[MolsonExport]

KWCFan: Thanks very much for the new pics and info. I am fascinated with the Kowloon Walled City.

[KWCFan]

KWCFan: Thanks very much for the new pics and info. I am fascinated with the Kowloon Walled City.

your welcome ME, although I found out about KWC recently, I am very much fascinated with the city too. To find new material is quit difficult as they are very rare on the web. Most probably due to non-existence of the city since 1992, a time in which internet wasn't as developed as today.
The new video from youtube I found was thanks to a tip from one of the posters on this forum, i.e., using the chinese characters as search string. But only that one came up.

I really want to see more video's from inside KWC but they are very hard to get/find.
As posted before there are documentaries on the city, two I know of but that's it.

Also various Japanese horror movies seemed to have been recorded there but I think we need a Japanese person to help to find those. Anyone??

What I have found and what has been posted on forums is that this movie with Jackie Chan has scenes which are recorded in the empty city.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108656/

I found out about a second documentairy on KWC by reading the http://www.doobybrain.com (http://www.doobybrain.com/2007/08/22/kowloon-walled-city-city-of-darkness/) forum. That's all I know now.

[KWCFan]

I was reading up on it a little yesterday. Fascinating, and just incredible that people could live in such a place. 50,000 people in 0.01 square miles??? Some of the other facts about it were even more incredible in some ways. Its beginnings started as far back as the year 960. Amazing, I had no idea it was that old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_City_of_Kowloon


yes it was a very unique place which will never happen/exist anymore. Total chaos, anarchie, a very dark, dark place. Sick imo, but fascinating.

[KWCFan]

could contain KWC footage.

http://www.christianbits.co.uk/product.php?id=VD641

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Pullinger



Jackie Pullinger wrote two books of which the latter contains many photographs: here is a link.

http://www.amazon.com/Crack-Wall-Death-Kowloon-Walled/dp/0340488077

and here is a review taken from here (http://www.epinions.com/review/Crack_in_the_Wall_Stories_of_Changed_Lives_in_Hong_Kong_by_Pullinger/content_64745016964).

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/ad/5c/3422e893e7a0e749864e6110._AA240_.L.jpg
link (http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/ad/5c/3422e893e7a0e749864e6110._AA240_.L.jpg)

jnbmoore's Full Review: Pullinger - Crack in the Wall: Stories of Changed ...
I first became acquainted with the ministry of Jackie Pullinger when she came to speak at our church in Taiwan. At the time, you could set your watch by the pastor's sermons. Exactly twenty minutes long -- no less, no more.

Jackie shared the story of her ministry and a message of forgiveness and hope for two hours. Only about a third of the church stayed for the whole thing; however, those who left early missed one of the best messages I have ever heard.

Immediately afterwards, I picked up the two books by her they had available. Chasing the Dragon and Crack in the Wall: Life and Death in Kowloon Walled City.

I had hoped to write my review on Chasing the Dragon; however, that is one book that I've had about three copies of thus far and they never find their way home. Crack in the Wall has never become part of my lending library, so it remains safe in my possession.

Who is Jackie Pullinger?

In 1966, Jackie Pullinger was a new Christian with a heart for sharing with others. As she shared in her sermon, as a young convert in England she just felt it was wrong to be staying in a room full of Christians praising God when there were folks outside who had never heard of Jesus.

She felt a strong pull to missions work but was told that she was too young and not educated/experienced enough. So she paid for her passage on a tramp steamer and headed east. When she got to Hong Kong, she felt this is where she should be. She got off the boat, was let in the country even though she didn't have much money to her name.

At first she tried the traditional way of ministering to folks -- passing out tracts. But what do pieces of papers telling of God's love mean to folks who can't read and are taking heroin three times a day? So she began to love and pray for the folks. Lives began to change.

A large part of her ministry was in the Walled City in Kowloon (which was torn down before the handover of Hong Kong to China). The Walled City was the home to Triads (organized crime), prostitution, drugs, and hopelessness. That was and still is her mission field -- modern day untouchables.

