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29th Annual Freedman Lecture: Robert Hymes, Carpentier Professor of Chinese History, Columbia University

Day	Friday, May 06
Time	4:30 PM to 6:00 PM
Where	ITC-Symposium Hall

Robert Hymes, Carpentier Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University, will speak on “The Adventures of the Bubo: Evidence of plague in post-Mongol China.”

Did China encounter Yersinia pestis plague already in the 13th century? This talk will show the sudden new emergence of a large purulent sore, called the geda, in Chinese medical texts’ descriptions of fatal epidemic disease beginning around 1250 — shortly after the Mongol invasions and conquest of China — and will argue that this was the bubo of bubonic plague.  
 
Many years ago William H. McNeil proposed that the Black Death had begun in China and spread via the Mongol conquests, but he had very few reliable Chinese data to go on, and his proposal attracted little support among scholars of East Asia. Recently Monica Green, basing herself (where East Asia is concerned) on my own initial work on a new version of the McNeill hypothesis together with new genomic discoveries about the history and distribution of the Yersinia pestis bacillus, has laid out an overall model of an initial Mongol contact with plague in the 1218 conquest of the Qara Khitai state on China’s western border and its multiple spread as “Four Black Deaths,” first into China in the early thirteenth century, then to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In this talk I seek to clinch the case for 13th-century Chinese plague by showing the sudden appearance of a new symptom, a large purulent sore then called the geda, in Chinese medical texts’ descriptions of epidemic disease from the mid-thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. I argue that the geda was the bubo of bubonic plague. I will also comment on Green’s proposed reconstruction of the Mongols’ first plague contact and suggest an alternative possibility I see as just as likely.