Buddhist Toilets
The Temple of the Six Banyan Trees
is one of the few Buddhist temples left standing in
Guangzhou, People's Republic of China,
where any religion other than
worship of Communist leaders is strictly forbidden.
Above is an overview of the facility,
and below is a detailed look.
Notice the floor covered with small tiles, and the
raised footpads.
Those are specially designed ceramic blocks.
I suppose they might make for a less inconvenient souvenir
than an entire toilet....
Notice the long hose for cleaning yourself.
The floor in the stall drains into the toilet.
Of course, with a hose running it isn't all going to drain
into the toilet, but there's a shallow channel along the
row of stall doors that will catch most of the overflow.
As collectivist Chinese toilets go, this one provides a
much higher degree of privacy than usual.
See the toilets at the
Tomb of the Martyrs of the
Guangzhou Commune W.C.
for more typically communal Chinese toilets.
Other pictures from China:
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This is their sign pointing the way
(to the toilet, not to enlightenment).
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Rose George's
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World
of Human Waste and Why It Matters
is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions
around the world.
"2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....]
Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled
Toilets of the World.
It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs
and commentary on other people's plumbing.
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A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used.
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How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around?
I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s
as a single page on a Purdue University server.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see
what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in
(or at least tolerate):
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