Tokyo toilet, Koji Yanai project/Paris Photo, Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris, November 2023.
Our most ancient ancestors were not as indifferent to the idea of good intimate hygiene as one might assume.
But the predecessors of modern toilet paper—a very useful thing indeed—were objects that hardly had anything in common with it. Objects used instead of toilet paper over the years have included small stones, pinecones, and sticks, all of which were found in rubbish piles near the encampments of primitive people. This article recounts the journey of our sanitary habits, starting from stones to the emergence of the humble toilet paper and its not-so-humble industry. Those studying the animal kingdom have suggested that chimps and gorillas often use leaves and branches in order to keep their behinds in good shape. In fact, primatologist Jane Goodall, who kept a diary about the lives of several groups of chimpanzees, wrote: ‘Over six years, we witnessed nineteen instances of a chimpanzee helping another get rid of the remainder of their excrement, and only members of the same family participated in that process. One chimpanzee named Melissa wiped one of her siblings four times after defecation.’ And so, it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that our ancestors were not very different.
It is likely that a big, comfortable leaf became the first toilet accessory for the early humans.
However, one does not always have leaves to hand, and in winter, among town dwellers, and in the desert, a competitor entered the scene: toilet stones. Small and flat with smooth edges, they were commonly used by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Some Muslims still use those stones for the first stage of cleaning themselves before a necessary and thorough wash. The stones are, of course, thoroughly washed, and where water is not available, according to some hadiths, people can clean up using dry, clean sand. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, chose sticks over stones. Sticks were often used multiple times, and because wood is much harder to clean than stone, they were not as effective or hygienic as the stones.
Toilet stone
But in many tropical regions of China, for example, it’s much harder to find a stone than a stick, and the popularity of the latter is quite understandable. Sticks were used in China for quite a long time, even up to the beginning of the last century. In fact, Master Yunmen Wenyan, one of the pillars of Zen Buddhism, when asked by a monk to explain what Buddha is, also alluded to the use of sticks when he replied: ‘The used wiping stick is the Buddha.’ The honorable master was not being blasphemous but was instead trying to emphasize the insignificance of words and definitions compared with the true eternity and limitlessness of anything in the universe. It was around the same time that China, and later Korea and Japan, discovered paper that was remarkably clean and absorbent. As a result, using paper became quite widespread. In a surviving letter, the well-known Buddhist Yan Zhitui (531–591 BCE) tells us how carefully he selects the books he uses for sanitary purposes, never allowing himself to use pages with quotes and comments from the five classics or with the names of the wise men.
By the Ming dynasty (the fourteenth century), China was thus definitely already manufacturing and using specially made toilet paper and not just pages from classic tracts. Some surviving documents listing the emperor’s court expenses in 1391 mention two types of toilet paper—slightly worse quality for the members of the court and the best quality, thick and scented yellow paper, for the emperor and the members of his family.
What Europeans were using at that time, though, is quite unclear. The Christian culture of that era did not encourage the discussion of such intimate subjects. Only later, during the Renaissance, we learn about Rabelais’1
1François Rabelais (1494–1553) was a French writer, editor, doctor, theologist, monk, philologist, and mathematician. One of the greatest satirists of all time, he is the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.soft gosling (the character in his satirical novel considered a gosling to be the best wiping accessory) and the ‘rough wipe’ from Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius.22Hans von Grimmelshausen (1622–76) was a German writer and the author of the picaresque romance Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (Simplicius Simplicissimus)However, we do have some idea of what these items may have been as various documents mention moss, hay, bast fibers, and rags. Compulsory washing after going to the toilet was also an established practice.
(Un)Fortunately for us, long gone is the culture of ancient Rome, which did not feel at all embarrassed to write down the most intimate details of everyday life. We know, for example, that Rome’s public toilets had xylospongiums, sea sponges on a stick, which were placed in a vessel containing vinegar, or just water, after use, ready for the next person. Thus, it is hardly surprising that dysentery was not just a frequent visitor in Rome but lived there permanently.
Xylospongium/WIkimedia Commons
As such, toilet paper didn’t really exist in Europe in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, even though more and more people were using it elsewhere. Paper was not manufactured specifically for sanitary use here, and people used paper wrappers and old letters. As cheap printed works and periodical publications became more common, the little boxes in toilets started getting filled with pieces of newspapers and leaflets.
It is believed that the first manufacturer of actual toilet paper was the American Joseph Gayetty, an entrepreneur, who in 1857 came up with the idea of manufacturing soft paper. He cut this paper into squares, packaged it, and sold it at quite a high price. But Gayetty’s paper simply could not be cheap—he had heavily invested in advertising, trying to scare consumers with the dangers of lead in newsprint. Everything, from hemorrhoids to tumors and from infertility to miscarriages, was explained by people’s ‘unhealthy’ habits. Now, these horror stories sound questionable at the very least, but Gayetty got what he wanted. Many hypochondriacs and worried mothers no longer thought that 50 cents for a thin pile of bad quality paper was too much. Quite a few businessmen followed in Gayetty’s footsteps. Toilet paper was sold in the shape of packs, books, and bags, and at the very end of the nineteenth century, toilet rolls appeared, proving to be the most convenient option. Some years later, in 1928, a German named Hans Klenk came up with the idea of manufacturing toilet rolls with perforations to make it easier to rip the paper off. Ever since then, toilet paper has existed in the form we know it. The innovations ahead only included beautification: softening, whitening, multilayering, the ability to quickly disintegrate and sink, et cetera. But generally speaking, the trusty, loyal, and perforated toilet roll has remained unchanged for almost 100 years now.
Ancient toilet sticks from the Nara period /Wikimedia Commons