Reappraising the bubonic plague in Hong Kong : tracing the evolving medical landscape of Kowloon (1894-1924)

Abstract

The plague struck Hong Kong in 1894 and became an endemic disease until its disappearance in 1924. Previous scholarly research extensively focus on the outbreak in 1894 at Taipingshan district and formed a “Taipingshan plague narrative”. The “Taipingshan plague narrative” has become a discursive cliché circumscribing a comprehensive understanding of the prolonged plague epidemics in Hong Kong. The historical significance of the recurring plague epidemics needs a territorial and periodised revisit, Kowloon was selected to be the research region. My dissertation argues that reappraising the plague epidemics from an alternative geographical perspective allows us to evaluate the evolving medical landscape of Hong Kong comprehensively, and that would construct a regional historical perspective of plague studies. The experience that plague had shaped the medical landscape of Kowloon, were not only inherited from a general Hong Kong context, but also followed a distinctive regional course. The dissertation adopted the idea of place and space to elucidate the development of Kowloon’s medical landscape in three stages: the first stage 1894 to 1904 demonstrates the colonial government’s duality in administration that constructed the hierarchical medical system between the urban city of Victoria and the suburban Kowloon. The second stage 1905 to 1913 examines the emergence and development of Kowloon’s anti-plague establishments and the tripartite collaboration between the colonial authorities, Chinese philanthropists and local committee members in promoting communal medical services in Kowloon. The third stage 1914 to 1929 explores the formation of an independent and resilient Regional Medical Centre in Kowloon in 1910s and the continuous expansion of Western medical services and spaces in Kowloon in the 1920s.