In February 2025, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) announced that Hong Kong’s sole surviving pre-war public bathhouse, located on Second Street in Sai Ying Pun, will close down due to low usage. The fate of the Grade II historical building has not yet been decided, but come June 1st, it will close its doors for the last time.
This century-old bathhouse has served the neighbourhood since 1925, when it was built as part of efforts to combat the bubonic plague. The plague first struck Hong Kong in 1894, killing over 2,500 people, and returned every summer thereafter until 1929, taking 20,000 lives over the entire period.
The plague was the event that shook the government and business community out of their complacency. Public health officials had been warning of the risk of epidemic for decades. Dr P. B. C. Ayres, who served as the Colonial Surgeon for 23 years, documented appalling conditions in the lower-income districts of Tai Ping Shan and Sai Ying Pun as far back as 1874, describing people crammed by the dozens into subdivided rooms, with no running water or toilets. Live pigs were kept in homes, in kitchens and even under beds. When upper floors’ kitchen drains were not clogged with rubbish, they often emptied onto the floor of the kitchen below.
To make things worse, Chinese districts were deliberately underserved by water infrastructure compared to European areas due to the belief that poor people would waste water if they were given easy access to it. As a result, residents had either had to buy water by the bucket from water sellers who effectively monopolized the public standpipes, or collect it from hill streams and shallow wells that were built mere feet from open sewers. People survived on two quarts of water (about 1.8 litres) a day for all of their needs. Bathing was out of the question. “The lowest class of women rarely wash themselves; men, only the exposed parts of their persons,” wrote Dr. Ayres.
Ayres’ warnings were brushed off. The business community opposed extra taxes to fund better infrastructure, and governors wished to keep them happy. While many Chinese tenements were finally connected to water mains in the 1880s, water rationing remained frequent and sanitary conditions were little improved by the time the plague broke out.
The plague forced the government to get serious about public health not just because of the death toll, but due to the economic crisis caused by 45% of Hong Kong’s 200,000 residents fleeing to mainland China. Major changes were made to Hong Kong’s medical system, building regulations, and sanitation infrastructure. One of these interventions was the construction of public bathhouses.
Soldiers cleaning out plague houses in Tai Ping Shan during the 1894 bubonic plague. Source: Wellcome Collection, CC-by-4.0. .
The very first public baths built in 1901 were temporary bamboo matsheds with wooden tubs and fireplaces to heat water. These lasted less than a year due to water shortages, as well as their tendency to burn down. The next attempt saw the opening of temporary bathhouses in four vacant tong lau in Sai Ying Pun in 1902, which remained in service until the 1920s.
The first permanent public bathhouse opened in 1903 on Cross Lane in Wan Chai near the wharves. It served only men as it was intended for coal coolies to wash coal dust off themselves. The first bathhouse serving both genders opened in 1904 in Pound Lane, Tai Ping Shan, with 28 compartments for men and 10 for women. This imbalance in facilities for men and women was typical at the time because 70% of the population was male, as many single men came to Hong Kong to earn money.
The Second Street Public Bathhouse was part of a second wave of bathhouse construction in the 1920s and 30s which replaced the temporary bathhouses and added several new ones in Kowloon. It was built on the site of a former bucket latrine, and so a new underground public toilet was built to replace it, but the bathhouse itself had no toilet facilities, which is still the case today.
The Second Street Public Bathhouse, built in 1925. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
Hong Kong’s government-run bathhouses were nothing like traditional Chinese bathhouses. Those were places of leisure and social activity, with communal soaking tubs and services like back scrubbing, massage, and tea. By contrast, Hong Kong’s were purely utilitarian, designed only for getting bodies clean. For example, the Cross Street Bathhouse had a 10 foot deep entrance lobby, beyond which the space was divided up into individual 3’ by 4’ (91 by 122 cm) compartments, separated by low brick partitions. Each compartment was outfitted with a small Shanghai-style tub. Hot water was supplied from a coal or wood-fired boiler.
This public toilet on Dyer Avenue in Hung Hom is Hong Kong’s only other surviving pre-war bathhouse, though it no longer functions as one. The chimney on the right is a clue that this building had a coal-fired boiler. It was built in 1930 mainly to serve dockworkers. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
When the first bathhouses opened, people flocked to them. In 1904, the Cross Lane and Pound Lane Bathhouses saw an average of 600 and 1,200 users a day, respectively. The government quickly discovered how costly they were to run in terms of coal, firewood, gas, soap, and wages for the boiler technicians and caretakers. So in 1905, the government instituted a 1 cent admission charge. The immediate effect was a steep drop in usage by women and children, as women had far less money of their own, and were less able to travel to the District Sanitary Office to buy tickets. But women and children were just as capable of getting sick, so the government relented and let them bathe for free. By 1907, the government had abolished the charges altogether because they proved too troublesome to administer.
This money-saving mindset carried on well into the post-war period, especially as Hong Kong’s growing population placed increasing demands on public bathhouses. One way of saving money was to provide hot water only in the winter, which carries on to the present day. The FEHD’s website states: “The provision of hot water starts from any day in November every year when the temperature at 7 a.m. is recorded at 20°C or below, and stops when the temperature at 7 a.m. is recorded at 25°C or above for three consecutive days in May the following year.”
