"Hong Kong - One of the special cemeteries for Chinese who have died of plague. It contains around one thousand corpses"

From plague diary of Alexandre Yersin, who discovered the plague bacillus in July 1894. Photograph by Alexandre YersinThe third pandemic of plague (in its bubonic and pneumonic clinical forms) struck the globe between 1894 and 1959. As Yersinia pestis spread from country to country and from continent to continent, it left behind it not only a trail of death and devastation, but also a vast visual archive. It was the first time that plague would reach and establish itself in all inhabited continents. But it was also the first time that any epidemic would be photographed. As plague spread from harbour to harbour, and amongst cities, towns and villages, so did photographs of the pandemic through reproductions in the daily and illustrated press. Rather than forming a homogeneous or linear visual narrative, these photographic documents provided diverse perspectives on the pandemic, which, more often than not, were not simply different from region to region, but in fact conflicting within any single locus of infection. Moreover this photographic production came to establish a new field of vision, what we may call “epidemic photography” which continues to inform the way in which we see, depict and imagine epidemics and their social, economic, and political impact in the age of Global Health.Plague arrived for the first time in the British colony of Hong Kong in the spring of 1894. The first outbreak to be widely recognised at the time as part of the third plague pandemic (which biologically originated in Yunnan) the Hong Kong epidemic led to the discovery of the pathogenic agent of plague (the bacterium Yersinia pestis) by the Pasteurian doctor Alexandre Yersin. Neither Yersin nor other leading scientists in the field at the time, were however able to ascertain the transmission path of the disease. At the same time, British colonial authorities established draconian measures for stamping out the disease. These led to conflict with Chinese medical authorities and the Chinese population of the colony which was particularly targeted by house-to-house visitation and other intrusive and destructive measures of epidemic control. In charge of these measures, the Shropshire Regiment’s so-called Whitewash Brigade was credited by the British as putting a stop to the outbreak. However, plague would keep returning to Hong Kong for decades, establishing a seasonal pattern (spring-summer).The database “Photographs of the Third Plague Pandemic” was funded by an European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no 336564) for the project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic, led by Dr Christos Lynteris (PI) at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge (2018-2019). The project would like to thank its postdoctoral researchers, Drs Lukas Engelmann, Nicholas H. A. Evans, Maurits Meerwijk, Branwyn Poleykett and Abhjit Sarkar, and its administrators Mss Teresa Abaurrea, Emma Hacking and Samantha Peel for their contribution to this database