Abstract
By the turn of the twentieth century, the British colonial government in Hong Kong was struggling with the provision of health infrastructure for the urban working class, whose living quarters were identified by sanitary experts as breeding grounds for a range of contagious diseases. At the time, the colony was still in recovery from the Bubonic Plague outbreak in 1894 which had claimed 2426 lives in just the first two months of the outbreak. The plague subsequently paralysed the economy of the whole city. In an investigation into the causes of the plague outbreak, Medical Officer Dr. James A. Lowson suggested the structural defects of urban tenements – ‘the want of ventilation, light and air in them, the inadequate water supply, the want of proper drainage, the overcrowded condition of the houses […] the filthy condition of wells’ – was contributing directly to the rapid spread of the plague in the Chinese quarters (see Fig. 3.1). In the immediate decades following the 1894 Plague outbreak, colonial anxieties over the sanitary condition of working-class dwelling underwrote a series of interventionist measures, including compulsory domestic cleansings, sanitary inspections, and building regulations. The domestic space was indeed the one of the sites where sanitary reform in colonial Hong Kong first materialised. The Sanitary Department urged ‘even more important than the cleansing of the streets was the cleansing of the dwellings of the poorer classes of Chinese, and this work was now coming to occupy most of the energies of the Sanitary Department’. Tanks of soap and water were provided in the streets for the respective blocks of houses, and notice was served on the residents that their houses must be cleaned by a certain day – when all floors, rooms and cubicles must be cleared out and they with their furniture ready for inspection. Accompanying these sanitary measures were building regulations which came into place when the colonial state passed the Public Health and Buildings Ordinance of 1903. This landmark legislation systematically reshaped the spatial character of urban buildings, ensuring minimum hygiene and sanitary standards in buildings used for domestic, commercial, and industrial purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
In the nineteenth century, the sanitary discourse was used by the colonial state in Hong Kong to create a racially segregated urban landscape. The urban working-class dwelling was criticised by sanitary experts as the breeding grounds of contagions. For a discussion on disease and planning, see, for example, Margaret Jones, “Tuberculosis, Housing and the Colonial State: Hong Kong, 1900–1950,” Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (2003): 653–682.
- 2.
“The Plague in Hong Kong,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, July 31, 1894, 2. After the resumption of the Plague-infected residential district of Taipingshan in 1894, in 1901, the whole of the City of Victoria, together with the villages of Hunghom, Hok Un, Yaumati and Mongkok Tsui in the Kowloon Peninsula, was declared by the Acting Secretary G. A. Woodcock as infected with Bubonic Plague. “City of Victoria and Certain Villages Declared Infected,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, May 4, 1901.
- 3.
“Medical Report on the Epidemic of Bubonic Plague in 1894,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 16/95, 175.
- 4.
“Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1914,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 5; In 1915, a new by-laws was passed empowering the Sanitary Board to carry out cleansing and lime-washing in tenement houses which had not been cleansed and lime-washed by their owners within the appointed periods and to charge the cost of the work to the defaulting owners. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1915,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 4.
- 5.
“Ordinance Passed and Assented to: Public Health and Buildings, No. 1, 1903,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, February 27, 1903, 201.
- 6.
On eugenic thought that links health of youth with the future of British empire, see, for example, Fiona Skillen, “‘A Sound System of Physical Training’: The Development of Girls’ Physical Education in Interwar Scotland,” History of Education 38, no. 3 (2009): 403–418.
- 7.
This image on the ‘insanitary’ condition in private schools appeared constantly in education and medical reports across 1901 to 1941. Details in, for example, “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1912,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 4–5, which will be referred later in this chapter; here these details were offered in “Annual Medical Report for the Year 1938,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 23.
- 8.
“Annual Medical Report for the Year Ending 31st December 1934,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 43.
- 9.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1934,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 4.
- 10.
These two lines of public health management were discussed in Milton J. Lewis and Kerrie L. MacPherson, “Public health in Asia and the Pacific: An introduction,” in Public Health in Asia and the Pacific: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Milton J. Lewis and Kerrie L. MacPherson (London: Routledge, 2007), 1.
- 11.