She found that many drug addicts would be cured by praying in tongues (a spiritual language unknown to men). Even though men joined the Triads for life, Triad bosses would release their members who found Jesus because they couldn't fight as addicts and once they found Jesus they couldn't follow a Triad boss. They were useless.

From page 37 from this book:

"You can have all the rotten ones (Triad members) and I'll keep the good ones for myself," he (a high-ranking Triad member) finished.

"Fine," I agreed, "Jesus came for the rotten ones anyhow."

What's the book about?

Well-written, Crack in the Wall tells the story of Jackie's ministry in an unemotional, matter-of-fact way. It's not play with your emotions writing that keeps you reading -- it's the stories of changed lives that draws the reader in. It is divided into four sections:

Section 1: Death in the City

The history of the Walled City is given from both a political point of view and a personal point of view of how it affects one young man's life. Jackie's introduction to the Walled City is also mentioned.

There are side bars explaining the Triads, police corruption, British/Chinese relationships, and drugs in Hong Kong.

Section 2: Life in the City

Jackie's agreement with the Triad boss starts this section. She explains how folks were freed from drugs.

There are the first of many testimonies (personal stories) of individuals.

There is a side bar explaining Idols and Ancestor worship.

Section 3: Moving out of the City

It is not good for someone to come clean from drugs and then return to living in an opium den. So they needed other places to go. The British Hong Kong Government stepped in and gave them places to care for folks as reformed drug users and prostitutes became clean and started new lives with new families.

This section is full of one to two page testimonies of lives changed.

Section 4: Building a New City

This section if full of the most hope. The government gave Jackie and others a temporary housing facility (Hang Fook Camp) to use as more permanent homes for folks who had completed the year program. This becomes a mini-town full of hope.

There are side stories about ministry to street sleepers, folks in Macau and the Philippines. There is also a section from the newspaper about the destruction of the Walled City.

This section has some of the strongest testimonies in the book.

Post Script

As this book was published before the handover, it doesn't have any events in that happened after Mainland China regained control of Hong Kong. Jackie and her ministry (St. Stephen's Society) doesn't have a web site and seems to shy away from publicity. However I did learn from a web search that the government did take away the Hang Fook Camp:

http://www.churchlink.com.au/churchlink/worldscope/communigram/jackie.html

However, I did learn elsewhere that they had built a new camp on private land.


Is a picture worth a thousand words?

The one advantage of this book above Chasing the Dragon is that Crack in the Wall is filled with photographs. Not two pages go by without a photograph of a person or scene of Hong Kong. Most of these photos aren't of scenes you'd find on a post card.

There is a heart-wrenching photo of a boy about six trying to wake his father from an opium sleep. The father is just lying on the ground.

Three mug shots of one man over many years time shows the toll heroin takes on the addict -- by the third photo he looks more monster than man.

Think your house is small -- what about a single room full of metal bunk beds that is home to three generations of one family. The photos bring the oppression and unhappiness to life.

But there are other photos in the book. Photos of smiles. Many smiles. There are photos of each person who has a testimony written about them - even in the photos the people seem to be glowing with hope and love.

There is touching photograph of Jackie and others ministering and touching a street sleeper (the same street sleepers I sadly admit I adverted my eyes to and walked by on my Hong Kong trips). The street sleeper seemed to come alive from the prayers and the simple touch of another person.

The photos are what bring this book to life. There are no photos in here that would be too graphic for a young child.


Final recommendations

I cannot recommend this book high enough - it's not preachy. It's a matter of fact portrait of folks who lost so much in the world and regained life through Jesus Christ.

I recommend it to skeptics -- the personal stories of these folks may give you room to think.

I recommend it those who attend perfect churches full of perfect people where the walls might fall down if a former drug user walked in the door -- it will show you how God uses broken lives.

I recommend it those with imperfect pasts -- it will show you that Jesus is there for folks who aren't perfect.

I recommend it for those at churches full of grace -- it may open your heart to others.

I recommend it to folks who believe that speaking in tongues is the work of the devil -- Satan doesn't want folks to be free from drugs and vice.

