This book, the first work in English on the history of disease in China, traces an epidemic of bubonic plague that began in Yunnan province in the late eighteenth century, spread throughout much of southern China in the nineteenth century, and eventually exploded on the world scene as a global pandemic at the end of the century. The author finds the origins of the pandemic in Qing economic expansion, which brought new populations into contact with plague-bearing animals along China's southwestern frontier. She shows how the geographic diffusion of the disease closely followed the growth of...