Meet Dr. Toilet, Hong Kong’s Advocate for Better Public Washrooms

They call him Dr. Toilet. And if you visit his office on the upper floors of a Tsuen Wan high-rise, you can see why. Not only has Henry Hung Chi-kuen helped install the plumbing in Hong Kong’s two tallest skyscrapers, the ICC and IFC, he has dedicated the past two decades to improving the city’s large number of public washrooms.

“You can say I’m passionate about toilets,” says the soft-spoken plumbing executive, who has a doctorate in business administration. He proudly shows off the large collection of miniature porcelain loos he has collected during his travels around the world. “When I travel somewhere new, the first thing I visit is the public toilet.”

In addition to running his own commercial plumbing company, 78-year-old Hung is the co-founder and current president of the Hong Kong Toilet Association, which was set up in 2005 when Hung joined forces with a design professor, a medical doctor and an air sanitising entrepreneur, each with the ambition to improve public facilities.

Hung was not destined to lead the way: it’s the product of a long career in plumbing that began by chance at the age of 20, when he got a job in a sanitary ware company. Intriguingly, he isn’t the first person in Hong Kong to earn the nickname Dr. Toilet: that honour goes to Ronald Leung, former chairman of the Urban Council, known for investing in public toilets in the early 1990s.

By the time the Toilet Association was founded, though, many of Hong Kong’s washrooms were old, run down and not particularly clean. “Public toilets in Hong Kong were so messy,” recalls Hung. “Everyone, when they went in, they would come out covering their mouths, saying, ‘Oh no, no, no, I don’t want to stay any longer.’” 

The situation has improved significantly since then — thanks in no small part to the advocacy of the Toilet Association, whose founders met at an international toilet conference in Moscow. Since then, they’ve issued an annual ranking of Hong Kong’s best and worst public toilets and developed guidelines based on the world’s best practices. “There have been a lot of improvements,” says Hung.

At this point, you may be thinking: there are international toilet conferences? And the answer is, there certainly are, specifically those organised by a Singapore-based non-profit called the World Toilet Organization, which advocates for better sanitary conditions around the world. 

“You know, everyone, when they go outside, they need to use a public toilet,” says Hung. Whether due to shame or embarrassment or disgust, it’s an experience we rarely talk about. And yet public toilets are a lynchpin of urban life, a piece of vital infrastructure that allows us to lead our lives in public, far from the comfort of our own personal commodes. 

“The state of a country’s civilization can be judged by its public facilities,” declared American magazine The Nation in 2023. In this sense, Hong Kong may be considered to be quite civilised indeed: it has a network of more than 1,600 public toilets across the city, most of them open 24 hours a day, free of charge. 

But Hung still isn’t satisfied. “There’s still a lot of work to be done to make it better,” he says.

Pound Lane Public Toilet and Bathhouse in Sheung Wan – Photo courtesy Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) HK

Born of the plague

Though toilets date back thousands of years to the ancient societies of the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, it was the Roman Empire that pioneered the concept of large-scale public latrines, beginning in the second century BC. By 315 AD, Rome had 144 public washrooms for a population of 700,000, with communal bench toilets that opened into drains flushed by bathwater that drained into the Cloaca Maxima, a sewerage system that was heralded as a triumph of Roman engineering.

That would end up being the pinnacle of public toilet technology for many centuries to come. In the medieval era, cities around the world regressed into the most primitive forms of human waste disposal, and even if the flush toilet was invented in the 16th century, bedpans and waste buckets remained the norm well into the 19th century. 

That was certainly the case in early colonial Hong Kong, where only the rich had access to flushing toilets that drained into the system of nullahs the British built after their arrival in 1841. Most of the population did their business in buckets that were emptied periodically by waste collectors. 

In 1881, the colonial government hired a British engineer named Oswald Chadwick to conduct a survey of Tai Ping Shan, a crowded tenement district home to many migrant workers from mainland China. He found horrific living conditions, including one situation where 80 people were squeezed into a single flat alongside livestock like pigs and chicken. There were no toilets. 

“As a general rule throughout Hong Kong, in accordance with time-honored Chinese practice, human excrete are removed by hand, on what may be called the ‘pail’ system,” he wrote in his report, which was published in 1882. “Neither deodorisation or disinfection of any kind is attempted.”

Public facilities were almost non-existent: there were just a few latrines built by the government in 1867 after a cholera outbreak the previous year. Entrepreneurs took advantage of the situation by building private latrines — just 25 for a population of more than 100,000 — from which they made a hefty profit by selling human excrement as fertiliser, most of which was shipped to Guangdong to nourish the mulberry trees where silkworms were raised. 

It was not an effective system. “On the whole the existing latrines are offensive and a nuisance, both as to position and construction, and they are so crowded as to render improvements to maintenance very difficult,” wrote Chadwick.

Until then, nobody had made a direct link between Hong Kong’s filth and any outbreak of disease, but Chadwick suggested that an epidemic of some sort was inevitable. “He predicted that if there was an outbreak, it would be a disaster because sanitation was so bad,” says Lau Kwok-wai, executive director of the Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage. “He was right.”

In 1894, an outbreak of bubonic plague killed more than 3,000 people in Tai Ping Shan. In response, the government demolished the entire neighbourhood and rebuilt it on a grid of streets surrounding Blake Garden, Hong Kong’s first public park. In 1904, it opened Hong Kong’s first public toilet and bathhouse on Pound Lane, with space for 28 men and 10 women.

