Speaker: Lory Wong, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Cecilia L. Chu, School of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Dan Vukovich, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
The Colonial Sanitary Engineer, Osbert Chadwick’s 1882 Reports on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong is the first significant document on Hong Kong’s sanitary state. The reports prompted regulations to improve sanitary infrastructure and the creation of the Sanitary Board. As a result, many modern historical narratives have referenced Chadwick’s reports, with some magnifying its Eurocentric and classist perspectives associating the East and the poor as filthy, and the West as clean and modern.
This talk challenges the aforementioned Eurocentric and classist portrayals of the Chinese and Europeans in Chadwick’s reports by scrutinizing the internal contradictions in his document, before offering comparatively less biased perspectives of alternative archival sources which have been sidelined by modern historical narratives. The talk is based on a part of my PhD chapter examining the distorted lens in which many colonial officials viewed the Chinese, the spaces they occupied in the lead up to the 1894 plague, the outbreak itself, and the ways in which these perspectives guided the colonial government’s handling of Taipingshan. My doctoral thesis aims to challenge the popular traditional historiographical narratives of the 1894 plague in Hong Kong and offer alternative ways to understanding the event.
Lory Wong is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Hong Kong history, Hong Kong culture and literature, Postcolonial Studies, and the Medical Humanities.
Cecilia L. Chu is an Associate Professor and Director of the MPhil-PhD Programme in the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as an urban historian with a background in design and conservation, her works focus on the social and cultural processes that shape the forms and meanings of built environments and their impacts on local communities. She is the authorofthe award-winning book, Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City, which received the 2023 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award from the Urban History Association and the 2024 International Planning History Society Book Prize. Her other book publications include The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment (2022) and Hong Kong Built Heritage (forthcoming 2025).
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