I recommend it those interested in Asia -- the sidebars are great history lessons to the region.

I recommend it to those who have a disdain of the teleevangelists on TV -- I am no fan of the "big hair" stations; but it's nice to know that real folks are doing real ministry.

I recommend it to you -- wouldn't you like to hear the individual stories and see all the puzzle pieces fit together?


Recommended:
Yes

[MolsonExport]

I remember reading about Jackie Pullinger in "The City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City"). I will try to read this book as well.

[KWCFan]

ok, once you've read it let me know.

[MolsonExport]

Here are some other angles:
http://meshula.net/photos/kowloon/apt4.jpg
http://meshula.net/photos/kowloon/apt7.jpg

Source: http://www.on-point.be/?p=1034


Here is a map of the park that sits on the footprint of the former WCK:
http://nijntjeinsitu.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/kowloon-walled-city-park.jpg

source: http://nijntjeinsitu.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/kowloon-walled-city-park/

other shots:
http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/images/baraka/fullsize/baraka0516.jpg
http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/images/baraka/fullsize/baraka0537.jpg
Source: http://stashpocket.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/kowloon-walled-city-hong-kong-china/

Video of the infamous Chunking Mansions:
Owf7mHiTS4Q

[MolsonExport]

More insights into the history of the Walled City of Kowloon.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Kowloon Walled City
Hong Kong Island was obtained by the British in 1842 as part of the Treaty of Nanjing that ended the first Opium War. Though opium was illegal in Britain, the British fought this war with China to ensure that they would have a commodity that there was demand for in China in order to correct the huge trade imbalance created by British demand for tea, spices, porcelain, silk, art, and other Chinese goods. Opium was one of the first truly global commodities, with a production chain wrapping the world. Grown in India, processed in Afghanistan, shipped by Americans, and sold by Brits in East Asia, opium was one of the first 'vertically integrated' global products, with all aspects of production from farm to front controlled by the British Empire.

The British obtained Hong Kong from the Qing emperor to use as a port in this trade. After the second opium war, the mainland side of the harbor, Kowloon, was added to the British possession. In 1898, the British leased the New Territories and Lantau Island for 99 years from the Qing, to ensure adequate food and water supply. It was the expiration of this lease that led to the return of the entire possession in 1997, since to separate the New Territories from Kowloon and HK Island by then would have been like returning a body but trying to keep a head alive.

The Qing court retained one 0.026 sq. km. parcel of land in Kowloon, a toehold that was kept as a garrison to keep an eye on the British. Known as the Kowloon Walled City, this fortified settlement was abandoned after the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, but remained Chinese territory. At that time, the population of the walled city was approximately 700. In the ensuing decades, the city became a lawless place, full of Triad mobsters and a lively informal economy composed of unlicensed and illegal businesses, secret factories, labyrinthine corridors where no sunlight ever shone. Lacking any planning regulation, buildings and utility service were modified at will. Eventually, the Kowloon Walled City reached the highest recorded residential densities in human history, with an estimated population of 50,000 inhabitants in the 1980's.

The Chinese and the British agreed to demolish the city in 1987, and today the site is the Kowloon Walled City Park.

source: http://chinesemigrantworker.blogspot.com/2007/05/kowloon-walled-city.html

some great first-hand accounts of residents can be found here: http://www.hh.iij4u.or.jp/~asabe/hongkong/hkkyuuren.html

[dchan]

It's an exceptionally fascinating place. My first post on SSP was on this thread because I was looking up info on the Walled City myself. China owned the city, but did not give a rats ass about it, and Hong Kong and the UK couldn't do much about it since they had no jurisdiction.

The city is a good case study in 'anarchy'. Despite the fact that nobody officially policed the place, 50000 people still decided that it was good enough to live in cramped, dank, sunlight-deprived conditions. Granted, a good chunk of them were probably illegal immigrants/criminals from China. Off hand, I'm guessing that the Triads were the unofficial police there and used their reputation to keep the place safe and stable enough to go about their own business, whatever it happened to be.

[scalziand]

Who had the jurisdiction to impose the 14 floor height limit?

