Andrew Thomson, the co-creator of the cesspool rose garden which opens this book, was forced to leave China as a prisoner of war in 1942 by the Japanese. Yet his roses survived the violence and turmoil of those years. New China under Mao’s rule tore down the city wall and the church buildings, and the stinking cesspool was replaced by a small, clear pool of water, surrounded by a park where the thriving Thomson roses were still perfuming the air.1 Amid the ruins of the past, can the scents of the roses bear, in Proust’s words, ‘in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection’?2 If they can, then the most enduring of memories must be of their faithful companion: the reeking breath of the cesspool. Inspired by the peculiar mix of odours, this book has tracked a chaotic assemblage of olfactory vestiges of recent Chinese history. Let us conclude the book by returning to the questions posed at the outset: could the sweet scent of the Irish roses offset the effluvia from the indigenous cesspool? Or did the latter overpower the effect of the former? Answers vary, reflecting the strands of thinking this book has explored.

The first stirrings of a Chinese olfactory revolution arose at a time when an influx of Western travellers set foot in China in the nineteenth century. To most of them, China stank. Suffocating odours from manure-buckets, vile fumes of opium, indescribable stenches from filthy streets and stagnant ditches, and the disagreeable reek from perspiring ‘coolies’ suffuse the pages of their writing. Drawing on a large corpus of English-language travel literature, Chapter 2 probes how China was implicated in the global history of olfactory modernity, giving rise to a new olfactory order and sensibility. I inquire into smell’s role in forging the ‘China stinks’ rhetoric, and I argue that this rhetoric was not grounded upon a supposedly pre-defined orientalist structure of feeling, but came into being through sensorial and psychical encounters. The private sensorium and macroscopic sociopolitical changes were entangled. This chapter illuminates these dynamics through an investigation of the specific Chinese odours that offended the foreign travellers’ noses, the particular strategies of producing the impurity rhetoric, and the permeation of the constructed discourse into the Chinese imaginings of modernity.

In 1906, the Canadian missionary couple Andrew and Margaret Thomson arrived in China to spread the word of God. During the ensuing thirty-six years, they built churches, hospitals, schools, and gardens in their mission field in north Henan. ‘To bring some beauty to the bare, brown soil’, they planted roses around a stinking town cesspool, into which drained all of the town’s sewage, waste, and even the bodies of unwanted babies. The bushes thrived, the roses were ‘gorgeous and abundant’, and all survived the great changes and wars that came thereafter, still blooming ‘in the New China’.

Alongside the grand scheme of deodorization, the arrival of a variety of mass-manufactured scents instigated an olfactory revolution in everyday life, feeding new sensory data into Chinese bodies and neurons. Drawing on trade statistics, advertisements, and corporate archives, Chapter 4 restores the materiality of the changing smellscape, exploring both imported scents and domestically produced perfumes, with special attention to state-of-the-art synthetic scents that invaded and contaminated the sensorium. Equipped with industrialism, capitalism, consumerism, science, and nationalism, this revolution’s key battlefield was none other than the human body. The regulation and management of its odours were intended to transform the body into a consumer object. The thrust of my inquiry is the question of how the united forces of olfactory modernity tuned neurons to accept new scents, and how the body was re-educated to internalize a new set of codes, values, and aesthetics.

The link between aroma and eros is a time-honoured theme across cultures, and yet in the 1920s Chinese literary repertoire of amour, what mesmerize the modernizing men and women is not cultured scents of perfume, but biological odours of libido. Chapter 5 investigates the phenomenon of olfactophilia emerging in modern Chinese literature. Considered ‘perverted’ in late nineteenth-century Europe, olfactophilia was symptomatic of the discourse of emancipation in May Fourth China. The Chinese modernists discovered in the primitive sense of smell the true essence of being human, a gesture of defiance against Confucian culture. Embedded in their pursuits was the aporia of modernity, a parable about the porous boundary between purity and contamination. I analyse three sets of texts: early works by members of the Creation Society, which functioned as a trendsetter for olfactory expressions; Lu Xun’s 1924 short story ‘Soap’, an artful anatomy of the ambivalent modern psyche wrapped in an ambiguous whiff of olive aroma; and Mao Dun’s early fictional oeuvre of the late 1920s teeming with libidinal odours and revolutionary vigour.

The Communist revolution from the 1950s to the 1970s unleashed an excess of olfactory anomalies. In the lexicon of Mao-era politics, class enemies are ‘dog shit’ and labour camps are ‘cowsheds’. A method to castigate landowners and capitalists is to ‘stinken’ (douchou) them, and the bourgeois ‘fragrant breeze’ has to be perceived as stinking air. Chapter 6 measures the mighty symbolic power commanded by the olfactory in the moral–political regime of Maoist China, and ponders its jarring relationship with the teleology of Western olfactory modernity. Adopting the keywords approach initiated by Raymond Williams, I analyse a number of smell-related keywords that pervade Mao Zedong’s writings, party documents, and official media. Bridging the biological and the social, this olfactory glossary maps the emotional states of paranoia, rudeness, ruthlessness, and love–hate, all necessary ingredients of the Communist revolution. Overall, Mao’s olfactory revolution was yet another round of retuning the neurons, and yet smell never fails in laughing at the absurdity of human acts evidenced by the contradictions embedded in the propaganda discourse.

The canonical eighteenth-century novel Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber) archives the intangible heritage of perfume culture in late imperial China. Chapter 1 explores the material culture of perfume and the spiritual, philosophical, and social subtexts of smell through a close reading of the novel. I argue that the author Cao Xueqin’s engagement with the sense of smell is twofold. On the one hand, he illustrates how culture tunes neurons cognitively and aesthetically: smell acts as an embodied form of knowledge to conceptualize time, space, gender, class, sexuality, and morality; aromas also elevate the everyday into an aesthetic way of living. On the other hand, he indicates the fragility of this painstakingly choreographed order of things. Overall he weaves an allegory about contamination as an inevitable human condition through smell. Unwittingly he forecasts the onset of a modern olfactory revolution premised on the arguable impurity of China.

Chapter 3 undertakes a comparative study of three deodorization projects in Shanghai, conducted respectively by Western colonial administrations from the 1850s to the 1890s, reform-minded Chinese gentry of the late Qing and early Republic, and the Communists in the 1950s, with a focus on the trope of stagnant water. Despite their disparate, if not antithetic, motives and rhetoric, these projects forged a continuous Chinese olfactory revolution through a common commitment to the progressive ideology of deodorization. I scrutinize how the threads of olfactory modernity tied in with a series of spatializing projects during the urbanization of Shanghai, and how these undertakings brought about an uneven redistribution of sensescapes alongside capital and symbolic capital. I argue that the outcome of battling against contamination was not purity, but a stratified reorganization of purified and contaminated spaces.