The toothbrush in ancient China was used for cleaning teeth, much as it is today. What makes China’s role remarkable is that it produced the first bristle toothbrush, invented during the Tang Dynasty (619–907 CE), a design that became the direct ancestor of the modern toothbrush sitting in your bathroom right now.
Before Bristles: Chewing Twigs and Using Fingers
Before the bristle toothbrush appeared, people in China cleaned their teeth with simpler methods. The most common was chewing on tree branches, particularly willow twigs. This practice likely originated in India, where people chewed on a specific type of tree branch, but when the custom reached China it was adapted to use willow, a tree already deeply embedded in Chinese culture and traditional medicine. Willow was favored because traditional Chinese medicine valued materials considered mild and balanced, not too strong or too cold.
The technique was straightforward: you chewed one end of a twig until it frayed into soft fibers, then used those fibers to scrub your teeth and gums. Some people skipped the twig entirely and just used their fingers. Paintings found in the Dunhuang caves, a major archaeological site in western China, show people cleaning their teeth this way.
The Tang Dynasty Bristle Toothbrush
Sometime during the Tang Dynasty, which ruled from 619 to 907 CE, someone in China had the idea of attaching animal hair to a handle. The result was the first bristle toothbrush: stiff hog hair fixed to a handle made of bamboo or bone. This was a genuine leap in oral hygiene because it separated the cleaning tool from a disposable twig, making it reusable and more effective at reaching different parts of the mouth.
Archaeological evidence backs this up. Bone toothbrush handles have been recovered from Tang Dynasty ash pits, now held in the museum of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. These artifacts confirm that organized tooth-cleaning tools existed in China over a thousand years ago.
The bristles were typically taken from hogs raised in cold northern regions, including Siberia. Cold-climate pigs grew coarser, stiffer neck hair, which made for better scrubbing. The hairs were pulled from the back of the hog’s neck, where they were thickest, and set into small holes drilled in the handle. Over time, some users found hog bristles too harsh and swapped them for softer materials like horsehair, though boar bristles remained the standard for centuries.
What They Brushed With
The toothbrush alone was only part of the routine. Ancient Chinese oral hygiene also involved tooth powders, early predecessors to toothpaste. These powders drew on ingredients from traditional Chinese medicine and folk remedies. Common components included salt (often bamboo salt, made by roasting sea salt inside bamboo stalks), ground wheat flour as a mild abrasive, and dried alum, a mineral that acts as an astringent to tighten gum tissue. Herbal additions like angelica root, wildginger, and lotus seed powder were mixed in for their supposed medicinal benefits, including reducing inflammation and freshening breath.
You would dip the dampened bristles into a dish of this powder, then brush. The gritty texture of the salt and flour helped scrape away food debris, while the herbal ingredients addressed gum health. It was a surprisingly comprehensive system, combining mechanical cleaning with what the Chinese understood as medicinal treatment for the mouth.
How the Design Spread to Europe
The bristle toothbrush remained a largely Chinese innovation for several hundred years. The Library of Congress dates the first bristle toothbrush recognizable as a modern type to 1498 in China, still using boar hair on bone or bamboo handles. European travelers and traders eventually brought the concept westward, though Europeans initially found hog bristles uncomfortably stiff and sometimes preferred horsehair alternatives.
It took until around 1780 for the first mass-produced toothbrush to appear, made by William Addis in England. Even then, the basic architecture was the same one Chinese inventors had established during the Tang Dynasty: bristles set into a handle. That fundamental design persisted until DuPont introduced nylon bristles in 1938, finally ending the centuries-long reliance on animal hair that began in Tang Dynasty China.
Why It Mattered
The ancient Chinese toothbrush wasn’t just a grooming tool. It reflected a broader cultural emphasis on bodily cleanliness and preventive health that ran through traditional Chinese medicine. Oral hygiene was understood as connected to overall well-being, not a cosmetic afterthought. The progression from finger-cleaning to chew sticks to a purpose-built bristle tool shows a society actively iterating on how to solve a universal human problem. The fact that the basic solution they arrived at over a thousand years ago is still the one billions of people use today says something about how right they got it.