I wonder how high the buildings would have been if there was no limit.

[MolsonExport]

^who knows. An interesting question for sure. The British enforced the height limit for the path into Kai tek airport.

[MolsonExport]

It's an exceptionally fascinating place. My first post on SSP was on this thread because I was looking up info on the Walled City myself. China owned the city, but did not give a rats ass about it, and Hong Kong and the UK couldn't do much about it since they had no jurisdiction.

The city is a good case study in 'anarchy'. Despite the fact that nobody officially policed the place, 50000 people still decided that it was good enough to live in cramped, dank, sunlight-deprived conditions. Granted, a good chunk of them were probably illegal immigrants/criminals from China. Off hand, I'm guessing that the Triads were the unofficial police there and used their reputation to keep the place safe and stable enough to go about their own business, whatever it happened to be.

^from my reading of "City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon's Walled City", this was largely true.

[EricFletcher]

...snip... http://www.chesleyhouse.com/Travel/Images/MaiPo%20spoonbills%20and%20apts.JPG

I've been wondering why my web logs show so many serves on this little photo. Now I know. ;)

I realize MolsonExport's initial use of my picture was some time ago (2004 in fact), and likely before the new policy statement about giving photo attribution was posted. Be aware that when an image is "pulled" like this, every view of the page causes the source site to serve it -- and that each time, a web log record is generated. The log record leads directly to the page requesting the image -- in this case, to this forum.

I'm not bringing this up to make waves or to insist on payment; rather, to help reinforce good etiquette. I'm flattered if you think my photo is worth using to illustrate a point, but I do expect credit for it.:tup:

In any case, for those interested in the subject of this image, I took it in 2000 while visiting Mai Po (http://www.chesleyhouse.com/Travel/hk_mai_po.htm) bird sanctuary. At the time I was very discouraged about how the wall of skyscrapers would apparently destroy the wetlands.

When I returned again in January 2009, I made a point of returning. Not only had the encroachment stopped, but now the extremely well-designed Hong Kong Wetlands Park (http://www.wetlandpark.com/en/aboutus/index.asp) forms an "information barrier" between the buildings and the real wetlands. As the picture below shows, it is very popular.

http://www.chesleyhouse.com/Travel/Images/DSC_6861to5hdr_1024.jpg

The image is a composite of several shots I took on a very hazy day. I then rendered the images to get higher dynamic range to overcome the haze.

The image below is an updated view of the Tin Shui apartment complex that was being built when I visited in 2000. The wetlands are still there, and now many more Hong Kong residents have a sense of why the wetlands are beneficial to everyone.

http://www.chesleyhouse.com/Travel/Images/DSC_6805to7hdr_1024.jpg

[MolsonExport]

^As you pointed out, these postings go back way before the current policy was implemented. And they are nice pictures, by the way.

Another book on the Walled City of Kowloon:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FMR0J32YL._SS500_.jpg
source: Amazon.com

[MolsonExport]

Finally found some more great photos on the Walled City of Kowloon:

Here: http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/

all photos from Stanleyng.net.hkscene. (where more can also be found)

http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_07_30.jpg

Here is a good one after the surrounding squatter camps were torn down:
http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_09_42.jpg

historical entrance/cannon:
http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_07_20.jpghttp://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_07_16.jpg

Wall-E made this:
http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_07_24.jpg

This is not to be confused with the hanging gardens of babylon:
http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_07_36.jpg

Helter Skelter:
http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_12_48.jpg

A typical 'factory' inside the walled city:
http://www.stanleyng.net/hkscene/Kowloon_Walled_City/images/kowloon_walled_city_hong_kong_678x409_23_8_2006_15_07_58.jpg

[ethereal_reality]

Amazing photographs. Thanks for posting them.

[villelumiere]

Bizarre place. At once fascinating that if existed and horrifyingly real.

[MolsonExport]

I see that Wikipedia now has an external link to my Walled city thread:

Quote:
Skyscraperpage.com forum thread devoted to Kowloon Walled City, information, pictures and videos [/Quote]

[MolsonExport]

will this thread hit 1ooK views?

