Daily Life History

Daily life in Dalian during the early 20th century

A grounded look at a Manchurian port where railway offices, soybean warehouses, tramlines, Chinese market streets, Japanese residential districts, and migrant dock labor shaped ordinary routines.

Early 20th-century Dalian, then commonly written as Dairen in English, was a new city built around a deep-water port at the southern end of the Liaodong Peninsula. Russian planners laid out its first radial avenues and administrative center from 1898; after 1905, Japanese authorities and the South Manchuria Railway Company expanded the port, railways, streets, utilities, and residential districts. The city linked Manchurian soybeans, grain, and coal to overseas shipping and brought imported cloth, machinery, and manufactured goods inland. Its population rose from about 18,000 in 1906 to approximately 200,000 in 1926, with Chinese residents forming the majority and a large Japanese settler community holding political and economic advantages. For ordinary people, Dalian's celebrated modernity was uneven: tramcars, electric lights, hospitals, parks, and paved boulevards existed beside crowded tenements, migrant dormitories, shacks, and streets where water, fuel, and waste still had to be managed by hand.[1][2]

Housing and Living Spaces

Dalian's housing reflected an urban plan divided by function, ethnicity, and class. Japanese officials, railway employees, professionals, and prosperous merchants often lived east or south of the commercial center in planned neighborhoods of detached houses, hillside villas, or orderly rows along tree-lined streets. Better-serviced homes could have glass windows, piped water, electricity, and gas for cooking. Rooms were organized for sleeping, dining, receiving visitors, and household work, and company employees sometimes obtained housing through the South Manchuria Railway. Wealthy Chinese merchants could also secure substantial houses in favored districts, but access depended more on money and connections than on the nominal openness of the city.[1][3]

Most Chinese residents lived in denser western districts, especially Xiaogangzi, later known as Xigang. Its narrow commercial streets combined shops, workshops, restaurants, rented rooms, and small courtyards. A family might cook, sleep, sew, store goods, and conduct business in one or two rooms. Coal stoves or heated platforms helped households endure cold, windy winters, while bedding, grain sacks, trunks, ceramic jars, and work tools filled limited space. Landlords and shopkeepers divided buildings as demand increased. Mixed-use apartment and commercial buildings appeared during the housing shortages of the 1920s, but new construction did not remove overcrowding.[1][7]

Migrant laborers faced the harshest conditions. Many men arriving from Shandong first found beds through relatives, labor contractors, lodging houses, or shacks around Siergou near the docks. From 1911 the Hekizanso complex, called the Red House by Chinese residents, placed thousands of dockworkers in long brick dormitories under contractor supervision. Other workers and their families formed settlements close to the port, railway yards, and factories, trading comfort for a shorter walk to uncertain employment. Shared wells, taps, privies, bathhouses, food stalls, alleys, and courtyards extended domestic life beyond the room. Carrying water and coal, airing bedding, patching paper or glass windows, removing ash, mending roofs, and washing soot from floors were recurring tasks. The contrast between a serviced company house and a crowded laborer's bed was not incidental; it was built into the geography of the colonial city.[4]

Food and Daily Meals

Chinese households drew on the food traditions of Shandong and northeastern China. Sorghum, millet, maize, wheat flour, and soybeans were everyday staples, made into gruels, steamed breads, noodles, pancakes, and dumplings. Cabbage, radish, scallions, garlic, bean curd, bean sprouts, and salted or pickled vegetables supplied inexpensive variety. Pork, eggs, fish, and shellfish from the coast appeared when income allowed, but poorer families often used a small amount of meat or oil to flavor a larger grain or vegetable dish. Tea or hot water accompanied meals. Winter encouraged households to store grain, coal, dried foods, and crocks of pickles because fresh produce became scarcer and dearer.[6][8]

Japanese residents created an overlapping food economy of rice, miso, soy sauce, pickles, noodles, fish, vegetables, tea, and imported or locally manufactured foods. Railway employees and office workers might carry boxed midday meals, eat in a company dining room, or visit cafés and restaurants in the central shopping streets. Department stores and specialist shops displayed Japanese and Western groceries to residents with disposable income. Korean migrants, sailors, and other travelers added further tastes to the port. Yet the busiest everyday trade took place in neighborhood markets, small groceries, street stalls, and inexpensive restaurants. Xiaogangzi's shops competed for Chinese and Japanese customers, while vendors near the docks and stations served laborers who could not return to their lodgings between jobs.[1]

