Public Health in a Transnational Context: Hong Kong and the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic

Originating in south-western China, the Third Plague Pandemic reached the Pearl River Delta in the early 1890s, whereupon steamships took the disease to port cities worldwide. We examine the impact of responses to plague on the built environment in Hong Kong, a British colony, as well as the comparable experiences of Honolulu and San Francisco. Bubonic plague is not the result of polluted water, but officials drawing on contemporary understandings of miasmic theory believed it to be so. Fearing the epidemic would spread beyond crowded Chinese districts, governments quarantined affected areas, carrying out house-to-house inspections and in America, controlled burnings of condemned buildings. To improve sanitation, the Hong Kong government commissioned reports that recommended a sewerage system, lower density housing, and rat control, but large-scale urban redevelopment was not undertaken due to high costs, and water infrastructure would prove to be ineffective in the face of twentieth-century population growth.