My analysis will focus on “Climate and Sanitary Condition” from the primary source The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. This primary source illustrates mid-19th-century Hong Kong from the view of the foreign inhabitants residing there. This source is fascinating for a number of reasons. At first glance, this section of the source, “Climate and Sanitary Condition,” seems to focus solely on disease, specifically detailing which illnesses befell the foreigners across their first few years of inhabitance in the British colony of Hong Kong, with the primary source citing all sorts of illnesses throughout Hong Kong, corresponding locations of said illnesses and outbreaks, and a chart denoting mortality rates among foreigners in their first eight years settling in Hong Kong.

However, the meticulous mapping and logging of the specific locations of illness outbreaks serve a broader purpose. By mapping illness outbreaks to certain spots in Hong Kong, the author covertly manages to forge associations, through the use of deliberate language, characterising spaces where predominantly lower-class Hong Kong locals reside as sites of illness. These associations strengthen pre-existing racial/class divisions between foreigners and Hong Kong locals under the guise of spatial divisions. This idea is similarly demonstrated in Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Powerand The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, where foreign ideas surrounding sanitation and health oftentimes informed the spatial organisation of China’s treaty ports.

When “Climate and Sanitary Condition” from The Treaty Ports of China and Japan describes the foreign-stationed soldiers who were residing amongst Hong Kong locals when there was a particularly severe outbreak of illness, the source writes, “From all accounts, it is not easy to escape the spots of this malarious character at Hong Kong; and if it is ever to be a healthy station, our soldiers must not be housed as they have been hitherto.”[1] The terminology used by the author here, describing spots in Hong Kong as possessing “malarious character”[2] and later in the source describing the locality of the barracks as “unwholesome,”[3] illustrates a contempt for certain spots in Hong Kong, and these certain spots are far from coincidental. The foreign soldiers of the “unwholesome” locality were stationed in the barracks of the East and West ends of town, where many lower-class Hong Kong locals resided.[4] In fact, most, if not all, of the “towns” where illness is mapped throughout “Climate and Sanitary Condition” were inhabited by Hong Kong locals, usually “among the lower classes.”[5]

This made me think of the emphasis put on sanitation in areas occupied by foreigners and how much it was prioritised. In Bickers and Jackson’s Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power, it is explained that sanitation played a big role in the organisation of foreign spaces within China’s treaty ports. Significantly, this mention of sanitation was centred in the foreign concession, again illustrating spatial separation between foreigners and locals in the treaty ports. Bickers and Jackson write that treaty-port municipal authorities in China employed “public health officials” and attempted to construct “a suitable system for sanitation in the concession.”[6] An emphasis on sanitation in the foreign concession does not mean a lack of sanitation in local areas by any means; the significance here has more to do with the language of sanitation and how significant this concept was to foreigners. This, however, does illustrate that both in the treaty ports and cities like Hong Kong, when something was deemed sanitary or needing to be sanitised, it was reliably associated with foreigners. Associative wording is of the utmost significance here, as putting so much emphasis on sanitation in foreign spaces creates a connotation of “sanitary” and “healthy” in specific relation to the foreigners. Contrasting that with the aforementioned descriptions of local spaces as “unwholesome” and having “malarious character,” there appears to be quite a harsh divide between locals and foreigners and what attributes or associations they have been given.

This terminology associated with space is described well in Henriot’s “The Shanghai Bund in Myth and History: An Essay through Textual and Visual Sources.” Henriot wrote about the renaming of Chinese street names with French figures in Shanghai’s French Concession, demonstrating that colonial separatism from Chinese locals was produced through terminology, where language was able to “mark” spaces in a way that imbues a real association with a place.[7] I would argue this was observed in the “Climate and Sanitary Condition” section of The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. Ultimately, in The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, the sections regarding illness and sanitation were not useful in the logging and mapping of illnesses in mid-19th-century Hong Kong; instead, the writing on illness revealed more about the social perspectives, class divisions between Hong Kong locals and foreigners, and how language reinforced spatial separation between them.

 

[1] Nicholas Belfield Dennys, ed., The Treaty Ports of China and Japan: A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of Those Countries, Together with Peking, Yedo, Hongkong and Macao (London: Trübner and Co., 1867), 32, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/treatyportschin00unkngoog/page/32/mode/2up

[2] Dennys, Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 32.

[3] Dennys, Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 33.

[4] Dennys, Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 33.

[5] Dennys, Treaty Ports of China and Japan, 34.

[6] Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson, eds., Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power (London: Routledge, 2016), 3.

[7] Christian Henriot, “The Shanghai Bund in Myth and History: An Essay through Textual and Visual Sources,” Journal of Modern Chinese History 4, no. 1 (2010): 5–6.