For dockworkers and other day laborers, meals followed the hiring cycle. Contractors who supplied lodging often also controlled food, subtracting its cost from earnings. Steamed bread, coarse-grain cakes, pickles, noodles, and hot gruel were portable, filling, and cheap. Work could begin before daylight, so cooks in dormitories and stalls prepared food early; a missed hiring call could mean a missed meal. In family homes, women and older children commonly bought small quantities, carried water and fuel, washed grain, kneaded dough, tended stoves, preserved vegetables, and stretched leftovers into soup. Mechanical refrigeration was rare, making daily shopping and salting, drying, or pickling important. Although Dalian exported enormous quantities of soybeans and grain through its modern harbor, the food security of a laboring household still depended on wages, market prices, storage space, and careful domestic work.

Work and Labor

The port concentrated manual labor. Dockworkers carried soybean sacks, bean cake, grain, coal, timber, cotton goods, and machinery between rail wagons, warehouses, lighters, and steamships. Cargo handling was paid by the day or by the amount moved. Work required strength more than formal training, so it attracted rural migrants, especially men crossing the Bohai Gulf from Shandong. Labor bosses assembled gangs, arranged meals and beds, allocated jobs, and took deductions from pay. A worker's income varied with ship arrivals, weather, trade, physical health, and the favor of the contractor. Long hours, dust, heavy loads, slippery quays, moving wagons, and winter cold made injury and exhaustion ordinary risks.[4][6]

The railway-port system supported many other occupations. Locomotive workers, mechanics, boilermakers, fitters, carpenters, electricians, signal staff, engine crews, clerks, telegraph operators, warehousemen, customs employees, and cart drivers kept freight moving. The large Shahekou railway works repaired and built rolling stock and employed both Chinese and Japanese workers, though pay, promotion, and access to skilled positions were unequal. Ship repair, construction, gas and electric works, printing, food processing, oil pressing, metalworking, and chemical production broadened the industrial economy. Factory whistles and railway timetables imposed clock-based routines, while small workshops continued to organize work around masters, apprentices, family labor, and customer demand.[1]

Commerce was just as important. Chinese wholesalers and shopkeepers handled grain, food, clothing, fuel, lodging, transport, and household goods, particularly in Xiaogangzi. Japanese trading houses, banks, shipping companies, and the South Manchuria Railway controlled much of the largest-scale capital and infrastructure. Offices required accountants, translators, typists, messengers, and cleaners; hotels and prosperous homes employed cooks, servants, laundresses, and gardeners. Education and Japanese-language ability improved access to clerical work. The city's Japanese business elite included railway officials, merchants, and manufacturers whose careers and school connections reached back to Japan and other colonial cities.[5]

Women's paid work was less visible in surviving records but remained essential. Chinese women sold food, sewed, laundered, kept shops or lodging houses, worked as domestic servants, and helped with family businesses. Japanese women managed households, taught, nursed, served customers, and joined family enterprises; poorer settler households also depended on their unpaid labor. Children fetched water, minded siblings, delivered meals, swept shops, and learned trades. Across communities, a household rarely depended on one task alone: wages could be combined with boarders, vending, repair work, credit from a shopkeeper, or money sent between Dalian and a home village.

Social Structure

Colonial authority structured Dalian's social hierarchy. Japanese administrators and the South Manchuria Railway governed important services and institutions, while Japanese residents generally received better housing, schools, jobs, and municipal provision than Chinese residents of similar means. At the top stood senior officials, railway executives, bankers, shipping agents, major merchants, industrialists, and property owners. A middle range of engineers, doctors, teachers, clerks, technicians, shopkeepers, skilled craftspeople, and small business families occupied more secure positions. Dock laborers, factory hands, rickshaw pullers, servants, hawkers, and recent migrants had less stable incomes and weaker claims on housing and services.[1][3]

Nationality did not erase differences within each community. A Japanese railway manager and a Japanese shop assistant did not share the same comfort, just as a wealthy Chinese merchant lived differently from a newly arrived Shandong laborer. Permanent residence, property, education, language, occupation, gender, and ties to officials or contractors all affected opportunity. Korean residents, Taiwanese students and professionals, and travelers from other parts of the empire occupied further positions within this unequal order. City planning encouraged separation, but markets, tramcars, workplaces, hospitals, and mixed streets brought communities into repeated contact. Children in border neighborhoods sometimes picked up words from one another even when they attended separate schools.[1]

