Bubonic plague spread out of Yunnan from the mid-nineteenth century, reached Canton and Hong Kong in 1894 and, carried by steamship, arrived in Bombay in 1896 and in scores of ports worldwide, eventually killing more than twelve million people, overwhelmingly in India and China. Yersin and Kitasato identified the causative bacillus in Hong Kong in 1894 and the rat-flea transmission route was established by the end of the decade. Colonial responses combined forced house searches, segregation camps, quarantine, and the demolition and burning of whole districts, provoking riots and mass flight from cities. In Hong Kong the Taipingshan district was condemned, cleared and rebuilt; in Bombay a quarter of the population fled the city.
The pandemic institutionalised sanitary demolition and created purpose-built planning agencies, above all the Bombay City Improvement Trust of 1898, followed by trusts in Calcutta, Mysore, Rangoon and beyond, together with building rules on ventilation, plot coverage and back-to-back housing. Its formula of clearing the dense inner city while opening planned suburban extensions became the working template for colonial and later post-colonial planning across Asia and Africa, and it fused public health with racial segregation, as in Cape Town's Ndabeni location of 1901.
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