2025 Theses Doctoral

Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease in the Making of Modern Chinese Architecture, 1894–1949

Wang, Y. L. Lucy

At the turn of the twentieth century, sources near and far characterized greater China as a “Sick Man of the Far East 東方病夫.” The phrase suggested a far-reaching, trans-regime backwardness, and it crystallized into the following question: Was greater China—customs, lands, peoples—inherently disease-ridden and unhygienic? This conflation of the body with the body politic contained medical and architectural dimensions.

Indeed, in 1894, as outbreaks of the Third Plague Pandemic ravaged British colonial Hong Kong, medical experts working on the ground uncovered the disease’s bacterial mechanics, and the first significant public health changes on the heels of this development targeted the built environment. In this way, bacterial transmission prompted architects, physicians, land-surveyors, and engineers across the region to integrate new understandings of disease into their work.

This dissertation traces the merging of medical and architectural expertise throughout greater China, first in Hong Kong, a colonial site adjacent to the ailing Qing empire (1644–1912), and eventually in the new Republic of China (1912–1949). Elsewhere within architectural history, hygiene’s stakes are well-established but predominantly address miasmic understandings of disease. In contrast, this project examines how, in the age of germ theory, medical experts and professional architects managed outbreaks, modernized architecture and infrastructure, and modulated between tradition and modernity.