“The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”
- On the Concept of History (Walter Benjamin)

Since late 2019, a pandemics has taken the world by storm, forced billions of people into lockdown and is profoundly reshaping our lives. For many, this is a novel experience, but for those who have survived leprosy outbreaks of the last decade, this may feel like a déjà-vu.
According to the official tally issued by the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China in 1956, over 500 thousands persons suffered from leprosy in the country. Leprosy was historically considered to be a highly contagious disease, and the PRC government took large-scale segregation measures to contain its spread, sending hundreds
of thousands of patients to be isolated on far-flung mountains and islands. Hundreds of leprosy settlements, called “lepers’villages”, were thus formed across the country. During the decades-long isolation, these villages lagged behind the national average by a wide margin in economy development, education level and public health discriminate, while their inhabitants bore the stigma associated with the disease and suffered from injustice. When the segregation was finally lifted in late 1980s, many of them had die of old age, whereas few among the living found opportunities to leave the settlements. Villages today. Some of them have only a few aged residents left, while some others are already emptied. This historical chapter is now nearing its end.
For his ongoing project “Curse of the Wind. A History of Leprosy in China”, TIAN Jin has visited and photographed 51 “lepers’villages” across nine provinces since 2016. Photography aside, he also carried out extensive documentation and collected hundreds of personal and institutional documents, including personal dossiers, medical records, official directives, diaries and letters alike. Centered around personal trajectories, this project aims to show how disease and segregation affected personal destinies. In this era of China Dream with its rapid economic growth and unrelenting progress, these are the souls left out and forgotten in the country’s unsuspected corners.