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During the autumn of 1910, China began to report a unknown and deadly pneumonic disease that had reached Harbin in the extreme Northeast of China province, which was then known as Manchuria. Though the deadly and rare disease was confined largely to China’s Northeastern provinces, cases were reported scarcely throughout the empire, in Beijing, Tianjin and along the Beijing-Hankou railway line stretching down into central China. It was difficult to attain a precise statistics about the death toll rate of the deadly disease; however reports suggests that between 50,000 to 60,000 people died, with an unprecedented mortality rate of 100 per cent. As a point of comparison, this claimed the death toll of the Manchurian disease in the same region as that of the more familiar Great Plague of London happened between 1665-66.
The deadly disease was likely to have originated among tarbagan marmot hunted for their fur in Manchuria. As the German chemical industries developed new dyes and cheap marmot fur could be manufactured into imitation sable, mink and otter fur. Consequently, the value of marmot fur raised from a few kopecks a skin to a Ruble, causing migrant hunters to flock to Manchuria. These migrants, however, were inexperienced. Whereas local hunters, many of whom were from the region’s Buryat ethnicity, could identify and avoid diseased marmots, while the migrant hunters collected unhealthy marmots, infecting themselves with the plague bacilli carried by the diseased animals.
The spread of the plague was aggravated by the bitter cold climate of the northern winter, which caused the hunters to gather together in huts and camps which became a major reason for the quick spreading of the pneumonic plague making it an airborne disease. The extensive railway network further aided the rapid transmission of the disease by facilitating the movement of large numbers of migrant workers returning home for the New Year Festival.
This photo taken sometime between 1910 and 1915 shows Dr. Wu Lien-teh, a Cambridge-educated Chinese physician who pioneered the use of masks during the Manchurian Plague of 1910-11.
Lockdowns, quarantine measures, social distancing, wearing of masks, travel restrictions, mass cremation of victims, and border controls were deployed to try to lower the spread of infection rate. Yet more than 60,000 people died in the northeast China, making it one of the world's largest epidemics at the time. When the outbreak was eventually brought under control, the Chinese government called for the International Plague Conference in the northern city of Shenyang, close to the epicenter of the outbreak. Virologists, bacteriologists, epidemiologists and disease experts from the United States, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and France took part in this conference. The purpose of the conference was to find the cause of the outbreak and learn which suppression techniques were most effective against the deadly plague and discover how the disease had spread so far so fast, and assess what could be done to prevent a second wave in the future.
The response to the outbreak was rapid even with the logistical constraints at the start of the 20th century. Quarantine centers were established, mostly in converted rail cargo cars, for people thought to have come into contact with the disease, relatives of the dead and those who were involved in fur trapping and trading business. If the quarantined didn't show symptoms within 5 to 10 days they were released with a wire wristband fastened with a lead seal stating they were free from plague. But if symptoms did show, the entire cargo car was essentially doomed, given the disease's staggering near 100% mortality rate. Burials were forbidden and mass cremations were enforced.
In Harbin, the Chinese authorities' chief doctor Wu Lien-teh, a Malaysian born ethnic Chinese medic educated at Cambridge University, was researching to contain the deadly outbreak. Wu began to study and research postmortem reports of victims and crucially established that the disease was pneumonic plague and not bubonic (the difference between the forms of plague is the location of infection; in pneumonic plague the infection is in the lungs, in bubonic plague, the lymph nodes). He also heavily recommended the wearing of face masks to prevent the spread of deadly disease.
In 1911 there was no WHO. The response to the epidemic was to limit its spread and suppress it.
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