Combating nuisance: Sanitation, speculation and the politics of planning in colonial Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper explores how discourses of health and sanitation, which had provoked intense public debates amidst growing fear of epidemic outbreaks in Hong Kong in the late nineteenth century, had been reappropriated and constructed anew by different groups of people for specific purposes. By examining a number of controversies over the colonial government’s effort to combat diseases and to improve public health, this paper elucidates some of the underlying tensions in colonial urban development, whereas the entanglement of public and private interests in property had repeated thwarted attempts to implement building regulations and sanitary reform. The comparison of the competing narratives about race, culture and the built environment by colonial administrators, sanitary experts and Chinese and European property owners illustrates not only the malleability of the these categories, but also the ways in which a particular rationality of capitalist development came to be accepted and consolidated under colonial rule.