By Christopher Cowell

Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent early years of settlement of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a reputation as deadly. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapour or miasma, carried off settlers by the hundreds. Attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better. Caught in a frenzy to rebuild the city, this book charts the interplay between a cast of figures, from military surveyors, naval doctors, Indian sepoys, and corrupt officials to opium traders, arsonists, Chinese contractors, and sojourner architects and artists. However, Hong Kong’s ‘construction’ was not just physical but also imagined. Architecture, cartography, epidemiology, and urban infrastructure offer a critical lens through which to examine the shifting ideologies of public health and space, race and place-making, and commerce and politics, set against the radical alteration of the settlement in response to miasma theory, a pre-bacteriological belief in gaseous emanations from a sickly environment.