Officials in Shanghai hope to showcase their ambition and ability to become a leading international metropolis in the Far East through improvement to the city's public conveniences.

The city's efforts to burnish its international image include fitting advanced illumination and washing facilities, adding special seats for disabled people and redesigning restroom exteriors.

There are more than 1,000 signposted public toilets and nearly 2,000 toilets in stores, hospitals and restaurants open to the public in Shanghai, which is home to more than 16 million people.

Mobile toilets have also been introduced in public venues like subway stations in China's biggest city.

In Shanghai's central areas, there is one standard public restroom every 300 metres on average, contrasting with a meagre one loo every 1,000 metres 10 years ago, according to recent statistics.

"We will take sustained measures to gradually open other toilets that are currently closed to the public," said an official at the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of the Management of City Appearance and Environmental Sanitation.

The official said city authorities had finished making 10,000 special signs pinpointing the location of public conveniences, and would set them up near the toilets soon.

Most public toilets traditionally cost less than 1 yuan (12 US cents) to use in Shanghai, a similar fee to other places in the world's most populous country.

But the municipal authorities have ordered some toilets inside shopping malls and restaurants to open to the public for free.

Analysts said more efforts were needed for Shanghai to improve its public toilets.

Though China's first modern toilet was introduced as early as in 1864 on Nanjing Road, Shanghai's most prosperous shopping area, residents and foreign tourists used to complain about the difficulty of finding a toilet in the city.

To make the situation worse, people living in the city, especially foreigners, usually found it hard to overlook the filthy condition of many public toilets.

Last year, a taxi driver called Wang Weixiong collaborated with more than 30 colleagues to draw a map locating Shanghai's public toilets for drivers to use when they were caught short.

The hand-written copy was so popular among taxi drivers that the Shanghai Municipal Academy of Mapping decided to formally publish the map based on Wang and his colleagues' hard work.

To date, about 100,000 copies of the toilet map have sold in the city.

(Xinhua News Agency May 22, 2003)