The Qing court's medical officials attached great importance to infectious diseases, especially smallpox. People feared it no less than Europeans feared the Black Death.
In the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen Emperor's reign, a plague had broken out within Beijing, allowing Li Zicheng's army to enter that supposedly well-fortified city with ease. The plague likewise destroyed Li Zicheng's army, yet the Manchus who entered Beijing were not infected.
Nick tried to persuade the military doctors to accept cowpox inoculation, but they would not. Even though they practiced medicine in Macau and could visit the hospital where the priests had received their training at any time.
People's fear of epidemics had even given rise to the "Plague God."
Nick had previously mentioned that the governor-general's office was located in the same city. During the Ming dynasty, the Liangguang governor-general was not stationed in Guangzhou, but in Wuzhou, which was closer to Guangxi. There were more Yao uprisings in Guangxi, so the governor-general's yamen was placed in Wuzhou.
By the Qing dynasty, Guangdong was no longer as chaotic as it had been under the Ming dynasty. The people could trade, fish, and live peaceful lives. Stimulated by foreign trade, Guangzhou developed rapidly and became many times more prosperous than it had been during the Ming dynasty.
As large numbers of migrants arrived, many "joint-clan ancestral halls" were also built within Guangzhou. Such halls were generally funded and constructed by major families of the same surname from several, or even dozens of, county villages. Though they took the form of ancestral halls, they also served as offices for provincial-capital examinations, lawsuits, and other affairs. They had not been established out of kinship-based clan concepts. When life grew difficult, Chinese people had a customary practice of relying on a special form of mutual aid