Public Health in a Transnational Context: Hong Kong and the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic
Journal: Journal of Urban History
Year: 2024

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