Family and native-place ties provided practical security. Shandong migrants used relatives and fellow villagers to find a contractor, bed, meal, loan, or route home. Merchants formed chambers and associations; workers built connections through dormitory gangs and workplaces; temples, shrines, schools, religious organizations, and neighborhood groups supplied ritual and social settings. Funerals, seasonal festivals, New Year visits, weddings, and ancestor observances punctuated working routines. Mutual aid could soften illness or unemployment, but bosses, landlords, lenders, and senior relatives also exercised considerable power over dependents.

Leisure varied with time and income. Chinese residents gathered in markets, restaurants, bathhouses, teahouses, theaters, and temple events. Japanese districts offered parks, cinemas, cafés, department stores, sports grounds, and organized company recreation. Newspapers, advertising, and shop windows made new goods and fashions visible beyond the circle able to buy them. A tram ride could cross impressive boulevards and crowded commercial streets in minutes, revealing both the city's connected economy and its social boundaries. Modern public space did not create equal citizenship; it gave people of different status shared routes while regulating where they could live, study, and work.

Tools and Technology

Electric trams were Dalian's most conspicuous everyday technology. The first line opened in 1908; by 1926, about one hundred cars ran over 37 kilometers of track and provided roughly 60,000 rides a day. Trams connected the port, railway station, offices, commercial streets, residential districts, and industrial Shahekou, making longer commutes predictable. Fares still mattered to poor workers, so walking, bicycles, rickshaws, handcarts, horse carts, and contractor transport remained common. Railway clocks, whistles, printed schedules, telegraph messages, and telephones synchronized work across the port. Electric streetlights extended shopping hours and made the central avenues a nighttime spectacle.[1]

Large systems depended on small tools and human effort. Cranes, conveyors, locomotives, steamships, machine tools, boilers, and electric motors moved cargo and powered workshops, but men still used hooks, ropes, shoulder poles, barrows, shovels, hammers, files, and hand trucks. Shops relied on scales, abacuses, ledgers, seals, wrapping paper, and sewing machines. Homes used coal or gas stoves, iron pots, steamers, kettles, chopping boards, wash tubs, irons, needles, brooms, buckets, oil lamps, and ceramic storage jars. Access to piped water, gas, and electricity differed by neighborhood and rent. A household could live within sight of an electrically lit boulevard while carrying water, heating one room with coal, and repairing clothing by hand.

Clothing and Materials

Clothing had to suit a windy coastal climate, cold winters, humid summers, work, and public respectability. Chinese laboring men commonly wore cotton jackets and trousers, cloth shoes, caps, belts, and padded winter layers. Dockworkers chose garments that allowed lifting and could be washed or patched after contact with dust, oil, and cargo. Chinese merchants, clerks, and teachers might wear long gowns or neater jackets for business, while Western-style suits became more visible among professionals and students. Women's wardrobes included loose jackets with trousers or skirts; by the 1920s, urban students and prosperous women also adopted simplified modern cuts and early forms of the qipao. Most working households relied on durable cotton rather than silk.[9]

Japanese residents wore kimono, work garments, school and company uniforms, or Western-style suits, dresses, coats, hats, and leather shoes according to occupation. Railway and municipal uniforms made authority recognizable. Wool coats, padded cotton, felt, fur trim, gloves, scarves, and sturdy footwear were valuable in winter. Clothing was household property rather than disposable consumption: cuffs and knees were patched, linings replaced, adult garments cut down for children, and fabric scraps saved for quilts or cleaning. Laundering, brushing, airing, starching, and ironing demanded water, fuel, time, and skill. Department-store fashions occupied the same city as dormitory clothing worn until repair was no longer possible.

Daily life in early 20th-century Dalian was organized by connections: railway to harbor, warehouse to ship, migrant village to labor gang, and household budget to market price. The planned city offered fast trams, electric light, offices, schools, and modern utilities, but access followed colonial status, occupation, and income. Most residents experienced Dalian's growth through practical routines—finding a room, carrying coal and water, packing food, waiting for work, keeping to a timetable, mending clothes, and navigating districts that were economically intertwined but unequally served.

Related pages

References

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