On the morning of 15 January 1857, residents of Hong Kong awoke to what seemed an ordinary day. As usual, loaves of fresh bread were delivered across the European quarter of Victoria, warm from the ovens of a popular Chinese-owned establishment, the Esing Bakery. By midday, however, hundreds were violently ill. Victims suffered nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, dizziness, and general malaise. The cause of this sudden outbreak was not immediately clear. Only later did tests on the consumed bread reveal that it had been poisoned.
Esing Bakery, from The Illustrated London News. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The scale of the incident was unprecedented. Estimates suggest that between 300 and 500 people, most of them Europeans, were affected. Although no one died immediately, several deaths in the months that followed were later attributed to complications arising from the poisoning.
The bread contained arsenic trioxide in such high concentration that it provoked immediate vomiting saving hundreds of lives. Had the dose been smaller, the outcome could have been catastrophic.
Attention quickly turned to the Esing Bakery. Owned by a Chinese merchant named Cheong Ah-lum, it supplied bread to much of the European community. Early that same day, Cheong had left for Macau with his family. By the following evening, he and several of his employees had been arrested and charged with administering poison with intent to kill.
To many European residents, the case appeared straightforward. Hong Kong in 1857 was a young colony, governed by Britain but overwhelmingly Chinese in population. Worse still, the colony was living through the Second Opium War, a conflict that had reignited hostilities between Britain and Qing China only months earlier. The European-style bread produced by the Esing Bakery was consumed largely by non-Chinese residents, making it seem an ideal vehicle for targeting the colony’s European population. It was later estimated that as much as ten pounds of arsenic had been added to the dough. Ironically, the excess proved life-saving. Rather than killing its victims, the poison acted as its own emetic, inducing violent vomiting that expelled much of it from the body.
The bread as well as its raw ingredients, such as flour, sugar, yeast and scrapings from the table at the bakery were analysed. No trace of arsenic was found on any but only on the bread itself, suggesting that the poison had been added at the end of the baking process. In the 19th century, arsenic was widely available and commonly used to kill rats and other pests, and it was not unusual for commercial premises to store it on site.
The trial that followed became one of the most sensational in early colonial Hong Kong. It revealed not only the uncertainties surrounding the poisoning but also the racial tensions embedded within the colony’s system of justice.
Cheong is interrogated at the police station. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The prosecution tried to paint Cheong as an agent of the Qing government, ideally positioned to sabotage the colony. They claimed he was financially desperate and had sold himself out to Chinese officials in return for money. The defense argued that Cheong was a highly regarded and prosperous member of the local community with little reason to take part in an amateurish poisoning plot, and suggested that Cheong had been framed by his commercial competitors. The defence noted that Cheong's own children had shown symptoms of poisoning. Who would poison their own children, much less one’s own customers, who formed the backbone of one’s business?
The prosecution had no answer. At one point, a frustrated Attorney General Anstey declared that even if Cheong was innocent, it was "better to hang the wrong man than confess that British sagacity and activity have failed to discover the real criminals".
The jury rightly rejected the arguments of the prosecution and acquitted Cheong Ah-lum. The verdict infuriated much of the European community. Acquittal in court, however, did not mean restoration of trust. A petition was filed demanding that Cheong be banished from the colony.
Cheong was not the only one expelled. Dozens of his bakery workers arrested alongside him were also banished from Hong Kong. Yet Governor Bowring did not stop there, and proceeded to deport hundreds of Chinese offenders, during the 1857 emergency, earning him condemnation back home in Britain and in the local colonial press.
Despite the unfavourable opinion towards Bowring, the British press condemned the poisoning using language that was lurid and emotive. The London Morning Post decried the poisoning in hyperbolic terms, describing it as a "hideous villainy, [an] unparalleled treachery, of these monsters of China", "defeated ... by its very excess of iniquity"; its perpetrators were "noxious animals ... wild beasts in human shape, without one single redeeming value" and "demons in human shape".
German philosopher and socialist Friedrich Engels wrote that the Chinese now "poison the bread of the European community at Hong Kong by wholesale, and with the coolest premeditation". "In short, instead of moralizing on the horrible atrocities of the Chinese", he argued, "as the chivalrous English press does, we had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis, a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity, learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war."
Yet, there were some in England who denied that the poisoning had even happened. Parliamentarian Thomas Perronet Thompson alleged that the incident had been fabricated as part of a campaign of disinformation to drum up support for the Second Opium War. “Was there a man who believed in the poisoning at Hong Kong? Call the whole College of Physicians, and ask whether they could poison 300 men with arsenic without any of them dying,” Thompson asked.
Some people even joked about the affair. Much of the humour centred on Cheong’s surname—Ah-lum. In 19th-century Britain, bakers were notorious for adulterating bread with alum, a whitening agent. “A baker named Cheong Alum would have been considered funny by itself, but a baker named Cheong Alum accused of adding poison to his own dough seemed too good to be true,” note Lowe and McLaughlin.
More than a century and a half later, historians still disagree about how the arsenic got into the bread.
One theory holds that the poisoning was deliberate, possibly carried out by one or more bakery workers acting independently, or under the influence of wartime propaganda. Another suggests sabotage by a rival, aiming to destroy Cheong’s business by turning the colony against him. A third, less dramatic explanation is accidental contamination—arsenic stored for pest control mistaken for flour or sugar in a busy bakery. A biographical note written after Cheong’s death attributes the poisoning to carelessness of one of his workers dropping “odd things” in the flour and defends Cheong as running too large an operation to keep track of every worker.
After Cheong was banished from Hong Kong, he moved to Macau and later to Vietnam, where he lived the rest of his life as a respected community leader and successful businessman. He died in 1900.
The Esing Bakery affair was not the only arsenic panic of the era. Just a year later, in 1858, Britain was shaken by the Bradford sweets poisoning, in which arsenic was accidentally mixed into peppermint lozenges sold by a confectioner. Unlike the Hong Kong case, the Bradford tragedy was not an act of suspected sabotage but the result of fatal negligence. A sugar substitute known as “daff,” commonly used to cheapen sweets, was mistakenly replaced with arsenic trioxide. The contaminated sweets killed more than twenty people and sickened hundreds.
References:
# Jason Lee. Poisoned Bread: The Esing Bakery incident of 1857 and racism in colonial Hong Kong
# Kate Lowe and Eugene McLaughlin. ‘Caution! The Bread is Poisoned’: The Hong Kong Mass Poisoning of January 1857
# Esing Bakery incident. Wikipedia
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