Born Then
1855–1930

Life during the Third plague pandemic

Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.

What it meant for ordinary people

Plague left Yunnan in the 1850s, reached Hong Kong in 1894 and Bombay in 1896, and killed about ten million people in India over the next thirty years. Colonial plague measures, such as house searches, forced isolation and burning of goods, caused riots. The bacterium and its spread by rat fleas were identified during this pandemic.

Deaths: about 12 million in India and China, most of them in India after 1896.

How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.

Around the same time