Night soil

The punishment matched the crime with a precision that modern sentencing guidelines would find excessive.

Night soil was also an economy.

In China and Japan, where cattle manure was scarce, human waste was the fertilizer.

In Edo, compost merchants bought feces from apartment owners.

Manual scavenging was banned in India by the 1993 Act, but the National Human Rights Commission observed in 2021 that eradication is far from over.

Government data shows 971 people died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between 1993 and 2021.

North Korea still uses night soil as fertilizer due to shortages.

So the job of the gong farmer isn't a historical curiosity.