Abstract: When the British residents of Tianjin established the Municipal Waterworks in 1899, their goal was not only to provide clean water for British households: they also wished to reduce, if not eliminate, the unsightly presence of Chinese water carriers on the streets of their Settlement.In the minds of many foreign residents, water carriers not only fell short of the ideals of modern urban hygiene – with their pride and unruly behavior, these men also fell short of the residents’ ideal of colonial servility. In some ways, replacing water carriers with water pipes helped to sanitize the human landscape of Tianjin.This paper uses the emergence of modern water supply and sewer systems in twentieth-century Tianjin as a jumping off point for a wider rumination on the impact of modern technologies of hygiene (widely defined) on the types of human interactions within the urban environment.What are the social implications of the process of “sanitizing” a city?What forms of segregation, stratification, and isolation accompany modernizing technologies?What do trends in contemporary China’s urban development show us about the possibility of human connection and community in China’s cities today?