There must be very few villages in the world where there is a museum. Personally I know only two of them. One is in China, with the name of Xibaipo, where the Communists had their last rural headquarters before sweeping into Beijing to found the PRC, which lasted till today. The other one lies in the depth of the Peak District National Park of UK, a village with the name of Eyam.

We all know what the Chinese one is for. It is meant to be a shrine for people to pay their homage to the greatness of the Communism, and its leaders in China, especially Chairman Mao.

My intention here, however, is to share the story of the English village of Eyam.

A minor, but not insignificant event happened during 1665-1666, when the village population was believed to be around 500.

One day in September 1665, a parcel arrived from London, and its recipient was the village tailor. He had ordered a bale of cloth to make customs for a village religious festival. When the bale was rolled out, it unleashed a deadly villain, the flees hidden inside it which carried the germ of the Black Death, the plague. The first victim it claimed was the tailor’s assistant.

At the end of the year 46 deaths were recorded, although the onset of winter seemed to have slowed down the spread of the disease somewhat. When the next spring comes more villagers perished with the resurgence of the plague, with whole families wiped out.

It was at this defining moment the rector of the local parish, William Monpesson, decided that something drastic deeded to be done, not to save the villagers because there was no cure at the time, but to persuade them to impose a self quarantine by isolating the village from the surrounding areas to contain the spread of the plague.

Monpesson said to the people that the village must be isolated with no one allowed in or out. He himself will stay in the village, effectively choosing death.

He succeeded. The whole village agreed and was cut off from the outside world, with food and supply sent in and placed at a designated spot for the villagers to collect.

The summer of 1666 was a hot one with those flees more active and many more people died from the infection. With remarkable restraint no one broke the cordon, the pestilence was successfully contained within Eyam, not before a total of 260 villagers succumbed to it and died when the pandemic finally disappeared by November 1666.

For more than 300 years people remembered the extraordinary self-sacrifice of the Eyam dwellers. Thus the museum for the commemoration.

On the other side of the world, exactly 300 years later in 1966, China saw a deadlier pestilence, named as the ‘Cultural Revolution’ starting to sweep through that ancient civilisation, with catastrophic consequences, and is still terrorising the country. If you ask me where did this bug originated from, I have no idea. But I am certain that it is not from the village museum in China that I mentioned at the beginning.