The Real Sin City...

The Kowloon Walled City, the city of darkness, the quintessential concrete jungle...

For many people in Hong Kong, the Walled city once represented everything that are dark, criminal, and uninhabitable. The enclave was in fact full of opium dens, brothels, triads, gambling dens, and had real bad sanitary conditions. But to many others like me, it possessed a sort of beauty that can only be describe as exceptional and ethereal...

Before I go any further, however, I must confess that I've actually never been inside the Walled city. It is no exaggeration to say that this is one of the biggest regret of my life (well of course, besides all the personal immaturity and stupidity committed in the past). By the time I came to hear about and started reading on the history of this special place in Hong Kong, it was already demolished by the government. What a shame, but we'll get back to that, because to talk about the walled city, we must first dip into the muddy water of Hong Kong history... Most historians agree that the Kowloon Walled City can be traced back to the Song Dynasty (960 - 1297), where the North-Eastern coast of the Kowloon peninsula was the site of a major salt trading port. But it was really in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) that buildings and a new fort were built on the strategic position in 1810 that would later become the infamous walled city. The reasons for the imperial court to do so are simple, they wanted to put a check on the rampant pirates that were roaming in the South China Sea and the British colonial development on Hong Kong island, since only Hong Kong Island was ceded to the British in the Treaty of Nanking in 1841, and it wasn't until 1860 that the colony began to extend inland into the Kowloon peninsula with the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing after the second opium war.

However, even when the New Territories were 'leased' to the British for 99 years in 1898, the British still did not claimed control of the Kowloon City. Many Imperial officials who remained in the area refused to give up jurisdiction which resulted in the British giving the Chinese jurisdiction of the area after numerous failed attempts in forcing the inhabitants out. And eventually, with the turbulent events of the early 20th Century China that saw the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the formation of the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China in 1949, many Chinese refugees, be it anti-Manchurian Triads, the Kuomingtongs or Communists, began to populate the Chinese enclave.

With the British and the Chinese government taking a hands-off policy towards the walled city because of its touchy subject, the place quickly developed into a special zone in which law and order did not apply. Triads seized control of the place, and it grew into the a hotbed for all sorts of criminal activities and dodgy operations that became synonymous with the walled city in our collective memory of the place. 

It was during this period, in post-WWII Hong Kong and all the way to the evacuation of its residents in 1991 that the Kowloon Walled City began its continual process of demolition and reconstruction where individual buildings homogenised into an intricate network of communal stairways and corridors linked one to the other, creating a labyrinth of buildings and passages that makes it impossible for an outsider to navigate without getting lost...

Without an architect supervising the construction of all the buildings and renovations in the walled city, the only regulations the residents had to follow were the limiting height of its building to fourteen stories because of its close proximity to the Kai Tak airport, and electricity safety regulation for the obvious reason to avoid fire. Thus, in an effort to build a better home for themselves, the six and a half acre of slum with its 35,000 residents at its peak became a sort of organism, always growing and mutating into its own form...

The Walled city's evaucation and demolition began in 1991 and was completed in 1993. A recreational park was built on the location where the walled city once stood and several relics from the enclave still remain now in the park. But like most project by our government to preserve cultural heritage, it is a complete failure. It is a great loss to not only the people in Hong Kong, but also for anyone who are interested in visiting extraordinary historical landmark, that such an unique structure is now torn down and lost forever. Why haven't anyone suggested on preserving the whole walled city under sustainable development? If it was preserve, clean out, and turn into a museum, I think it would be one of the coolest museum or art gallery ever existed. Walled city is part of China's, Hong Kong's and Britain's history, and like most things in our past, it was first deliberately displaced, then destroyed, and finally forgotten...

Ever since I came to learn about the Kowloon Walled City, I've always wanted to go inside and experience how it was like for the people who lived there and found their own ways to survive in this seemingly dystopian landscape. So whenever I come across a book or article about the walled city, I always try to make it part of my library collection. One of the book I've always go back to is CITY OF DARKNESS - Life in Kowloon Walled City, a photo-journal about the Walled city's history and the people who lived and survived in the enclave. Most of the photos in this blog are grabbed out of the book, and there are a lot more stunning photos inside the book with lots of interesting personal stories from the resident of the walled city.

For those of you who have traveled in and out of Hong Kong in the 80's or early 90's at the Kai Tak Airport, I'm sure most of you did not miss the concrete monolith during the plane's landing, which was always a joy for me to watch the foreigners in awe (or fear) of the close proximity of the plane and the buildings nearby. I remember pointing at the Walled city once when I was young and asked my mom what that piece of land was. She didn't give me a very good answer, she only said that it is a place in which no decent people would want to set foot in. How mistaken she is...

At last, I like to show you a clip of a film shot in the walled city when it was still standing.

Anyone remember Jean Claude Van Damme's Bloodsport??

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEo6ogAnoZ8 I wish Borges could write a piece about the walled city...

D....