[MolsonExport]

finally some more photos/info/etc. on KWC:
http://sharii.com/2008/walled-city-of-kowloon/


Also, from http://web.archive.org/web/20020220021106/www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/story/str05_e.html

Intrepid explorers of the KWC

http://web.archive.org/web/20020220021106/http://www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/story/image/str5_1.gifhttp://web.archive.org/web/20020220021106/http://www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/story/image/str5_2.gifhttp://web.archive.org/web/20020220021106/http://www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/story/image/str5_3.gif
http://sharii.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/walledcityinside.jpghttp://sharii.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/walledcityinside.jpghttp://sharii.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/kwc_4.jpghttp://sharii.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/kwc_4.jpg

[MolsonExport]

http://allyrose.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/wolf2.jpg?w=400&h=525
^allyrose.wordpress.com/

[MolsonExport]

^(re:crazy density) won't you please, won't you please. please won't you be...my neighbor.

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/02/28/rogers_zoom.jpg

[morfius]

I don't know if this has been posted already, but I found an entire website on an expedition to Kowloon by a bunch of Japs.

It has some decent pictures, and despite the relatively poor English and annoying page backgrounds, it really gives you a good feel for the place.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020208225753/www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/story/index_e.html

[MolsonExport]

^yes, I have read their account of their exploration, which took place just before the KWC was destroyed. I very much enjoyed the read, despite the poor grammar.

[muppet]

... by a bunch of Japs.


grrrrr....

[MolsonExport]

well, it made it to 100K.

[dchan]

grrrrr....

I know....I don't like Japs either, but I guess they're necessary here and there.

[Swede]

This thread is now 4th on google if you google for "Walled City of Kowloon"!

On topic: when will we see such density again? as many people living on a similar size area? will we ever?

[MolsonExport]

^I think not. Ther WCK was just anomalous, in terms of being a bit of China smack dab in British-ruled Hong Kong. The closest thing to a functioning anarchy city-state. And all that went with this geographical accident, along with the never ending source of refugees from Red China needing a cheap place to lay their head.

[Swede]

The land area of KWC was about 200 x 100m and the population about 35 000. In an area of 200x100m you could fit in 8 towers of about 80x40m. That would allow for quite a few appartments per floor - especially if the average (and median) sizes were small. So I actually think it would be doable. Not gonna happen in Europe, but maybe in one of the Asian megacities?

[MolsonExport]

^I just don't see it, as very few people would want to live in such density by choice. I could possibly envision a super-dense slum emerging in say, Mumbai or Lagos, but even so, I suspect that the density would not even half that of KWC.

[dchan]

Such high densities are only feasible in situations where your hands are kinda tied. In other words, a bunch of people won't voluntarily live in one spot if they aren't forced to by various circumstances.

In the Walled City's case, it was the perfect storm. The city was in a sort of 'limbo' state in which it was technically controlled by China, yet it was not controlled in virtually any sense by Chinese authorities. And because British and Hong Kong authorities had no jurisdiction there, it became a sort of paradise for anarchy.

So the Triads and other gangs, people on the run from Chinese authorities, illegal immigrants, and others who were looking for haven all made their homes and businesses here. And unlike other small foreign regions that require identification papers to cross (military bases; consulates; etc.), the 'border' was completely free and unguarded. So residents of the Walled City weren't completely restricted to the stifling and dank corridors of the City, while still being able to live under no officially recognized authority.

But the term 'anarchy' only refers to the fact there were no officially recognized governments or authorities governing the City. It doesn't mean that it was a wild lawless place where anything could happen with no real consequences. Rather, my guess is that the Triads were the unofficial police of the City.

It was a mutual relationship for them. They needed a place of business that wasn't under the scrutiny of authorities, but they also needed this place to be stable enough to carry on their business with minimal muss and fuss. So they themselves did the policing of the City, with both actual policing and their reputation, in order to achieve this stability. In turn, this helped keep the City safe enough for the other residents to live and do their business without much fear.

