Maps, Malaria and the Visual Construction of Early Hong Kong

Hong Kong, one of the world’s major cities, has a bizarre yet neglected settlement history. Until recently, historians had scant knowledge of how the city was set up and developed across the first ten years of its precarious colonisation in the mid-nineteenth century. For colonists to physically construct Hong Kong, they had to conceptually and ideologically form it in parallel. It was an assemblage of parts, both regional and global. This talk, based upon evidence from the speaker’s new book Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849, explores how both the city’s physical form and blunt spatial politics were actively shaped by the fear of malaria, then thought to be a gas or “miasma” emanating from the surface of the island itself. The research draws upon many unpublished sources, such as medical reports, personal diaries and letters, government records, journal accounts, newspaper articles and advertisements. However, as this history takes place a decade before the introduction of photography to the colony, the talk concentrates upon the variety of alternative visual evidence necessarily brought to bear, from navy sketches, Chinese trade paintings and engineers’ and architects’ studies, to hydrographic and cartographic maps that individually and in combination provide trace material enabling the reconstruction of this strange and rapidly evolving society. 

Speaker biography

Christopher Cowell studied architectural history at Columbia University. He has taught worldwide, including in Hong Kong, New York and more recently in Dublin, where he was assistant professor of modern and contemporary architectural history at Trinity College Dublin. He now lectures in architectural history and theory at London South Bank University. His longstanding historical research focuses on both southern China and northern India, exploring the entanglement of modernity within European imperialism and its participation in architecture and urbanism. Christopher’s writing examines the relationship between the practice and theory of architecture against the cultural complexity of colonialism. This intersection draws upon the study of urban militarism, spatial security, hinterland ecologies, cartography, property, climate, disease and race, among others. He is the author of Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849 published this year by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press; a book that explores the early urban history of the settlement’s colonisation and its relationship with miasma theory. 

Image caption: Surveyor General’s Dept., ‘Plan of Victoria, Hong Kong’, with Cantonment Hill (now Admiralty) (detail), 12 May 1845. Ink and watercolour. © The National Archives, Kew (WO 78/479).

Information about event format and access

The event starts with a presentation and talk Adam Eaker, lasting around 40mins, followed by Q&A and a free drinks reception. The event is hosted in our Lecture Room, which is up two flights of stairs (there is no lift). The talk will also be streamed online and recording published on our website.

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