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Wu Tufu saw the airplane that dropped plague-infected fleas over Quzhou.
He still lives with his wife in a house in the Chaijia Xiang alley (right) in the old center of Quzhou. In the days and weeks after the attack, his sister and dozens of neighbors in this alley died of plague.
Photos: Matthias Ziegler, J. van Aken
7. The plague attack on Quzhou in 1940
On 4 October 1940, a Japanese airplane dropped plague-infected fleas over Quzhou, a small town in Western Zhejiang. A few days later, the first victims in Quzhou died, and soon the plague spread all over the region. Through 1948, more than 5,000 people died of plague in the district of Quzhou, and many more in neighbouring districts.
Wu Tufu was twelve years old when he saw the airplane coming on that very day. He lived in the old center of Quzhou, in the narrow Chaijia Xiang alley. He still remembers this airplane, because it flew unusually low, and there was no detonation. Soon thereafter, fleas and grains were all over the streets. A neighbor found his courtyard littered with fleas and took samples for the local authorities. Experts in a provincial laboratory realized that this specific flea species is able to transmit plague, but they did not have the resources to investigate the samples any further.
In the meantime, people in the old town of Quzhou began to get sick and die. The local health authorities were unsure about the disease – no case of plague had ever been reported in Quzhou, and no dead rats had been seen in the city, something that usually precedes human plague cases. In the blood of the seventh victim, which happened to be Wu Tufu’s sister, they finally identified plague bacteria. Immediately, epidemiologists and plague experts from all over China were sent to Quzhou, but it was too late. The disease already spread all over the city and the region. Within one year, 2,000 people died of plague. Antibiotics were not available at that time, and the locals were skeptical towards the plague vaccine, due to a general distrust in Western-type medicine.
The last human case was reported in 1948. By then, more than 5,000 citizens of the Quzhou region had died of plague, and many more in neighbouring areas. The threat persists today. The local Center of Disease Control is still monitoring the local rat population for plague. Until 1990, plague antibodies were detected in rats from the Quzhou region, but as monitoring is restricted to spot checks, they are still not sure whether they successfully eradicated plague in the area.
The idea to disseminate plague-infected fleas with grains was developed in Ping Fan by Unit 731: the grains would attract rats, the fleas could infect the rats and thus initiate a long-term infection chain. Some fleas would directly infect people living in the area, such as Wu Tufu’s sister and several dozen more people in the neighborhood that died in the first wave of infections in 1940.
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