Burning Money: Materiality and Modernity in the Construction of Peking Union Medical College, 1916–42

As China’s premier modern medical educational institution in the early 20th century, Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) embodied both the promises and paradoxes of technological transfer. Through archival analysis of construction ledgers and Rockefeller Foundation correspondence, this study reveals how PUMC’s “gold-standard” infrastructure - from its steam-heated laboratories to dedicated power plant - consumed over $7.5 million (1921 USD), exceeding initial budgets by 700%. Such material extravagance created an enclave of medical modernity that paradoxically depended on improvisations with Beijing's pre-modern urban systems. The institution’s daily operation required constant negotiations: artesian wells compensated for absent water mains, coal stockpiles bridged erratic electricity grids, and diplomatic favors secured telephone access. These hybrid adaptations, this paper argues, constituted a form of “infrastructural alchemy” where Rockefeller dollars transmuted local limitations into functional modernity. However, the financial hemorrhage precipitated strategic retrenchments that reshaped PUMC’s research scope. By situating medical educational institutional building within material networks of energy, labor, and municipal politics, this case challenges diffusionist narratives of Western medicine in China. It demonstrates how global standards became locally reconfigured through quotidian material struggles, while the very costs of maintaining civilizational boundaries forced transnational actors to reconsider their imperial ambitions.