Then & Now | How Hong Kong exported the Chinese laundry around the world

In the days before the widespread introduction of domestic washing machines, when average family sizes were much larger than they are today, laundry was an arduous chore.

An entire day every week was usually set aside as “washing day”. Bedsheets, towels, heavy-duty work clothes and other bulky items were placed in a large water-filled metal vat known as a “copper”, heated over a fire then scrubbed on a washboard with a bar of laundry soap before being wrung out through an electric or hand-operated mangle. These tasks were routine facts of life until not so long ago; in post-war Australia, my mother and aunts, now in their 80s and 90s, did all their laundry this way, well into their married lives.

The story of laundry is a fascinating part of Hong Kong’s social history. For many years, visitors to the colony who asked if there was a Hong Kong flag were wryly directed to the myriad washing poles that flapped from virtually every window in the city.

Chinese-run laundries have long been commonplace in many parts of the world. Across the diaspora, Chinese ethnic groups took up specific trades and occu­pations, and laundrymen, as well as carpenters, were mostly Cantonese, from San Francisco to Penang.

Chinese laundrymen were also employed on the merchant vessels of inter­national shipping firms such as P&O, the Glen Line and Blue Funnel Line, which plied routes between Britain and East Asia. For decades, the Royal Navy, too, engaged Chinese laundrymen as part of a ship’s company; recruited directly from Hong Kong, they served all over the world.