On 13 May 1903 Li Sun, contractor of 31 Hollywood Road, Hong Kong, was arrested alongside a number of his âfokiesâ by Sergeant Dymond for a curious crime: lodging the corpse of a seventeen-year-old boy in a closed cement barrel. Under the title âPlague Body Passed as Cementâ, the following dayâs China Mail commented that âThe dodge was a very clever one, and they succeeded in taking the corpse up to the Peak from the contractorâs house.â 1 Upon a swift court hearing, Li was charged and found guilty not for murder, but for removing the corpse and not reporting the boyâs death to the authorities. The penalty imposed upon the contractor was 200 Hong Kong dollars (or two months of incarceration), whereas the âfokiesâ were discharged. Rather than being an isolated journalistic curio, this story formed part of what, following Robert Peckham, we may call a colonial âepidemic panicâ concerning Chinese corpses in Hong Kong at the turn of the century. 2 The panic related to British efforts to control bubonic plague in the Crown Colony, a public health objective that in many ways encapsulated both symbolically and administratively the much more general goal of achieving a status of âhygienic modernityâ for Hong Kong. 3
The aim of this chapter is to explore the Hong Kong medical and administrative authoritiesâ fascination with and concerns about the so-called âbody dumpingâ of plague victims at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses, on the one hand, on the transformation of this concern over the long years of recurrent plague outbreaks in Hong Kong, and, on the other hand, on the way that this became entangled with BritishâChinese dynamics in the colony. My aim is to show that in the course of the epidemic crisis the dumped plague corpse functioned as a locus of epistemic and governmental investment and problematization, but also, and most pertinently, that it acted as an aporetic and at the same time productive locus of colonial relations. In particular, this chapter examines how British concerns regarding body dumping in Hong Kong led to a heated debate on the explanation and resolution of the phenomenon both among colonial authorities and between them and Chinese elites. Rather, however, than reproducing tug-of-war visions of colonial power and native resistance, what this particular history of âpost-mortem contagionâ points at is the emergence of a common semantic and performative ground of opposing agents embroiled in epidemic crisis: culture. As an epistemic object, the dumped body of plague victims fermented a heated debate on the nature of the pathogen and its etiological and epidemiological profileâbroadly speaking, its disease ontology. As a political object, it was equally productive of destabilizations and re-negotiations of âChinese characterââin other words, the customs, habits, and proclivities that supposedly constituted the cultural identity of the Chinese.
Plague in Hong Kong
Hong Kong experienced its first bubonic plague outbreak in the spring of 1894, when the disease, possibly derived from the south-west Chinese province of Yunnan, struck the colony with devastating consequences. Besides the enormous human and economic cost, the epidemic fueled a wide range of rifts in the colony: within the colonial medical officialdom, between international bacteriologists operating on the ground, as well as between the colonial administration and Chinese elites. The crisis thus stands today as a historical exemplar of the multilayered societal and political impact of plague outbreaks across global ports at the turn of the century. 4 Importantly, in the summer of 1894, the Pasteurian doctor Alexandre Yersin succeeded in isolating the plague pathogen, a gram-negative bacillus that now bears his name, Yersinia pestis. 5 This was in spite of concerted efforts by the British medical administration to obstruct his work and his having only recently arrived from French Indochina. In the following years, plague would spread to India and thence to the rest of the world, forming what we now call the third plague pandemic, a global epidemic that, between 1894 and 1959 (when it was officially declared over by the WHO), cost the lives of twelve million individuals and established endemic foci of the disease, which are still active today, in Africa and the Americas. 6 During that period, the disease continued to afflict Hong Kong, where it became an annual spring-to-summer phenomenon until the mid-1920s, leading to thousands of deaths, mainly among the Chinese community. 7 While historians have primarily focused on the 1894 outbreak and, to a lesser degree, on the South China rural outbreaks preceding it, little attention has been paid to the persistence of the disease in the colony itself. 8 And yet this annual phenomenon was quickly established as a field of emergence of important epidemiological questions and practices as well as of biopolitical dynamics that led to the physical and social transformation of Hong Kong.
Crucially, from the very first weeks of the initial outbreak in 1894, plague confronted colonial authorities with a question of corpse disposal. Soon after the start of the epidemic, a special cemetery was designated for plague victims near Kennedy Town, the Chinese-inhabited neighborhood on the west side of Hong Kong Island where one of the plague hospitals operated during the course of the epidemic. Another cemetery was opened soon after for the same purpose inside the Chinese Mount Davis Cemetery, near Sandy Bay. The latter would be the destination of all plague corpses after the last week of May, where they were subjected to what the leading colonial medical officers Ayres and Lowson deemed to be âscientific burialâ. 9 Europeans dying of the disease were, on the other hand, buried at a special plot in Happy Valley, the long-standing cemetery ground for colonials. As for Roman Catholic members of the Chinese community, a specially allocated burial ground was provided in Kennedy Town. In all cases, corpses were buried in quicklime at a depth of seven feet, with no non-plague-related corpses allowed on site. After the end of the epidemic, the original plague cemetery in Kennedy Town was âcovered over with several feet of earth [âŠ] and walled up inâ with the intention to covering it up with cement, so as âto prevent any tampering by the Chineseâ. 10
The management of plague burials was a complex one, as it involved pressing epidemiological and administrative questions, including the maintenance of civil order in the course of the outbreak. In particular, plague burials posed an open question related to the mode of generation and transmission of the disease. At first, colonial medical officers saw plague as miasmatic, and even after the discovery of its causative bacterial agent it was suspected to be carried by the soil. 11 Could this mean, it was often asked, that the ground in which plague corpses were buried was prone to infection and in turn be infectious in itself? Equally important was the notion that plague could be carried and transmitted in the form of fomites on the clothes of the deceased. 12 Such questions would continue to be discussed across the world, wherever plague struck in its global pandemic trajectory, even after Paul-Louis Simondâs indictment of the rat and its fleas as the prime vectors of the pathogen, or, much more importantly in terms of contemporary perceptions, following John Ashburton Thompsonâs demonstration of the ratâhuman plague connection in Sydney. 13 Rather than bringing about some ontological stabilization, the main effect of the bacteriological identification of plague was the epidemiological unsettlement of the disease, opening up all sorts of scenarios regarding how it was transmitted between and preserved within...