Making the Semi-Colonial Infrastucture of Death: Public Mortuary in Modern Shanghai (1860s-1930s)

This article examines how the materiality of the public mortuary reshaped the urban governance of death and gave rise to the hygienic modernity in modern Shanghai. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Shanghai Municipal Council had built mortuaries in the Shanghai International Settlement to uphold public health and facilitate the administration of justice. As the number of Chinese people in the Settlement skyrocketed, the Council endeavored to extend mortuary-based death management from the Westerners to the Chinese population. The public mortuary functioned as a node within Shanghai’s expanding urban infrastructure system, including the hospital, cemetery, and police force. Meanwhile, the mortuary exposed the contestation between the Shanghai Municipal Council, the medical professionals, Chinese local authorities, and Chinese residents, whose cultural and material practices concerning corpse examination and death rituals often diverged from the mortuary-based ones. By foregrounding the materiality and infrastructural politics of death management, this article argues that the public mortuary constituted a contested site through which various actors negotiated and appropriated the meanings of death and ultimately contributed to the local formation of hygienic modernity in modern Shanghai.