Episode #1.5

Governor Rowbotham expresses surprise at Fogg's accommodation in Hong Kong's Taipingshan district and draws a parallel to Bethnal Green. Like the area of London to which Rowbotham compared it, Taipingshan was known for its poor living conditions and high population.

The district was to be found in the present-day location of Tai Ping Shan Street on the northern slopes of Victoria Peak in Sheung Wan. By the 1860s, it was described as being largely populated by brothels, gambling halls and opium dens.

Taipingshan would later become ground zero for the 1894 Hong Kong plague, an early component of a global bubonic plague pandemic. First identified in China in the 1880s, the plague spread via Hong Kong to much of the world and related outbreaks continued for decades afterwards.

Fix's newspaper article sits between two other period pieces, at least one of them anachronistic. At right is an article on then-French president Adolphe Thiers. At left is the text of "The Chaldean Account of the Deluge", a paper by Assyriologist George Smith.

Smith's paper details the discovery and translation of the Flood Tablet from among the archives of the British Museum. The tablet is the 11th in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and appears to be a late-Bronze Age-era Mesopotamian precursor to the Biblical story of Noah's ark.

Smith first read his paper to an audience including Prime Minister Gladstone at the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London on December 3rd, 1872. Hence it wouldn't have been published until the following day at the earliest, placing it too late in the timeline for Fogg's 80-day trip which would have passed through Hong Kong in mid-November 1872.