The Great Typhoon of 22-23 September 1874 was the worst natural disaster ever to hit Macau. Combining tempest, flood, and fire, it left the city devastated, with close to 5,000 people dead and around 1,200 junks and sampans destroyed. In the final days of September 1874, the Chinese photographer Lai Afong took a set of haunting photographs of the impact of the typhoon had wreaked upon familiar and previously picturesque views of the ravaged city. One hundred and fifty years later, their emotional impact is still intense.

This exhibition, co-sponsored by the Library, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and the Portuguese Delegation of the University of St. Joseph, Macau, and the Centro Cientifico e Cultural de Macau (CCCM) in Lisbon, features twelve of these brutally realistic photographs, reproduced from the CCCM’s collections. It places them against the background of the beginning of a new era in the international reporting and depiction of natural disasters. The typhoon, the first for which relatively accurate data was recorded, coincided with and boosted efforts by meteorologists across Asia—Macau included—to understand, predict, and share information on typhoons and hazardous weather.