The Big Necessity - Rose George

Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields. China's use of "night soil," as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations—the Maya, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust.

Sanitation professionals sometimes divide the world into fecal-phobic and fecal-philiac cultures. India is the former (though only when the dung is not from cows); China is definitely and blithely the latter. Nor is the place of excrement confined to the fields. It has featured prominently in Chinese public life and literature for at least a thousand years.

In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward. Andrew Morris, a historian at California Polytechnic, relates the story of night-soil carrier Shi Chuanxiang, who in 1959 was a star speaker at the Communist Party's National Conference of Heroes. Shi Chuanxiang worked for the exploitative gangs who controlled Beijing's night-soil collection. Customers showed their appreciation for his work by calling him "Mr. Shitman" or "Stinky Shit Egg."