For example, in 1931, an updated fee requirement was published in The Hong Kong Government Gazette where it suggested, ‘It is hereby notified that after 1st January 1931, in place of the existing entrance fees, charges, payable as are school fees, will be made for the medical inspection of pupils at the undermentioned schools, as set forth in the following table: Queen’s college, King’s college, Belilios Public School, Ellis Kadoorie School, Yaumati School, Wanchai school, Gap Road School, vernacular middle school, vernacular normal school for women, $3 for each pupil; Ellis Kadoorie school for Indian $1 for each pupil’. “School Medical Inspection Fees,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, Sep. 4, 1931, 614.
- 12.
As will be introduced later in the chapter, the School Hygiene Branch was established in 1925. By 1935, the Branch extended its medical services through the growth of staff. By then, the Branch consisted of the Health Officer for Schools, two Chinese health officers, one part-time lady medical officer and five school nurses. Its duties also extended to include ‘medical treatment with regard to general disease, defects of ear, nose, and throat, and eye defects; and health instructions’. This expansion of the school medical service notwithstanding, by 1936, the physical examination of pupils was still confined to 17 government schools containing 4,988 pupils. The primary vernacular schools, containing 59,977 pupils, were left ‘more or less untouched though it was here the need for health measures was most urgent’. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1935,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 54; “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1936,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 57.
- 13.
David Pomfret, “Tropic Childhood: Health, Hygiene and Nature,” in Youth and Empire, 22–54.
- 14.
Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997), 87–152; also see also see Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, “Eugenics in Britain: A View from the Metropole,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, eds. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 213–228; Diane B. Paul, John Stenhouse, and Hamish G. Spencer, eds. Eugenics at the Edges of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- 15.
Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2.
- 16.
Paul Lombardo, “Eugenics and Public Health: Historical Connections and Ethical Implications,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics, eds. Anna C. Mastroianni, Jeffrey P. Kahn and Nancy E. Kass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 642–653.
- 17.
“The Taint in the Family: Brilliant Children of a Strange Family, Eugenics Problem,” Hong Kong Daily Press, May 28, 1928, 10.
- 18.
Chloe Campbell, Race and Empire: Eugenics In Colonial Kenya (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 13.
- 19.
Levine and Bashford, “Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, 3–27.
- 20.
Sudipa Topdar, “The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children’s Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal,” Gender & History 29, no. 1 (2017): 176–197.
- 21.
“The Educational Report for 1890,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 23/31, 294.
- 22.
“Annual Report on Education in Hong Kong for the Year 1887,” Supplement to the Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, April 21, 1888, 403.
- 23.
“Preliminary Report on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong, 1902,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, April 11, 1902, 590.
- 24.
Ka-che Yip, Yuen Sang Leung, and Man Kong Timothy Wong, Health Policy and Disease in Colonial and Post-Colonial Hong Kong, 1841–2003 (London: Routledge, 2016), 13.
- 25.
“Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1932,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 12–13.
- 26.
Liping Bu and Ka-che Yip, “Introduction: interpreting Science and Public Health in Modern Asia,” in Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia, eds. Liping Bu, Darwin H. Stapleton and Ka-Che Yip (New York: Routledge, 2012), 2.
- 27.
Yip, Leung, and Wong, Health Policy and Disease, 24.
- 28.
“Report of the Inspector of Schools for the Year 1906,” Supplement to the Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, July 19, 1907, 447.
- 29.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1913,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 2.
- 30.
The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, Sep. 1, 1939, 785–8.
- 31.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1912,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 4–5.
- 32.
By 1936, the Medical and Sanitary Report recorded that ‘Many of the subsidised schools [private institutions which receive a subsidy from government when the conditions warrant it] and most of the unaided schools are institutions occupying one or more floors in old or newer tenement buildings. Such were designed for domestic purposes and not for schools and in many of them it is impossible to provide for the pupils satisfactory hygienic conditions’. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1936,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 54–56.
- 33.
Leslie Baker, “‘A Visitation of Providence’: Public Health And Eugenic Reform In The Wake Of The Halifax Disaster,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 31, no. 1 (2014): 99–122.
- 34.
“Report on the Teaching of Hygiene in the Schools of Hong Kong 1906,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 7/1907, 3.
- 35.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1913,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 20.
- 36.
Mona Gleason discussed the dominant paradigms underlining the school health governance, see Gleason, “Learning the Body: Schools, Curriculum, and Health,” in Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900–1940 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 85–102.
- 37.
