HKHC Speaker’s Series & History Department Seminar, Dr. Christopher Cowell , London South Bank University, United Kingdom
From Fever to Form: Malaria and the First Construction of Hong Kong
Speaker: Dr. Christopher Cowell , London South Bank University, United Kingdom
Date and Time: 12 November 2024, 3:30 – 5pm (UKT)
Venue: Lecture Room 8 (LT8), Arts Complex, University of Bristol
Language: English
In-person only event. To attend, please register on Ticketpass.
During the first half of the 1840s, the earliest decade of Hong Kong’s colonisation, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Settlers re-evaluated the topography, geology, society, and buildings of the early city settlement along the northern shoreline of Hong Kong Island in a desperate attempt to understand the nature and causes of a sickness that was killing them. This leveller was called ‘malaria’, as in ‘bad air’, believed to be a gaseous emanation from the land. Since malaria was considered a low-lying gas, it soon compelled the young city to be conceived of in ‘section’ as a divided community living at differing heights and (perceptually) different atmospheres, a stubborn morphology of status that has continued to the present day.
This well-known but barely researched history lies at the core of a new book by the speaker. Form Follows Fever: Malaria and the Construction of Hong Kong, 1841–1849 (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press), is the first in-depth historical account of the beginnings of the city. Early Hong Kong society and its urban form were hurriedly assembled—through borrowing, inventing, copying, and adapting from local and transnational sources—all manifested in its physical and cultural construction. This talk, drawing from the book, uses a wide range of visual evidence—from land cartography and hydrographic charts to architects’ studies and China trade paintings—demonstrating the complexity of this ‘construction’, in which the technologies of the image reveal both the anxieties of precarity and the technologies of recuperation.
Christopher Cowell is lecturer in architectural history and theory at London South Bank University. He studied architectural history at Columbia University. He has taught worldwide, including in Hong Kong, New York, and Dublin, where he was assistant professor of modern and contemporary architectural history at Trinity College. His longstanding historical research focuses on both southern China and northern India, exploring the entanglement of modernity within European imperialism and its participation in architecture and urbanism. Cowell’s writing examines the relationship between the practice and theory of architecture against the cultural complexity of colonialism. This intersection draws upon the study of urban militarism, spatial security, hinterland ecologies, cartography, property, climate, disease, and race, among others.