During the period of public health reform in Shanghai (1927–1937), “hygienic modernity” was a central focus of urban governance and sovereign recovery. While existing scholarship has shown how Chinese elites associated this concept with China’s place in the modern world, how different actors portrayed, perceived, or understood it remains to be explored. This thesis examines the narratives of hygienic modernity through the lens of Shanghai’s slaughterhouses. The authorities sought to build a new sensory order in pursuit of hygienic modernity through visual strategies, such as emphasizing procedural standards, spatial zoning, building materials, and mechanized operations. They suppressed the senses of smell and sound, reframing the slaughterhouse from a bloody, chaotic place into a rational, orderly, and controllable model of modern hygiene. In contrast, some records foregrounded foul odors, blood-soaked scenes, tear-streaked faces, dying moans, and harrowing physical reactions. Within these accounts, the concept of hygienic modernity that the official discourse attempted to promote was either unclear or entirely absent. This divergence in sensory perception reveals that pursuing hygienic modernity was a complex process of sensory reorganization, in which the sensory manipulation imposed by the authorities and the perception experienced by the recipients continuously intersected and conflicted.