Yip, Leung, and Wong, Health Policy and Disease, 24.
- 38.
This statement was offered in a review account by the Medical and Sanitary Department on the teaching of hygiene in schools. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1936,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 53.
- 39.
“Report on the Teaching of Hygiene in the schools of Hong Kong 1906,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no.7/1907, 3.
- 40.
“Education in Hygiene and Temperance,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, Sep. 9, 1905, 5.
- 41.
“The Teaching of Hygiene in Schools,” Hong Kong Daily Press, Feb. 22,1906, 2.
- 42.
“Examination in Hygiene,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, Jan. 13, 1906, 4.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
“Education in Hygiene and Temperance,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, Sep. 9, 1905, 5.
- 45.
“Education in Hong Kong,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, June 23, 1906, 5.
- 46.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1912,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 17.
- 47.
“Education in Hygiene and Temperance,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, Sep. 9, 1905, 5.
- 48.
This persisted throughout the interwar period where the Medical and Sanitary Department constantly pointed out the ‘unsatisfactory’ teaching of hygiene in vernacular schools. For example, in 1935, the Medical and Sanitary Report suggested, ‘The teaching of hygiene in private vernacular schools leaves much to be desired. Most of the teachers have grown up in insanitary surroundings and having received no training in the subject regard it as one of little importance. The few who are sympathetic are handicapped by the fact that the school premises do not demonstrate the principles of hygiene’. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1935,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 56.
- 49.
“Report on the Teaching of Hygiene in the schools of Hong Kong 1906,” Hong Kong Sessional Papers, Hong Kong Government, no. 7/1907, 3.
- 50.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1915,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 12.
- 51.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1919,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 7.
- 52.
For a discussion on hospital architecture and health, see Alison Bashford, “Tuberculosis: Governing Healthy Citizens,” in Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Imperialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 59–79.
- 53.
“Report of the Director of Public Works for the Year 1913,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 50.
- 54.
“Report of the Director of Public Works for the Year 1915,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 56.
- 55.
The health benefits of wide verandah in both domestic and civic buildings, particularly hospitals, has been well studied, see Alison Bashford, “Cultures of confinement: tuberculosis, isolation and the sanatorium: Alison Bashford,” in Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion, eds. Alison Bashford and Carylon Strange (London: Routledge, 2003), 135–150.
- 56.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1916,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 21; “The Opening Ceremony at the Ellis Kadoorie School for Indians,” Hong Kong Daily Press, Oct. 17, 1916, 3.
- 57.
“Anglo-French convent school, New Wing at Causeway Bay Opened by The Governor,” Hong Kong Daily Press, Oct. 7, 1916, 3.
- 58.
For a discussion on the modern health movement in Europe, see Pomfret, “The City of Evil and the Great Outdoors.”
- 59.
Anne-Marie Chatelet, “A Breath of Fresh Air: Open-air Schools in Europe,” in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and The Material Culture of Children, eds. Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 107–127.
- 60.
“Medical Examination of Boarding Schools,” The Hong Kong Government Gazette, Hong Kong Government, Aug. 20, 1915, 407.
- 61.
“Italian Convent School, Distribution of Prizes This Afternoon,” The Hong Kong Telegraph, Dec. 22, 1915, 4–5.
- 62.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1918,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 3.
- 63.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1919,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 2.
- 64.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1921,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 7.
- 65.
The purpose of school medical inspection was reviewed in “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1935,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 54.
- 66.
Richard Carr and Bradley W. Hart, “Old Etonians, Great War Demographics and the Interpretations of British Eugenics, c. 1914–1939,” First World War Studies 3, no. 2 (2012): 217–239.
- 67.
William J. Reese, “Progressive Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, eds. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 459–475.
- 68.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1922,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 10.
- 69.
Ibid., 15.
- 70.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1923,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 10.
- 71.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1922,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 11; also in “Report on the Botanic and Forestry Department for the Year 1923,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 7. Where the Superintendent reported ‘at the request of the Director of Education, school gardens were opened at Taipo, Tai Wai and Un Long. They are now maintained and worked by the pupils of the schools. Seeds of vegetables were given on several occasions and the experiments appear to have been most successful’.
- 72.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1926,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 15.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1927,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 13.
- 75.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1913,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 22.
- 76.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1921,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 8.
- 77.
