Poisoned Bread: The Esing Bakery incident of 1857 and racism in colonial Hong Kong

Authors

Jason Lee, University of Waterloo

Abstract

The Esing Bakery incident of 1857 remains one of the largest man-made food-poisoning events in known history. Set during the early Second Opium War, the trial and treatment of the bakery owner, Cheong Alum, serves as an intriguing event through which the racial tensions between Europeans and Chinese inhabitants of colonial Hong Kong can be examined. Adopting a microhistorical lens, this paper investigates existing racial tensions in the colony, past poisoning incidents, and the peculiarities of the Hong Kong legal system to reveal a colonial Hong Kong that was thoroughly steeped in racial, and arguably racist, rhetoric.

First Page

16

Last Page

39

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Lee, Jason (2021) "Poisoned Bread: The Esing Bakery incident of 1857 and racism in colonial Hong Kong," Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History: Vol. 11: Iss. 2, Article 2.
DOI: 10.20429/aujh.2021.110202
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/aujh/vol11/iss2/2