ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections between urban photography and disease in late nineteenth-century China. Focusing on a series of photographs taken in colonial Hong Kong during the 1894 plague outbreak, the chapter shows how such visualizations were integral to definitions of the Third Plague Pandemic. While David Knox Griffith’s images were widely disseminated at the time, they continue to be reproduced as anonymous illustrations in contemporary accounts of the plague. The chapter provides the first sustained analysis of these urban ‘plague scenes’, demonstrating how they drew upon a complex photographic repertoire within which late Qing China was imagined as a site of ruins. The chapter explores the development of this epidemic photography within the heterogeneity of the imperial album, highlighting the historical assumptions that continue to inform depictions of epidemic disease in the ruined cities of today.
