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. Its planning background began under Russian planners, who 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.[1][2]

Everyday living conditions changed as the city expanded: 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. This overview distinguishes that longer development from observations dated to the 1920s, including housing shortages and the tram figures for 1926; those later conditions should not be projected back to the Russian planning period.[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

Dalian's port economy provides local context for the movement of grain and soybeans; Vallaux's account dates to 1922.[6] Shandong and northeastern Chinese food traditions offer broader context for possible household meals: coarse grains, wheat flour, and soybeans could be prepared as gruels, steamed breads, noodles, pancakes, or dumplings, with vegetables and preserved foods alongside them. These examples are not a documented menu for every Dalian household. King's 1911 account concerns agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan and is used here as regional background, not direct evidence of the frequency of particular foods, meat consumption, or winter storage in Dalian homes.[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, irregular earnings could make meals uncertain. The labor arrangements described below place meals and beds within the contractor system, but do not establish a standard dockworker menu or a uniform daily meal schedule. Steamed bread, coarse-grain cakes, pickles, noodles, and gruel are possible examples drawn from the regional food context, rather than a verified ration list for Dalian's dormitories. The division of shopping, cooking, and food preservation among women, men, and children is likewise not established here for individual households. The scale of grain exports alone cannot show how securely a laboring family ate.

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]

Paid employment offers only part of the picture of household work. Sewing, laundering, food preparation, childcare, and help in a shop or lodging house are possible contributions to consider, but the evidence presented here does not establish how frequently Chinese or Japanese women performed each task in Dalian. Nor does it establish a common work routine for children. Some households may have combined wages with vending, boarders, or family business, but such arrangements should not be assumed for every family or assigned uniformly by nationality, gender, or age.

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]

The housing account above describes relatives and contractors as routes to a bed for arriving migrants. Such connections could offer practical help, but they do not by themselves establish a dependable system of loans, illness relief, or unemployment support. Family, native-place, and workplace ties may have provided mutual aid; its reach and reliability in Dalian remain uncertain in this account. Access through a contractor could also involve dependence, as the labor arrangements described above indicate.

Leisure opportunities should be distinguished from evidence of participation. The parks, cafés, restaurants, department stores, markets, and bathhouses mentioned in this account suggest possible places to spend time outside work. They do not establish how often particular residents visited them, or support a fixed division between Chinese and Japanese leisure routines. Time, income, and access could limit participation; a shared urban setting should not be taken as evidence of equal access.

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]

Port machinery and electric transport did not establish what equipment a particular household owned. The housing section describes coal stoves or heated platforms in crowded rooms and the possibility of gas, electricity, and piped water in better-serviced homes. Pots, kettles, wash tubs, needles, buckets, and storage jars are plausible examples of domestic equipment, but no household inventory is supplied here to establish a standard set for Dalian. Access to services and reliance on manual work should therefore be understood through the qualified housing examples rather than a universal list of possessions.

Clothing and Materials

The Royal Ontario Museum's account of daily wear in the late Qing and early Republic offers broader Chinese clothing context, rather than a survey of Dalian wardrobes. Cotton jackets and trousers, gowns, and women's jacket-and-skirt or jacket-and-trouser combinations are contextual examples, not a verified inventory for every local household. Discussion of simplified modern cuts and early forms of the qipao by the 1920s likewise belongs to that broader context; their local uptake among Dalian's students and prosperous women is not established here. Occupation, income, and winter conditions could influence clothing choices, but the museum reference should not be read as direct evidence of what Dalian dockworkers wore or how often local households used cotton rather than silk.[9]

For Japanese residents, kimono, work garments, uniforms, and Western-style clothing are possible forms of dress, but the evidence presented here does not establish their distribution by occupation or household in Dalian. Warm layers could help meet winter conditions, and mending or reusing cloth could extend a garment's life. Specific routines such as cutting adult garments down for children, replacing linings, or saving scraps for quilts should be treated as possibilities rather than documented practices shared by Dalian households. The same caution applies to assumptions about laundering, ironing, and how long dormitory residents kept their clothes.

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. The housing and labor examples show how finding a room, securing work, and obtaining services could shape ordinary routines. More detailed accounts of meals, domestic work, leisure, and clothing remain qualified where local household evidence is not established.

Related pages

• Daily life in Tianjin during the early 20th century
• Daily life in Fushun during the early 20th century
• Daily life in Shanghai during the early 20th century
• Daily life for a porter

References

1. Hess, C. A. (2006). From Colonial Jewel to Socialist Metropolis: Dalian, 1895–1955 (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zb7n2x9
2. Perrins, R. J. (1998). Great Connections: The Creation of a City, Dalian, 1905–1931: China and Japan on the Liaodong Peninsula (Doctoral dissertation, York University). Library and Archives Canada. https://library-archives.canada.ca/eng/services/services-libraries/theses/Pages/item.aspx?idNumber=1006544011
3. Kwon, K. (2016). A study on Dalian, a colonial city, and the living spaces of its residents. History & the Boundaries, 98, 127–158. https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART002093089
4. Si, L. (2014). A study of “Hainandiu” immigrants in Dalian: Dock coolies, 1905–1937. Journal of North-East Asian Cultures, 39, 229–247. https://doi.org/10.17949/jneac.1.39.201406.013
5. Nakanishi, R. (2016). Formation of the Japanese colonial city of Dalian: A focus on the backgrounds of successful Japanese businessmen and elites. Geographical Review of Japan Series B, 88(2), 86–95. https://doi.org/10.4157/geogrevjapanb.88.86
6. Vallaux, C. (1922). Le port de Dairen, en Mandchourie. Annales de Géographie, 31(169), 44–53. https://www.persee.fr/doc/geo_0003-4010_1922_num_31_169_10239
7. Xiang, Y., & Nishizawa, Y. (2024). A study on complex buildings with residence in Dairen during the first half of the 20th century. Journal of Architecture and Planning, 89(818), 731–742. https://doi.org/10.3130/aija.89.731
8. King, F. H. (1911). Farmers of Forty Centuries; or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. https://agri-history.ihns.ac.cn/books/Farmers%20of%2040%20centuries/ffc16.html
9. Royal Ontario Museum. (n.d.). Daily Wear in Late Qing Dynasty and Early Republic Period. https://www.rom.on.ca/collections-researches/rom-research/daily-wear-late-qing-dynasty-and-early-republic-period