So in reality, while many were forced to live in the Walled City out of necessity - running from the law; no official papers in either China or Hong Kong; no license to practice a profession in the Mainland or Hong Kong; etc. - they stayed and thrived there because it was safe and comfortable enough to make a life there. And more and more people came and did the same because the reputation of the City became stronger. It still probably wasn't a great place to live by any stretch, but under their circumstances with the Chinese or British government, it was the only place.



I really can't imagine such density occurring in Mumbai or other cities with big slums. Although the poor live in these slums because they can't afford anyplace else, the slums are not restricted to only a small parcel of land. Indeed, I've heard stories of slums surrounding the runways of Mumbai's airport. So these slums generally grow outwards, not upwards, as more people come to live in them.

[Gregp1962]

Where in Kowloon was the picture in post #221 taken?

[nature's calling]

It's not normal for a city to be that dense.

[Juelz]

Its ridiculously disgusting, but just as fascinating. I kinda wish it was still there. I would be there in a couple years. ;)

[nature's calling]

Its ridiculously disgusting, but just as fascinating. I kinda wish it was still there. I would be there in a couple years. ;)

Well, good luck with that. :D

I can only imagine as to what it smells like. The look of the building seems to give the answer. It's must of smelt like elephant poo..... :yuck:

[alexsan]

It seems that the Calgary public library has a couple of copies of the "In search of a Dragons Tale" documentary that is mentioned in this thread.

See <http://catalogue.calgarypubliclibrary.com/> and search on "In search of a dragons tale".

Sadly I don't live in Calgary...

[MolsonExport]

Model of Kowloon Walled City:

http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/kowloon-walled-city-model.jpg
source: Jetsetcd http://www.flickr.com/photos/jetsetcd/3478545588/

http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cross-section-kwc-2.jpg

[MolsonExport]

One thing that I can never figure out is how such a mass was never destroyed by fire, what with all the people, factories, and junk.

[LSyd]

^ extreme vigilance?

-

[MolsonExport]

Must be. A bit of Trivia: KWC was the fishball capital of the world.

[MolsonExport]

HONG KONG'S WORST SLUM SEEMS PLEASED TO FACE ITS DOOM - New York Times January 25, 1987
In the bowels of this city's worst slum, people walk about on paths that seem like tunnels. The buildings are so close together that the sky is just a thin crack in the blackness, 15 stories above a jumble of contorted alleys and dripping pipes. In the bowels of this city's worst slum, people walk about on paths that seem like tunnels. The buildings are so close together that the sky is just a thin crack in the blackness, 15 stories above a jumble of contorted alleys and dripping pipes. The Kowloon Walled City, as the slum is known, is a seven-acre pocket of crime and filth in one of ...

All that I could get. I would love to read the rest, so I will try to find it and post it.

[MolsonExport]

Here is a new bit of writing on Kowloon's Walled city:
http://jdowdell.typepad.com/global_jd/2009/04/kowloon-walled-city.html

Kowloon Walled City

I'm short-sleeped, and have physically pushed myself 'way beyond my usual boundaries, and so my words cannot do justice to the day. Awesome, awesome experience. I appreciate that you're reading this, and wish I could offer you better value for the time, but I can only proceed intuitively now, not intellectually.

(And nota bene, specific facts below may be incorrect, and come from my memory of my prior reading -- please research for yourself before using me as termpaper material.)

Imagine -- a series of discrete fishing villages along the South China seacoast -- some farming salt ponds for sale to Imperial China -- people living there since neolithic times, tribes disappearing, migrating in, migrating out -- Ming Empire in the 1600s sending their powerful yet ineffectual navy to the mouth of the Pearl River to guard against Japanese dwarf pirates, and the British and other uncivilized barbarians -- building a fort at a nice fishing harbor on the east side of the "Nine Dragon Hills", Kowloon -- camp followers building up the village, a long stone pier stretching into the bay for ships' ease -- the British not going away, and instead demanding Hong Kong after revenging the destruction of their ships' cargo (Indian Opium, like other goods forbidden by Empire) -- moving the fort back up the harbor and building a walled city where the Ming could keep an eye on things.

