CHINA'S PANDEMICS THROUGH THE AGES

c. 3500 – 3000 BCE

Inner Mongolian plagues

A form of plague is theorized to be responsible for mass graves discovered in the Neolithic Hamin Mangha and Miaozigou sites in Inner Mongolia. The bodies were hastily burned and buried in sealed chambers, and the average age of the dead was 26.8.

c. 157 – 280 CE

Han Plague

A series of diseases including hemorrhagic fever struck toward the end of the Eastern Han dynasty between 204 and 209. The poet Cao Zhi wrote in 217, “Every house has sadness at corpses, every family has tears of mourning” as a result of a fever that caused headache, inflammation of the spleen and liver, and rashes on the skin. China's population plummeted from 56 million to 16 million from 157 to 275.

1641 – 1644 Great Ming Plague Epidemic

Bubonic plague in the north of the country brought the waning Ming empire to its knees. One-fifth of Beijing's population is estimated to have died between August and December 1643 . When the rebel leader Li Zicheng marched into the capital in April 1644, he is said to have looked upon “ghosts and men mixed together.”

1855 – 1960 Third Plague Pandemic (Bubonic Plague)

The Third Plague Pandemic began in Yunnan and eventually spread across the world; it was only declared over in 1960. In Guangzhou, an estimated 60,000 died in just a few weeks during the spring of 1894. The plague spread from Hong Kong to India, killing 12.5 million there over a period of 30 years.

1910 – 1911 Manchurian Plague (Pneumonic Plague)

This novel form of plague killed 40,000 to 60,000 people in China's northeast, and led to the invention of the medical face mask (see pp. 33 - 34).

1957 H2N2 Flu

The second major influenza pandemic of the 20th century (after the "Spanish Flu" of 1918) originated in Guizhou province and went on to kill at least 1 million people worldwide. The mortality rate was low (around 0.7 percent) and a vaccine was developed in late 1957.

2002 – 2003 SARS

First identified in Guangdong province in November 2002, this respiratory disease had a mortality rate of 10 percent, and infected at least 1,400 in Beijing. China's health minister and Beijing's mayor were fired for covering up the true scale of the outbreak.

2019 – Covid-19

This respiratory infection was first identified in Wuhan in December 2019. Chinese authorities took drastic action, placing cities into “lockdown.” The virus has severely disrupted international travel. At the time of writing, over 350,000 have been killed globally, including 4,634 in China.