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Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China

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1. The demographic consequences of the Black Death and the reasons for the plague's disappearance from Europe continue to be debated by historians and epidemiologists (Appleby, 1980: 161-173; Flinn, 1979: 131-148). Indeed, some question whether the "Black Death" was caused by bubonic plague at all (Twigg, 1984).
2. The first was the "Plague of Justinian," which began in Egypt in A.D. 542; the second was the fourteenth-century "Black Death."
3. Yun-Gui, Lingnan, and the Southeast Coast designate three of the physio-graphically defined macroregions described by G. William Skinner (1977: 211-220).
4. In her pioneering work on epidemics in Ming China, Dunstan (1975) discusses in detail the problems posed by Chinese source materials for historical epidemiology.
5. There is no evidence that the pneumonic form developed in southern China during the nineteenth century, so I do not discuss it further here. There was an epidemic of pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910-1911, however, in which some 60,000 people died (Wu, 1936: 31-32).
6. The Gujin tushujicheng, the Imperial encyclopedia published under orders of the Kangxi emperor in 1726, contains a list of epidemics that occurred from 224 B.C. to A. D. 1718 (reproduced in Wu, 1936: 43-51). Epidemics for Yunnan province are included beginning in A.D. 1165.
7. Numerous epidemics are listed in Yunnan provincial gazetteers, but prior to the late eighteenth century such references are quite sporadic (Xu Yunnan tongzhi gao, 1898: 2/13b-24b). See also gazetteers listed in Appendix and lists for Yunnan in Imura (1936-1937).
8. In the late spring, summer, and autumn, temperatures and relative humidity in most parts of Yunnan are moderately high, conditions under which bubonic plague epidemics are known to occur. In May and June, temperatures in Mengzi, for example, range from 18 to 29 degrees Celsius and relative humidity is between 57% and 64% (Pearce and Smith, 1984: 223). In the summer months, temperatures remain about the same, relative humidity is about 70%. In the fall, temperatures range between 15 to 28 degrees Celsius and relative humidity is about 67%. The only season plague would not occur in Mengzi would be the winter, when temperatures dip to between 8 to 20 degrees Celsius and relative humidity is about 55%.
9. Reproduced in Yu Baitao (1910). My translation with the help of Yue Mingbao.
10. I am grateful to Susan Mann for her assistance in locating Hong Liangji's reference to Shi Daonan.
11. Rocher concluded that the mountain people brought the disease into the plains villages, but twentieth-century observations (Pollitzer, 1954: 494) of plague transmission have shown that the infection typically is transported from cities or towns to rural areas. It therefore seems far more likely that the mountain people carried the disease back with them from the lowlands. That the disease spread so erratically indicates that the infection was being passively transmitted by people carrying infected rat fleas or rodents with them as they traveled. If the disease was being spread by the migration of rodents, it would spread in a more uniform fashion (Appleby, 1980: 164). By "rainy season," Rocher may have meant the late summer when thunderstorms are most prevalent in Yunnan. The rainy season actually begins in May and lasts through October, but the heaviest rainfall comes in August (Zhu Binghai,1962: 533-543). Since heavy rain can kill fleas, Rocher's observation suggests that the plague season in eastern Yunnan lasted from May until August.
12. James Lee (1982a) discusses in detail the problems of underregistration of Yunnan's population in the official population registers. Wang Xuhuai (1968: 315) examines the particular problems the rebellion caused for accurate registration.
13. It is clear that military violence itself was not the major cause of population decline. Officially, about 135,000 Qing soldiers, militia, and officials "died in the line of duty" (Xu Yunnan tongzhi gao, 1898: 109-110, cited in Wang,1968: 317). As Wang points out, these numbers are probably too low because officials might have underreported casualties in order to put the best face on their campaigns. The Pingding Yunnan Huifei fanglue claims that 200,000 Moslems died in battle (Fulu 3, biao 6, cited in Wang, 1968: 317). Wang takes this higher number as a more probable count of the numbers killed on the government's side as well, and he estimates that a total of about 400,000 to 500,000 people died as a result of military action. Yet even this higher estimate accounts for only 12.5% of the recorded population decline.