About the size of a San Francisco city block, stone walls fifteen feet high. But the Ming are defeated by the Manchu Qing, and the Ming retreat south, as the Song did centuries before when the Mongols took the north, and the walled city at Kowloon Bay takes another change in direction, as the central empire has too many things to think about to worry about the south. They cede the entire area south of Shenzhen to the British as "The New Territories", but keep that small surrounded small city block as China.

The British build up Hong Kong Island and the southern tip of Kowloon Peninsula. The fort remains in Qing hands. Sun Yat Sen's Revolution overtakes the Qing in 1912, and the few Qing loyalists take refuge in the south, in the Walled City of Kowloon, long queues of hair and all. The Nationalists take formal claim to the walled city, surrounded on all sides.

But the Guomingtang have troubles up north too, with Japan invading Manchuria, and the Communists vying to betray the egalitarian revolutionary principles of the Republic. Even after the Communists drive the KMP offshore to Taiwan in 1949, the isolated little walled cityblock within British Kowloon remains a place neither here nor there -- under formal control of Beijing, but increasingly under the actual control of triads, which had their roots as Ming loyalists long long ago, before the KMP, before the Manchu.

The Japanese had torn down the walls during their occupation, using the stone to expand the nearby airfield. The triads built up and up upon that block-sized piece of land, fourteen stories building packed navel to navel, tight little alleys running between, caged verandahs as lightwells where the sun could never reach. An entire three-dimensional city, all in one city block, thousands of people packed together.

Drugs and drug factories, nightclubs and brothels, abortionists and displaced dentists, sex toys and fishballs, all made within this eight-of-a-mile 3D cube. A place where British police dared not go, formally under the control of Beijing, actually under control of the triads. The booming Kai Tak airport only two blocks away, ready to transport drugs or women around the world.

Hong Kong was booming, international air travel exploding post-WWII. Flights came in from the west, flying low from the westt over Nathan Road, until they saw the checkerboard pattern upon the hiill two blocks north of the no-longer-walled Kowloon Walled City, signaling them to make a hard right, to the south, passing just over the cubic city-within-a-city, a white-knuckle ride that every air passenger into Hong Kong remembered.

And then... the rapprochement between Beijing and London, as the 99-year-lease on The New Territories was terminated with the British tossing in Hong Kong as well. Both Empires called the chits on the triads. Kowloon City was demolished less than twenty years ago. The cubic proto-city, the Neal Stephenson dystopia where people spent their entire lives, was torn down less than twenty years ago.

Today? It is a beautiful garden, a Chinese garden, where every twist and turn reveals a new view, a puzzlebox of greenery, and history. The small almshouse in the center of Kowloon Walled City and Kowloon Cubic City remains, dating back to the 1700s. The engraved stone over the south gate, smashed and buried by the Japanese occupation, is left where it was found during excavation, a memento. That, and the memories of the oldtimers who lived in that dense cubic block of infamy and who sit chatting in the garden today, are all that remain.

I want to learn more about Kowloon City. It was the wickedest place on earth, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. The center of narcotics trade, of sex trade, of Chinese criminal gangs. A place where children were born and raised, where septugenarians breathed their last. An entire culture of people, living their lives, within an infamous society. Real people.

There is a brass model of the city before it was razed, in a central section of the park. Buildings built cheek to jowl, with windows that never saw light, narrow alleys running between, a maze where the police dared not enter. You can see the cubic city as it was, before it became a beautiful classical garden. The nearby wall shows a cross section of the life within that city, the way people lived in those apartments, the diversity in that one-block cube of life. Like no city, nowhere else. As people never before had been.

A fishing village. A fort, a fortress. A Ming outpost, a Qing outpost, a KMP outpost, a CCP outpost. A triad outpost. Surrounded on all sides by British civility, yet a law unto itself. Kowloon Walled City. Amazing.


What else did I do today? Late start, after a late night. I had hoped to take the train to the norther border in the afternoon, but was just blown away by walking in Kowloon City. Got done less than I had hoped to accomplish, but more than I had hoped to accomplish.

