Why Chinese people drink hot water, per the record

Ask why people in China drink hot water and you get two answers, both delivered with confidence. One is traditional: hot water is a Chinese thing, thousands of years old, rooted in the medical vocabulary of cold and hot. The other is modern: public health campaigns taught a poor country to boil its water, and the habit stuck.

This piece is about the history behind those answers. It is not about whether hot water is good for you. That is a medical question, I cannot answer it, and nothing below is advice.

The classical record has both temperatures in it

The vocabulary is real. In the Mengzi (attributed to Mencius, text usually dated to the late 4th century BC — Wikipedia, accessed 9 Oct 2026), a disciple asks whether eating and drinking are internal or external to a person, and uses temperature as his example: “In winter one drinks tang, in summer one drinks shui” (Mengzi, Gaozi I, undated digital edition). Tang is hot liquid, usually broth; shui is plain water. The sentence treats cold water in summer as ordinary.

The cold-injury idea is also old. The Huangdi Neijing corpus, compiled somewhere between the Warring States and the Han (Wikipedia, accessed 9 Oct 2026), contains the line “cold in the body and a cold drink injure the lung” (Lingshu, Xieqi Zangfu Bingxing, undated digital edition). The hot/cold categories long predate the twentieth century. What I could not find in the classical corpus is the thing people actually claim it says: that plain hot water is the correct daily drink.

For most of the record the binding constraint was fuel. Ennin, a Japanese monk who travelled through China between 838 and 847 (Wikipedia, accessed 9 Oct 2026), wrote that ordinary people in what is now Shandong “never cooked soup, and ate cold food all year” (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018; it reprints an Elderly Daily essay). In the Song and Yuan, teahouses spread and tea reached ordinary people, but boiling water cost more fuel than cooking did. Households that could not afford a fire bought tea door to door from hawkers carrying kettles; the trade was called ti cha ping, “carrying the tea flask.” Boiled water for the poor was a service you bought (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

Shops that sold boiled water

By the 1830s, cities around the Yangtze delta had hot-water shops, called laohuzao or “tiger stoves,” selling water for drinking and washing (Sixth Tone, 28 Sep 2017). In the Republican period the same trade appears as shushui dian, “cooked-water shops,” in cities in the southeast such as Shanghai and Wuhu. A 1930s Shanghai municipal survey of workers’ living conditions found the water cheap enough that workers bought it for cooking as well as drinking, to save on their own fuel bills (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

Outside the cities the picture inverts. A 1930s survey of eleven villages in Qingyuan county, Hebei, led by Chen Hansheng and the Beiping Institute of Social Research, found households burning roots, wheat straw and dry grass, cooking briefly when they cooked at all, and unable to afford boiled water: people drank raw water from wells and rivers, including in the coldest part of winter (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

Bacteriology gives boiling a new argument

The Republican-era shift was that boiling stopped being folk habit and became a scientific proposition: germ theory arrived from the West, intellectuals started urging the public to drink hot water, and governments promoted it intermittently, subject to whether the money existed (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

In 1934 the Nationalist government launched the New Life Movement, whose “Essentials” guidelines on food instructed the public to drink boiled water, on the grounds that it would limit bacteria and diseases such as dysentery (Sixth Tone, 28 Sep 2017). The same account says war and weak administration limited its reach.

After 1949 the promotion became systematic. The Patriotic Health Campaign committee instructed cadres to “repeatedly educate the masses to drink boiled and disinfected water, and not to drink raw water,” and rural health textbooks told health workers to promote boiled water (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

The campaign’s own dates are documented, though they are about germ warfare rather than about water.

Boiling water was the household-level tool because the utility-level one was missing. In cities, factories and government offices ran water-boiling rooms and gave water out on tickets, a system that persisted into the 1980s and 1990s. One documented example is a cigarette factory in Jinan: boiling rooms set up in the 1950s, water tickets at one fen for two bottles in 1982, closed in the early 1990s for environmental reasons. In the countryside, comparable communal supply existed briefly during the public-canteen period of 1958 to 1960 (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018).

The same essay gives a rough proxy for how the practice spread, in thermos output (Wenzhai Bao, 3 Feb 2018): 0.3bn units in 1957, 1.38bn in 1983, 2.66bn in 1997. The essay concludes that most people could drink hot water when they wanted by the mid-1990s. Those three figures are single-sourced and I could not trace them further.

The pipes arrived late, and unevenly

Those numbers measure whether a household is on a pipe, not whether the water is safe. The 2006–07 survey is the one figure here that measures safety, and it is two decades old.

