In October 1881, an overheated Hong Kong housing market collapsed. Property values fell by 50% or more, financial institutions that had lent money against real estate collateral went bankrupt, construction of tong lau and other urban structures ground to a halt, indebted compradors at foreign banks disappeared, and land speculators found themselves in bankruptcy court, as a commercial depression descended on the city. In this talk, I will delve into the causes and consequences of the bursting of this Hong Kong housing bubble, or “land mania,” from two perspectives. First, I will examine the extent to which the crisis was an endogenous, market-driven housing crash (of the sort familiar throughout the history of capitalism) or an exogenous, government-driven crash (triggered by then-Governor John Pope Hennessy’s colonial housing policy). Second, I will examine the extent to which the property crash was a localized financial crisis and/or the opening salvo of a broader deflationary banking panic and depression that spread to the Yangtze Valley and China coast.