A township of 40 square kilometres outside Yangzhou makes the toothbrush in your bathroom. One in three toothbrushes on Earth comes from Hangji, and about 80% of China's, alongside most of the little soaps, combs and slippers stocked in the world's hotel rooms.
A wall in Hangji's toothbrush museum reads: “Wherever humans reside, there are toothbrushes made in Hangji.” It is barely an exaggeration. This single township in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, just 40 square kilometres and around 40,000 people, produces about 7.5 billion toothbrushes a year: roughly one in three made anywhere on Earth, about 80% of China's domestic market, and close to 90% of China's toothbrush exports. Two thousand-plus firms work the trade, an output worth some 13 billion yuan, and the town's per-capita GDP runs higher than Shenzhen's.
It started in 1826, when a local farmer, Liu Wanxing, made the area's first toothbrush from a cow-bone handle and pig bristles. The modern industry dates to 1976 and the town's first factory; by the 1980s nearly 10,000 small workshops had sprung up. In 1989 the firm that became Sanxiao was founded, and by 1998 it was past a billion yuan in sales; in 2000 it drew in a Colgate joint venture, and Liangmianzhen, Perfect and others followed. When China wrote its first national toothbrush standard in 2003, five of the seven drafting companies were from Hangji.
Hangji wears a second crown: “Capital of Hotel Amenities of China.” It makes roughly 65% of China's and around 30% of the world's hotel disposables, the wrapped toothbrush, comb, soap and slippers in the bathroom of seemingly every hotel, helped by sitting a short drive from the Shanghai headquarters of China's big hotel groups. The raw bristle itself comes from a DuPont plant in nearby Wuxi. It is the invisible supply chain of a hotel stay, run out of one Jiangsu town.
Like every town in this atlas, Hangji is climbing. Its factories now run on automated lines and robot arms; firms make AI-enabled electric toothbrushes (the Shenzhen brand Oclean built a plant here), and biodegradable brushes from corn-based plastic and even sugarcane-refining residue, sold to dental clinics in Germany and Sweden. Hangji even makes the custom low-temperature brushes for the crew of China's polar icebreaker Xuelong 2. From there it is edging into polymer materials and beyond.