14. In the mountains, villagers could easily have come into direct contact with wild rodents infected with plague and then carried the disease back to human settlements.
15. The population no doubt suffered from many diseases, any one of which might have caused significant mortality. Ann Carmichael (1983) points out that epidemic diseases are rarely autonomous infections, but are usually part of a "synergistic package" of infections simultaneously besetting a population. Given the prevalence of famine, it is likely that many were afflicted by the "famine fevers," typhus and dysentery. (For the medical relationship between famine and disease, see Bang, 1981.) Malaria was endemic to the area (Li Yaonan, 1954); cholera and other water-borne diseases were probably present as well.
16. Given that the Yun-Gui macroregion is composed of large parts of both Yunnan and Guizhou, plague probably spread to Guizhou as well. However, I was not able to find any reference to rat epizootics in Guizhou gazetteers. In the spring of 1864, in Cunyi prefecture, a large number of rats came out during the daytime. That fall, in the prefectural capital, there was a major epidemic in which entire families fell ill and from which few recovered (Cunyi fu zhi, 1936: 13/5a-5b). The appearance of the rats seems to have been taken as an ill omen but was not actually a rat epizootic.
17. The first steamship arrived in Beihai from Hong Kong in 1879, but until 1885, steamships made only irregular trips between the two ports. In the 1880s, steamships gradually replaced the junks that had monopolized transport along the western coast of Guangdong, and, by 1891, foreign-operated steamships were the primary means of conveyance between Beihai and Hong Kong (Inspectorate General, Decennial Reports, 1882-1891: 637-640).
18. Many epidemics are recorded in Guangxi gazetteers during the 1860s and 1870s, but I have used only those accounts that specifically mention shuyi, rat epizootics, or describe symptoms that are clearly bubonic plague. Inasmuch as Lianzhou, Qinzhou, and Beihai, the coastal towns connected to Nanning by "much used land routes" (Inspectorate General, Decennial Reports, 1882-1891: 661), all experienced severe epidemics of plague in 1882 (Inspectorate General, 1882, No. 24:31) it seems likely that the disease was present further inland before 1889 as well. Nanning probably experienced outbreaks of plague before 1889; a French missionary who had long lived in the city reported that plague had been present "for years" (Inspectorate General, 1889-1890, No. 39: 15).
19. He estimated the total population at 1,500,000 and the number of plague deaths between March and June at 40,000. Case-mortality was 80%.
20. There were 1,458 cases resulting in 1,202 deaths out of a population of 49,667.
21. Wu Xuanchong wrote his pamphlet on plague in 1891 in the wake of outbreaks of Anpu in 1889 and 1890. His work was collated by another practitioner of Chinese medicine, Zheng Fenyang, in 1901 and reprinted in Qiu Jisheng (ed.) Zhenben yishu jicheng (1936). Divided into eight juan, the work covers the history of the plague in the southeast, theories on contagion, different symptoms of the disease, preventive measures, case histories of individual patients, and the many different herbal remedies thought by Chinese medical practitioners to be efficacious.
22. Unfortunately, historical descriptions of the content and purpose of these parades and ceremonies are lacking. There is enough evidence, however, to suggest that they were very similar to the ritual observances Francis Hsu (1983) witnessed in a village near Dali in 1942 during a virulent cholera epidemic.
23. Djang's translation reads "plague." I have changed it here to "epidemic," assuming that the original reads "yi."
24. In 1975, people in Shatin, Hong Kong, burned clothes during the ritual ceremonies commemorating the nineteenth-century plague epidemic (Hsu, 1983: 102). The purpose of this was to provide the dead with clothing. It is not clear if this twentieth-century practice originated in what had been a nineteenth-century public health measure or if there was a ritual aspect to the clothes burning in the nineteenth century as well.

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Pages: 107 - 155
Article first published: April 1988
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Carol Benedict
Stanford University

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