page_title: Pulled rickshaw
section_title: China
hierarchical_section_title: Pulled rickshaw / Country overview / Asia / China
caption_attribution_description: historical view of Qingdao
context_page_description: A pulled rickshaw is a mode of human-powered transport by which a runner draws a two-wheeled cart which seats one or two people.
  In recent times the use of human-powered rickshaws has been discouraged or outlawed in many countries due to concern for the welfare of rickshaw workers. Pulled rickshaws have been replaced mainly by cycle rickshaw and auto rickshaws.
context_section_description: In China, from the ancient times and until the 19th century, rich and important people, when traveling overland, were commonly transported in sedan chairs carried by bearers, rather than in wheeled vehicles. This was at least partly explained by road conditions.
  It is thought that it was from China (or East Asia in general) that sedan chair (a.k.a. "palanquin") designs were introduced into Western Europe in the 17th century.
   However, wheeled carts for one or two passengers, pushed (rather than pulled, like a proper rikshaw) by human servant, were attested as well.
  In the 19th century, wheelbarrow is the most popular transportation for commoners. In the spring of 1873, the French merchant Menard introduced rickshaw from Japan. The original name is "Jinrikisha", meaning "man-power-vehicle" in Japanese. Most of the rickshaws were owned by foreign investors at the beginning, but in around the 1900s, rickshaws were owned mostly by Chinese companies. The official name for rickshaw is "renliche", meaning "man-power-vehicle" in Chinese, but it is more commonly called "dongyangche", meaning "east-foreign-vehicle", or "huangbaoche" in Shanghai, meaning "yellow carriage for rent."
  Rickshaw transportation was an important element in urban development in 20th century China, as a mode of transportation, source of employment and facilitation of migration for workers. According to author David Strand:
  Sixty thousand men took as many as a half million fares a day in a city of slightly more than one million.  Sociologist Li Jinghan estimated that one out of six males in the city between the ages of sixteen and fifty was a puller.  Rickshaw men and their dependents made up almost 20 percent of Beijing's population.
  Most manual rickshaws – seen by many Maoists as a symbol of oppression of the working class – were eliminated in China after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
caption: Rickshaw and driver in Qingdao, c. 1914
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