french, the spanish, greeks, romanians, and maybe others in the Balkan Peninsula, preferred wine. Eastern slavic and northern Europe had their vodka-like beverages. Europe is not only Germany, mind you!
No. China has historically used toilets. In fact, the earliest documented case of a flushing toilet date from the Han dynasty ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/851957.stm ) , which is more than 2000 years old, but that's rare. Most Chinese toilets were buckets in a separate room. China historically used night soil as fertilizers. These bucket toilets were carried out of the house and later used to fertilize crops. This is the reason why the Chinese never had salad or any uncooked vegetables as part of their cuisine. They might not have known about germs but they did draw the correlation between uncooked vegetables and being ill.
That's disgusting honestly. Doesn't that pose a health hazard to the people who consume that meat? I don't eat pork so I never knew how filthy pigs can be!
Feeding shit and trash to pigs, and other animals like chickens or rabbits, used to be a common custom in European countries as well. It's not as terrible as it sounds, since for the most time these animals don't get infected by human germs, effectively acting as a kind of walking antibiotic bag, and therefore it's an acceptable way of disposing of residues and getting some extra food at the same time.
I've heard plenty of anecdotes from this decade that toddlers in rural China commonly poop onto the street, and that public toilets on e.g. buses are too messy to be hygienic.
Better than doing it in one's own drinking water, but I think what saves the Chinese is not education, but a tradition of cooking absolutely everything (see sibling posts).
It's far beyond "toddlers in rural China commonly poop in the street".
In downtown Shanghai I got to watch a mother walk out of her business holding her child, have the child crap on the sidewalk (while being held in the mothers' arms), and then brought back inside. This was not a baby. The kid looked about 3-4 years old.
This goes on in subway stations as well. The parent has the kid sit on the edge of a garbage can and crap into it.
If you go you'll see the children commonly wear these lower garments with the whole groin area open. It's so the child can squat and pee or poo anywhere without needing adult attention. The child is taken to public parts in the city and around downtown like this.
Chinese public conscientiousness is far below anything you can imagine until you experience it.
A strong agrarian tradition where no piece of human waste is going to be left festering in the sun - somebody is going to pick it up and make good use of it. In all seriousness this has been the case until chemical fertilisers became cheap enough, before then every town had organised dung-gatherer guilds who organised daily cleanup of faeces in the street and sold the product to the farmers in rural areas. Even urine-soaked earth dug up in alleys can be sold as a source of nitrates.
A second and more ingrained reason is that young children are regarded to only have the intelligence of animals because you cannot reason with them like how pre-Christianity Romans thought, thus they are to be treated with the same level of respect that animals deserve: if kids want to relieve themselves, then it might as well happen on the spot because self-control is beyond their facilities.
Shanghai is also unusual among major Chinese cities that many households in the old town are not serviced by sewage lines. Instead everybody bought their nightly waste to public septic tanks and pour it down a chute before a vacumm truck takes the load away every few weeks. Thus the residents are typically less fazed at the sight of faecal matter than their compatriots.
I'm not sure I buy the first two explanations. Taiwan is culturally Chinese, but if someone takes a crap on the street it'd be a small news story. Usually it's blamed on mainland tourists.
I'd say it's more to do with development than anything else.
Having been to Taipei several times myself, I'd say that it is no better or worse than any Asian city. but that's really just prejudice. I will concede, however, that Taiwan had the value of hygiene worked into them during the Japanese rule. In the first ten years of the 20th century, there was 49 newspaper reports of public urination leading to a formal warning by the police in Taihoku alone (ironically, more than half of these high-profile cases were perpetuated by Japanese), and public record shows that thousands of people of all sorts of background were fined every year for the same offense that did not make it to the news.[0] This really goes to show that the colonial government took the concept of hygiene very seriously, but even today some people will just do as they please.[1]
I've never heard anyone complain about that stuff in Taipei the same way they complain about it in Mainland cities. But it's not like I've been taking surveys.
Living in China I've noticed that the attitude towards the very young does seem really similar to the attitude they have towards their pets. It's always been so baffling.
It's hard to find a book or non-paywalled journal article on top of my head, but the thesis below touches on the basic premise of the Chinese view on children.
In short, Confucian scholars view personhood not as something gifted at conception or birth, but a learned virtue that develops progressively as each person lives through different stages of their lives. Thus rearing young children is not unlike taming a wild animal and a lot of nasty things kids do can be forgiven on the basis that they have not learned the proper way to act yet.
The ugly side of this thinking is that this naturally restricts youth rights since they are saw as an extension of the will of their parents; indeed one can argue that children are never fully independent until the death of their parents absolves them of these control and responsibilities. On the other hand, Confucianism has always been ambivalent if not indifferent to topics very touchy in the Judeo-Christian tradition such as abortion and infanticide, because the victims have not had a chance to develop their personhood yet, and thus these acts are sometimes considered deplorable but never compared to murder.
I'm currently reading a reprint of a 110 year old book about how China and Japan have kept their farms fertile for 4000 years.
The basics are lots of elbow grease, and continuous application of river silt and (aged?) animal and human sewage.
It occurs to me that this book predates both industrialization (factory effluent) and the last cholera outbreaks. Which makes me wonder what sort of sweeping agricultural practice changes came in subsequent decades.
Would appreciate a title if you run across it again and remember this request.
The term of art in the West is "anthroponics". A related subreddit [1] seems to currently focus upon using human urine in agriculture (with some really fascinating results of using watermelon seeds to sterilize the urine). Human feces given to black soldier flies and feeding their larvae to chickens and tilapia as a high-protein supplement might be more workable and timely than turning then feces into compost, and if scalable it could add a lot of new capacity to developed world sewer systems.
I'm more understanding when it comes to the lack of basic sanitation facilities, but lack of education is inexcusable in this day and age!