Today’s Beijing exudes a hypermodernity: space-age buildings designed by the world’s top architects, the world’s most extensive subway system, and vast networks of seven superhighway ring roads. But even in today’s hypermodern Beijing, there are still some hutong neighborhoods where residents rely on communal neighborhood restrooms. Thanks to the 2008 Olympics and Xi Jinping’s more recent “Toilet Revolution” (launched in 2015), these facilities are considerably upgraded and might feature QR-code equipped toilet paper dispensers or lovely landscapes projected on flat panel screens. At the same time, a certain low-tech human presence remains—these public toilets are likely to be attended by older denizens of the neighborhood and emptied by crews of itinerant workers.

Lei Zhang’s Water Lords reminds us that this hybrid of technological innovation and human-element persistence has characterized Beijing’s infrastructure for more than one hundred years. In this deeply researched monograph, Zhang traces the meandering pathways that water supply took in this notoriously dry city from the late Qing to the early years of the republic and beyond. Zhang’s stated goal is to demonstrate the non-linear trajectory of modernity in China, in contrast with assumptions of an inevitable and uncomplicated process of technological advance.

Water Lords’s six narrative chapters trace how Beijing’s drinking water was shaped by durable “water regimes” built around specific sites (wells and pumps) and controlled by the Shandong water carriers who delivered the water. In a city of brackish groundwater (ku shui) and scarce potable “sweet water” (tian shui), the Qing state organized Inner City wells as a benefit for banner households while the Outer City relied on market provision, thus entrenching the power of the men who carried the water. After the disruptions of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Japanese drilling techniques produced deeper “foreign wells” with better-tasting water, and the Qing government introduced piped “running water” waterworks sourced from a river east of Beijing. This zilaishui terminated not in individual homes, but at pumps stationed outside on the street. High costs, unreliable supply, and public suspicion of “foreign water” meant that most Beijing residents still depended on carriers, who adapted by monopolizing the last‑mile sales of tap water.

In the 1920s, state modernizing efforts to expand household connections sparked violent confrontation, prompting carriers to form powerful guilds that enforced territories, controlled prices, and leveraged patriotic protest to resist the foreign waterworks—thus earning them the nickname “water lords.” In the Nationalist era, concerns shifted to hygienic modernity, and the government experimented with registering carriers, standardizing buckets and prices, upgrading wells, and chlorinating water. In the end, however, these regulations improved water quality but did little to break the water lords’ distribution monopolies. The Japanese occupation authorities tightened hygiene enforcement but were still unable to dismantle the carriers’ power. Only after 1949 did communist nationalization replace private carriers with a municipal supply. Zhang’s narrative reveals how improvised infrastructures and human elements outlasted comprehensive technological modernization for decades.

Water Lords is deeply researched, with hundreds of examples of the ways that water carriers fought for their livelihood and created headaches for Beijing’s denizens while providing an essential service. Zhang collected these examples through a meticulous scouring of multiple archives and newspapers, and he richly annotated the text—scholars will find abundant leads for republican-era sources in the copious footnotes that grace every page of the book (and congratulations to Brill for including Chinese characters for each footnote). With its attention to the quotidian, Water Lords is a solid addition to the work on everyday modernity in Chinese history by scholars such as Di Wang, Hanchao Lu, Madeleine Dong, Joshua Goldstein, and others. With its many lively anecdotes, Water Lords echoes classic works in the field of Chinese urban history, such as David Strand’s Rickshaw Beijing or William Rowe’s Hankow pair.

Zhang has two main analytical goals: spatial and social. He pays particular attention to the invisible territories etched into Beijing by the complexities of water supply: Inner City vs. Outer City; east Beijing (near the modern water tower at Dongzhimen where the water flowed well) and more westerly Beijing (further from the water tower and thus with poor water pressure); and above all, the territories created and enforced by the strategies and struggles of the water carriers themselves. The “water regimes” created by these human workers determined the extent to which technology was distributed, thus thwarting the dreams of engineers and municipal planners.

Zhang’s story feels very much like a product of Beijing, with its royal Qing court, bannermen neighborhoods, and Shandong immigrants. The work could benefit from some comparison with scholarly discussion of the spatialized water regimes of other Chinese cities in the early twentieth-century. For example, how did Beijing’s “water lords” compare with the water carriers of Tianjin, violent roustabouts who defended their territories and persisted across foreign settlement boundaries in spite of the introduction of modern water works in the city after the Boxer Uprising?Footnote ¹

Few scholars working in the field argue for a straightforwardly linear narrative of modernity in China, and thus Zhang’s overall framing falls a bit short (7). Instead, Zhang’s emphasis on the “persistence of [older] technologies” fits very well with recent STS and tech history scholarship on “repair and maintenance”—work that takes the fragility of technology in all places and times as its starting point and emphasizes the agency of both materials and humans.Footnote ² Contingency, the inevitability of breakdown, innovation under scarcity: all these elements in Water Lords are also the focus of a vibrant field that could have perhaps provided a more felicitous framing. Read this way, the lively Beijing particulars of Zhang’s Water Lords join other considerations of the nature of technology, wherever it has been deployed.