The Third Plague Pandemic: When Bubonic Plague Went Global for 100 Years

In 1855, bubonic plague erupted in China's Yunnan province and spread across the globe in one of history's longest pandemics - lasting over a century and killing an estimated 12 million people. Unlike the medieval Black Death, this plague hit during the age of steamships, railroads, and modern medicine, yet authorities were just as helpless to stop it. The pandemic reached every inhabited continent, sparked racist public health policies, and led to the actual discovery of what causes plague - but not before devastating communities from Hong Kong to Bombay to San Francisco.

The plague traveled along trade routes via rats on steamships, reaching Hong Kong in 1894 where it killed 100,000 people. British authorities imposed brutal quarantines, burnin ...