This line of work on the maintenance of public parks and gardens was documented in the annual report of the Public Work Department, and the Botany and Forestry Department. In 1924, for example, the Botany and Forestry Department reported ‘King’s Park, Kowloon has now been laid out by Public Works Department as a sports ground and all flowering trees have been lifted and removed to Sung Wong Toi and elsewhere’. In “Report on the Botanic and Forestry Department for the Year 1924,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 3.
- 78.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1926,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 8.
- 79.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1925,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 5.
- 80.
“Report on the Botanic and Forestry Department for the Year 1931,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 3.
- 81.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1925,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 12.
- 82.
Ying Wa Echo Quarterly 1, no. 1 (July 1924): 23–4. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong Libraries.
- 83.
For a discussion on the different bodily forms that enabled the diffusion of physical education in British colonial context, see David-Claude Kemo Keimbou, “Games, Body and Culture: Emerging Issues in the Anthropology of Sport and Physical Education in Cameroon (1920–60),” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 40, no. 4 (2005): 447–466.
- 84.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1925,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 5.
- 85.
“Annual Medical Report for the Year ending 31. Dec, 1934,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 44.
- 86.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1925,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 5.
- 87.
“Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1931,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 46.
- 88.
The Tung Wah Eastern Hospital was among the first hospitals in Hong Kong to include a Children’s Ward, which only started in the 1930s. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1932,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 88. In 1933, a children’s clinic was also opened at The Kwong Wah Hospital, which were held twice a week. “Medical and Sanitary Report for the Year 1933,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 87.
- 89.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1931,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 16.
- 90.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1928,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 7.
- 91.
“Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1927,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 7.
- 92.
“Pupils’ Health, Report on Diocesan Girls’ School,” Hong Kong Sunday Herald, July 21, 1929, 8.
- 93.
Early medical inspections focused on eyes, ears, and teeth, by 1926, heart and lungs were included for the first time in medical examination. “Report of the Director of Education for the Year 1926,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 8.
- 94.
Kellee Frith and Denise Whitehouse, “Designing Learning Spaces that Work: A Case for the Importance of History,” History of Education Review 38, no. 2 (2009): 94–108.
- 95.
This attention to the function of timetable in shaping schooling experience is informed by one particular French scholar, Louis Boulonnois, where he suggests, ‘the most important thing in a school is not the body of the building or the way the alveolae [classroom] are grouped. It is the articulations of the classrooms, the corridors, the changes of level, the actual representation of the movements required by the timetables’. See Louis Boulonnois, “Architecture segment reel,” Euvres et maître d’oeuvre, 10 (1948): 1–3. Cited in Anne-Marie Chatelet, “A Breath of Fresh Air: Open-air schools in Europe,” in Designing Modern Childhoods, 107–127.
- 96.
Frith and Whitehouse, “Designing Learning Spaces that Work,” 100.
- 97.
Magdalene Fung, born in 1920, Hong Kong. Hong Kong Oral History Archives: Collective Memories, Hong Kong University Library Special Collection, access no. 32.
- 98.
“Diocesan Girls’ School, Annual Distribution of Prizes,” The China Mail, Feb. 15, 1930, 12.
- 99.
Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, “The Hearing School: An Exploration of Sound and Listening in the Modern School,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 323–340.
- 100.
In 1937, the Education Department standardised PE curriculum at urban government and grant-in-aid schools requiring that ‘at least one hour per week shall be devoted to physical education exclusive of organised games’. Further details in “Annual Report of the Education Department for 1938,” Hong Kong Government Administrative Reports, Hong Kong Government, 16.
- 101.
Arthur Garcia, born in 1924, Hong Kong. Hong Kong Oral History Archives: Collective Memories, Hong Kong University Library Special Collection, access no. 192.
- 102.
‘Hong Kong Eugenics League’, Hong Kong Daily Press, April. 10, 1937, 1. The first annual report of the League suggests its primary objects were ‘i) the provision of advice for women, and particularly women of the poorest classes, whose health makes pregnancy medically undesirable, and ii) the provision of clinics for women whose circumstances are such that both public policy and their individual good demand family limitation’.
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Meng Wang, S. (2023). Architecture of Health: Hygiene and Schooling in Hong Kong, 1901–1941. In: Space and Everyday Lives of Children in Hong Kong. Global Histories of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44401-2_3
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