In other directions the colony advanced steadily. It completed a new reservoir system and central market and rebuilt the sewage and drainage system. Ambitious land-reclamation projects were pushed ahead at Causeway Bay and Yau Ma Tei to meet the unabating demand for level sites in the crowded, mountainous colony. Kowloon, a wasteland of undulating red rock, in the 1880s began cutting down its ridges and using the spoil to extend its shoreline—a process that continues at an amazingly accelerated rate today.
Hong Kong has never known an age of serenity; its brief interludes of comparative calm have always been followed by cataclysmic upheavals. In the spring of 1894, the colony was invaded by plague, long endemic on the South China coast. Within a few months, 2,485 persons had died of pneumonic, septicemic and bubonic plague, and Western medicine had no more power to check it than had Chinese herb treatments.
The onset of plague was so terrifying that long-deferred sanitary reforms were rushed through and rigidly enforced. Deaf to the protests of all residents, British military units began regular inspections of Chinese homes. Sanitary teams condemned 350 houses as plague spots and evicted 7,000 persons from infected dwellings. Resenting foreign invasion of their privacy and mistrustful of Western medicine, the Chinese retaliated by posting placards openly in Canton and furtively inside the colony accusing British doctors of stealing the eyes of new-born babies to treat plague victims.
Business came to a stop and ships avoided the plague-stricken port. The plague abated for a year, then returned in 1896 to take another 1,204 lives. The Chinese kept up a rear-guard action against sanitary measures with strikes and evasions, hiding their dead and dying or dumping their bodies in the streets and harbor. Sometimes they exposed their dying relatives on bamboo frames stretched across the narrow streets, hoping that the departing soul would haunt the street instead of its former house.
The benighted traditionalism of the colony’s Chinese awoke the British administration to one of its most serious weaknesses; a half-century of British rule had failed to give to 99 percent of the colony’s residents any clear idea of the civilization they were expected to work and live under. The tardy lesson eventually took effect, and the British embarked on a long and intensive program of improving and enlarging their school system. In the Tung Wah Hospital, English and Chinese doctors learned to their surprise that therapies unlike their own were not necessarily sheer quackery, and that they could work together for the benefit of their patients.