Fringe Club

When bubonic plague tore through Hong Kong in 1894, killing over 100 people per day at its peak, the colonial government razed an entire neighborhood, 385 houses in Tai Ping Shan, displacing 7,000 residents. On that scorched earth, they built Hong Kong’s first purpose-built medical laboratory in 1906: the Bacteriological Institute. For decades, Scottish bacteriologist William Hunter and his team conducted post-mortems and developed vaccines here, institutionalizing the examination of every dead rat in the city to prevent another outbreak.

The building outlived its original purpose the way most colonial infrastructure does, by changing names as its mission narrowed. It became the Pathological Institute after the Second World War, then simply the Old Pathological Institute once its diagnostic work moved elsewhere in 1960. In 1996, the red-brick laboratory that once identified plague bacilli under a microscope reopened as the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, its old autopsy rooms now hung with photographs of the neighborhood it was built to outlive. The rats, at least, no longer have to be counted.