The facilities themselves were quite basic by today’s standards. The government avoided installing any fixtures that could be easily damaged or stolen. Until the mid 1970s, many shower compartments had no locks, and some compartments in men’s bathhouses did not even have doors. Ms. Lai, who used a public bathhouse on Boundary Street in the 1960s remembers that the compartments had double swing doors with no locks, and that partitions ended about 1 foot above the floor yet were short enough for her to see the tops of adults’ heads as they walked by.
Based on this description, the Second Street Bathhouse appears to have changed little from this period, aside from the addition of locks. The partitions still have old-fashioned double swing doors and are less than 150 cm (5 feet) tall. It has no seats, mirrors, wall-mounted hair dryers, or clothes lockers.
Inside the Second Street Public Bathhouse. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
However, Ms. Lai remembers the Boundary Street bathhouse quite fondly. As an early teen, she, her three siblings, and her mother ran an under-stairs shop and slept in an unauthorized crawlspace built under the verandah of a pre-war tong lau in the space between the shop signboard and the building’s front entrance. The public bathhouse was bright, clean, provided hot water in winter, and most importantly, it felt safe. It had a full-time attendant, which meant a teenage girl could go there alone.
It was a huge improvement over the bathrooms in the 7-storey H-block resettlement estate where her family previously lived. The bathrooms there which were shared by the whole floor did not even have shower heads, but required you to fetch your own bucket of water from the sink room (where people did dishes and laundry) and heat it on the stove. The bathing stalls had no doors or curtains, and the main door was usually left wide open. Women were afraid to bathe or use the toilet alone at night, and had to bring along at least one family member to guard against robbery or sexual assault.
In the 1950s and 60s, the government built dozens more bathhouses to serve the huge influx of people migrating to Hong Kong from mainland China, many of whom ended up living in squatter villages, on boats, or in illegal urban structures like Ms. Lai’s family. The number of bathhouses rose from 8 before the war to 44 by 1976.
Bathhouses built near prewar housing, typhoon shelters, and squatter areas saw heavier usage in the mornings, while those located near industrial and cargo handling areas saw more users in the evenings as workers showered before going home.
However, within a couple of decades, usage started to decline. Access to private bathrooms increased as urban redevelopment replaced the older housing stock and as more and more people moved into public housing. In the late 1970s, the Second Street Public Bathhouse received roughly 100 users a day, a far cry from 680 daily users in 1950 or 1000+ daily users in the 1920s. Today, according to the FEHD, it sees an average of 11 users an hour, which over a six-hour opening period amounts to 66 people a day.
By the 1980s, the government had started to close some bathhouses down or transform them into public toilets and refuse collection stations. If you see a three storey public toilet with a disused upper floor, chances are it was originally built as a bathhouse in the 1950s and 60s. These buildings were designed with two floors for men and one for women as government architectural guidelines continued to assume a steeply unequal sex ratio, to the point where Urban Council members tasked with reviewing public toilets and bathhouses in the 1970s discovered a need to rectify a 4:1 imbalance between the number of men’s and women’s toilet compartments.
In the 1950s and 1960s, bathhouses were built with standardized architectural plans. These nearly identical bathhouse/toilet buildings on Yen Chow Street (left) and Nam Cheong Street (right) were built in 1959 and 1961, respectively. Today, only the latter retains shower facilities. Photo credit: City Unseen, 2025.
In most parts of Hong Kong today, public bathhouses have been supplanted by the free showers available in many sportsgrounds, which have better facilities and hot water year-round. According to the FEHD website, 26 functioning bathhouses remain “in older districts where poor housing accommodation still exists,” serving a population of outdoor workers, street sleepers, and people in inadequate housing situations. And as of June 1st 2025, there will be one fewer.
Chan Ka-lam, “Ordinary Heritage of the Ordinary People: Hong Kong’s Public Bathhouses”, MSc Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2012.
Antiquities Advisory Board, “Historic Building Appraisal: Second Street Public Bathhouse”, HKSAR Government, 2020.
Cecilia L. Chu, “Building colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City”, London: Routledge, 2022.
Kyu-hwan Sihn, “Reorganizing Hospital Space: The 1894 Plague Epidemic in Hong Kong and the Germ Theory”, Korean Journal of Medical History, 2017; 26(1): 59-94.
1873. B. C. Ayres, “Annual Report of the Colonial Surgeon”, Hong Kong Government, 1873.
Osbert Chadwick, “Mr. Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong”, Colonial Office, United Kingdom, 1882.
Urban Council Environmental Hygiene Select Committee, “Report of a Departmental Working Party on Public Toilets and Bathhouses”, UC.ENH.104.75, Urban Council, Hong Kong Government, 9 February 1976.
Urban Council Environmental Hygiene Select Committee, “Locking Device in Public Conveniences and Bathhouses”, UC.ENH.104.75, Urban Council, Hong Kong Government, 31 May 1974.
Urban Council Environmental Hygiene Select Committee, “Review of the need for public bathhouses”, UC.PD.167.78, Urban Council, Hong Kong Government, 25 January 1979.
Why is Central not in the centre of Hong Kong Island’s north shore, but slightly off to the..
As a city surrounded by the sea on three sides, water transport once formed the backbone of Hong..
For many Hong Kongers, going to the beach is more than just a summer pastime, it is a..