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Short abstract:

This paper examines the role of refrigerated space in the urban governance of treaty-port Shanghai. It offers a nuanced understanding of the mediations and frictions involved in the modernization of the foodway and how cooling technology empowered diverse subjects living in the cosmopolitan city.

Long abstract:

In Shanghai, a treaty-port city that opened to foreign trade and residence in the mid-19th century, Western-administered sanitary authorities adopted the germ theory, attributing the prevalence of diseases to food contamination. The advent of mechanical refrigeration, ensuring precise temperature control for the production, preservation, and consumption of perishable products, not only addressed the dietary needs of European expatriates, overcoming long-term prejudice against food sanitation in Asia, but also played a pivotal role in regulating the urban environment through technological rationality and social ordering.

As “native ice” from lakes and rivers was deemed a public menace, cooling plants emerged in the municipal laboratory, public markets, and the abattoir complex. Health authorities promoted household refrigerators, particularly among newcomers from nations with established sanitary regulations, alongside the popularity of the electric appliance among the Chinese upper class. While foreign administration mandated cold storage installation in food premises for sanitary concerns, Chinese authority harnessed techno-power to effectively, though briefly, reconfigure the city’s supply chain logistics. Despite local resistance against government interventions in commercial activities, mechanical refrigeration permeated the foodscape, embedding thermal knowledge and sanitary norms into everyday life and providing fresh experiences to the metropolis.

This paper shifts away from the narrative that construes cooling technology as a tool of the empire and emphasizes its unilateral enforcement in facilitating Western acclimatization to the tropics. Refrigerated spaces, as socio-environmental-technical systems, participated as infrastructure in modernizing the foodway, a process imbued with mediations and frictions contesting the incomplete cold chain, which is commonplace nowadays.