For the first time, people who had been forced to live in their own filth “had a chance to clean themselves,” says Lau. The toilet and bathhouse were immensely popular. Two decades after it opened, in 1926, the Pound Lane facility was used by 224,363 people — one out of three Hong Kong residents. It would remain popular for many years. “I spoke to some kaifong and they said that even in the 1960s they didn’t have toilets,” says Lau. “Everyone would queue up for the bathhouse at night.”

The Pound Lane toilet is still there, although the original structure was replaced by a more modern one in 1961, which was subsequently given a surprisingly stylish renovation in 2023. An underground toilet for men opened at the junction of Wellington Street and Queen’s Road in 1913; it too is still operating. As Hong Kong’s population mushroomed after World War II, with a massive influx of migrants fleeing war, poverty and repression in mainland China, so too did the number of public toilets.

Hoi Hing Road Public Toilet in Tsuen Wan – Photo courtesy FEHD HK

Best and worst

Today, there’s a chance that when you need a public toilet in Hong Kong, you’ll find it closed for renovations. That’s because, since 2019, the government has invested billions of dollars in repairing or rebuilding toilets each year. Last year alone, HK$460 million was spent to refurbish 110 public toilets. 

Much of the credit for this initiative — officially dubbed the Enhanced Public Toilet Refurbishment Programme — can be attributed to the Toilet Association’s high-profile advocacy. Every year, just ahead of World Toilet Day on 19 November, the association publishes a ranking of Hong Kong’s best and worst public toilets. Last year, the Lan Kwai Fong toilet took the top spot, while the Kowloon City Road toilet in To Kwa Wan earned bottom position for its constantly wet floors and pervasively foul odors. 

There are plenty of examples of each category right across Hong Kong. Leaving his office and taking the lift to the ground floor, Hung walks around the corner to the Chai Wan Kok toilet, which is located next to a cooked food centre where several restaurants are packed beneath a tin roof and vinyl awnings. Though it looks recently renovated, this particular washroom is cramped, damp and smelly, which Hung says is the result of inadequate plumbing. 

A short walk away is an example of what Hung considers one of the best toilets in Hong Kong. On the Tsuen Wan waterfront, where office workers enjoy their lunch break overlooking the Rambler Channel, the Hoi Hung Road public toilet enjoys pride of place. Wandering into the circular, freestanding structure, Hung notes the features that make it a relatively pleasant space. “It’s naturally ventilated,” he notes, pointing towards the louvres that allow fresh air to flow through the space. The circular layout allows for a more efficient distribution of toilets and urinals. There are sinks both inside and on the outside of the building. 

It’s not perfect; Hung notes some puddles beneath the urinals, which increase odours and the need for constant cleaning. (He says he hasn’t yet found a perfect solution for this seemingly intractable problem.) But it meets most of the criteria established by the Toilet Association, which can be summed up as an acronym: CASH. “‘C’ means comfortable and clean,” explains Hung. “‘A’ is accessibility. ‘S’ means safe. And ‘H’ stands for hygiene.”

It’s a handy mnemonic for the next time you use a public toilet. Is it CASH? Or is it coming up short?

Public toilets, public life

There are roughly 14 public toilets per 100,000 Hong Kong residents, roughly the same per capita distribution as in London or Paris. But the devil is in the details. Public toilets in London are unevenly concentrated, with entire boroughs lacking even a single facility. In Paris, they are densely arranged throughout the city, but consist mainly of kiosks that serve only one person at a time, and which are notorious for being dirty and poorly maintained. 

In Hong Kong, by contrast, whether you’re in Central or a far-flung rural area, you are rarely more than a short walk from a standalone, round-the-clock public toilet with a dedicated cleaner. For people who have spent most of their lives in Hong Kong and in other Asian cities, it’s easy to take for granted. But for anyone who has experienced life in other parts of the world, it’s a wonder.

“They’re always there for me,” enthuses Zolima CityMag contributor Daisann McLane, as she sits inside the bookshop and natural wine store she helps manage on Peng Chau. She often takes the ferry to Chi Ma Wan, she explains, where she hikes along a particularly steep trail that descends into Mui Wo, where it meets a toilet on the shores of Silvermine Bay. It’s a perfectly humble facility, with men’s and women’s sections and a shared outdoor sink, but it’s a lifesaver after a long walk.

Myriem Alnet, who runs Nam Wan Bookshop and Lou Natural Wines with McLane, nods her head in agreement. “I appreciate them here because, coming from France, toilets there are either nightmares or privatised,” she says.

The same can be said for countless cities around the world. In the United States, the dwindling number of public toilets has been called a “civic catastrophe” by psychology researcher Guido Corradi. Those who need toilets the most — the elderly, people who are homeless and those dealing with health issues — suffer disproportionately when they are not available. In a grand sense, the decline in public toilets reflects a decline in public life. 

Hong Kong may not be on the vanguard when it comes to public toilets. We don’t have the architect-designed toilets of Shibuya, Tokyo, nor the gender-neutral toilets being promoted by the Taiwanese government, which are both more equitable and more space efficient. But for all its flaws, Hong Kong remains a place where public toilets — and therefore public space — remain abundant and accessible. 

Dr. Toilet says he is on the verge of retiring from his company, whose reins will be passed down to his son. But his advocacy for better public toilets won’t stop anytime soon. “I won’t stop,” he says.