The other side of the glass

The Western habit of iced water has a start date that is easier to pin down than China’s. In 1806 Frederic Tudor loaded 130 tons of Massachusetts ice onto a ship and sent it to Martinique (National Geographic, 19 Jul 2014; Wikipedia, Frederic Tudor, accessed 9 Oct 2026). The first cargo lost money. Tudor then gave ice away to American taverns, the taverns put it in drinks, and customers came back to buy it — that, at least, is how the historian Jonathan Rees describes the market being created (CNN, 25 Jul 2025).

Rees’s book on the subject is Refrigeration Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), and his argument is that the American fondness for ice is a specific national trait that Europeans never adopted. The same CNN piece quotes the ice historian Amy Brady on Charles Dickens, who was, in her words, “shocked and frankly disgusted” by the “mounds of ice overflowing from American drinks.” Mechanical refrigeration follows: John Gorrie’s US patent 8,080, for a machine to make ice, is granted on 1851-05-06 (US Patent 8,080; the patent model is held by the Smithsonian Institution per Wikipedia, John Gorrie, accessed 9 Oct 2026).

So the two countries solved the same problem — bad water — at different points in the supply chain. In the United States the fix moved to the utility: Jersey City began routine disinfection in 1908, the first American city to do so, and typhoid fell from about 100 cases per 100,000 people in 1900 to 33.8 in 1920 and 0.1 in 2006 (CDC, reviewed 26 Nov 2012). In China, treated supply reached only part of the population for most of the century, and boiling stayed at the household level.

Cold was never absent from China either. The imperial palaces kept ice houses from at least the Zhou; Qing emperors issued ice tickets to officials; street vendors in Beijing sold iced sour-plum drinks to ordinary customers; the country’s first electric refrigerator dates to 1958 (Palace Museum, undated). The Chinese cold tradition was seasonal and aimed at cooling; the American one at drinking water.

What is documented, and what is circulating

Documented, with a source I could reach:

• The tang / shui distinction, and cold water in summer as normal, in the Mengzi; cold food and drink as injurious in the Huangdi Neijing corpus (Mengzi, Lingshu).
• Song and Yuan teahouses and door-to-door boiled-water tea sales; Ennin’s 9th-century observation that Shandong commoners ate cold food (Wenzhai Bao).
• Hot-water shops in delta cities, and the 1930s surveys of Shanghai workers and Hebei villages (Wenzhai Bao, Sixth Tone).
• The 1934 New Life Movement boiled-water guideline (one source only) and its limited reach (Sixth Tone, 28 Sep 2017).
• The 1952 campaign’s dates and germ-warfare origin; workplace boiling rooms running into the 1980s and 1990s (People’s Daily, Zhang & Ma 2021).
• Piped-water coverage figures from 1908 to 2025, as tabulated above.

Circulating, and thinner than it looks:

• That Chinese medicine has always prescribed plain hot water. The hot/cold categories are ancient; the daily-drink prescription is not something I found in a classical text.
• That China “has always” drunk hot water. The record shows the opposite for anyone who could not afford fuel (Wenzhai Bao).
• The 1862 Shanghai cholera outbreak as the moment southerners concluded that hot water had saved them. The numbers attached to it (1.5 million refugees, 3,000 deaths a day) come from one magazine feature (Sixth Tone), and the account is second-hand.
• That the New Life Movement universalised boiling. The source I read says it did not.

Method

I worked from documents outward: official bulletins, classical texts, papers and museum material first; magazine features only when they name the document they draw on, and flagged as a single source when they do not. Every number above carries a link and a date on the same line. Where a figure existed in one place only, the line says so. Quotations in Chinese are from the cited pages; translations are mine. I checked each classical quotation against a second text host. I did not look for health outcomes; that is outside this piece.

What I could not check

• The original 1883 text by Yuan Zuzhi contrasting Chinese hot-water and Western cold-water habits. I only ever saw the quotation reproduced in a 2018 newspaper reprint.
• The thermos production figures (1957, 1983, 1997). They appear in that same reprint and I could not trace them to a statistical yearbook.
• The exact date of the 1952 People’s Daily editorial “Further Carry Out the Patriotic Health Campaign” — 5 July in the academic account, 10 July on the wiki page. I did not read the paper’s own archive.
• The claim that hot-water shops existed around the Yangtze delta by the 1830s. One magazine feature, no underlying document.
• The exact wording of the New Life Movement’s food guideline on boiled water. One magazine feature.
• The 1862 Shanghai cholera figures, and the argument that southern China was spared.
• The two 1930s surveys — the Shanghai municipal workers’ report and the Qingyuan county village study — which I saw only as quotations.
• The MOHURD 2021 bulletin at first hand: I read a government repost of it, not the original PDF.
• Whether any national-level document ever set a numerical target for household boiling, as opposed to general exhortation.