Third Plague Pandemic begins in Yunnan
- Date
- 1855 (origin in Yunnan); global spread from 1894
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Yunnan, China (global spread)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
The Third Plague Pandemic, the last of the three great bubonic plague pandemics caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, originated in China's Yunnan province around 1855, where mining booms and rising trade brought people into contact with plague-infected rats and fleas.
The disease spread along regional trade routes and reached Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 1894, from where ocean-going steamships carried infected rats and fleas to ports across every inhabited continent, including Bombay, San Francisco, and Sydney. The Hong Kong epidemic of 1894 prompted a scientific breakthrough when Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburo independently isolated the causative bacterium, later named Yersinia pestis, and in 1898 Paul-Louis Simond demonstrated that fleas transmitted the disease from rats to humans. The pandemic ultimately killed at least 15 million people, with roughly 10-12 million deaths in British India and about 2.2 million in China. The World Health Organization considered the pandemic active until 1960, when annual worldwide deaths fell below 200, though Yersinia pestis became permanently established in wild rodent populations on several continents.
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Empires active in 1855 (origin in Yunnan); global spread from 1894
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
- Edison's Electric Light and Central Power1879 (Pearl Street 1882)
- Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction29 August 1831
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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