Took the MRT to Kowloon Tong. This is the high-end suburb, the most desired suburban residential area, just a few blocks away from the block of infamy. Bruce Lee spent his teenaged years at 41 Cumberland, or so the Internet says. I didn't find his old house until late in the afternoon, but was impressed by how ritzy the entire neighborhood is -- he led a priviliged life, attending nearby LaSalle, as so many of Hong Kong's legit movers and shakers did. Jackie Chan has his massive walled headquarters just a block away from where Bruce Lee grew up.

The entire area today is just as paradoxical. Hong Kong's wealthiest still live in Kowloon Tong, and the area is filled with seminaries and theological schools of all denominations. Kindergartens abound, and the children of the wealthy all yearn to attend school in Kowloon Tong. The elementary school children pass by Love Motels interspersed among the seminaries -- not the baroque Love Motels of Tokyo, but discrete trysting shacks for the well-to-do, hidden behind high walls, where doormen draw curtains while patrons park and disembark.

Just to the south is the village which built up around the walled fort. Tenements, at one time the noisiest on earth, as airplances passed right overhead, twice a minute. Today the area still holds many of the Fujian minority, but also has a budding Thai population, of domestic workers who make this park their Sunday holiday-spot. I had some spicy Thai noodles there for lunch -- miraculously for chile-shy Hong Kong, the dish was actually hot.

Up above it all, on the hill, the Hau Wong Miu temple, one of the oldest in the area, dating back to the 1700s. Down below it all the Song Wong Toi inscribed stone, marking the death of the final emperor of the Song Empire about 1200AD -- a boy emperor, chased from the north by the Mongols, captured and drowned in the south.

Millions of human stories, on the streets that I walked. We only know about a millenium of history in this area, even though there are signs of human habitation here for millenia before that.

I was very moved today. Exhausted, but my brain's on fire. I walked among ghosts, and they spoke to me.
April 07, 2009 in Hong Kong & Singapore, 2009

[213]

All that I could get. I would love to read the rest, so I will try to find it and post it.

Good piece! The rest of it is here (http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/25/world/hong-kong-s-worst-slum-seems-pleased-to-face-its-doom.html). ;)


HONG KONG'S WORST SLUM SEEMS PLEASED TO FACE ITS DOOM

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Special to the New York Times
Published: Sunday, January 25, 1987

In the bowels of this city's worst slum, people walk about on paths that seem like tunnels. The buildings are so close together that the sky is just a thin crack in the blackness, 15 stories above a jumble of contorted alleys and dripping pipes.

The Kowloon Walled City, as the slum is known, is a seven-acre pocket of crime and filth in one of Asia's most prosperous cities. Some 40,000 people live within its boundaries, caught in a political no man's land because of a dispute between London and Beijing. Both China and the British-controlled Hong Kong Government claim the Walled City as their own, but neither has exercised jurisdiction within it.

Last week, however, in a sign of closer cooperation between Hong Kong and China, the Hong Kong Government announced that the slum would be torn down and turned into a park. The residents will be compensated and moved elsewhere, without resolving the question of who controls the Walled City.

''This place is terrible, and demolishing it is a good thing,'' said Lam Chung, an electrical worker who lives on the 13th floor of a building without an elevator and running water. He must collect water from taps outside.

Originated as Village

The Walled City is a misnomer, in that it is neither walled nor a city. It originated 100 years ago as a village near the current site of the Hong Kong Airport, and the granite walls that gave it its name were torn down four decades ago. In June 1898, Britain leased much of Hong Kong from China for 99 years, but in October of that year Britain returned the Walled City to China. Two months later, Britain reclaimed the Walled City.

Both China and Hong Kong consider the Walled City their own, but over the years neither did much to enforce its jurisdiction. Largely unsupervised, the enclave became a haven for criminals and illegal immigrants. Buildings were built against old ones, sharing a single wall. There are no streets, only dark, cramped alleys.

''It's so filthy here, and water drips everywhere,'' said Chan Yeekam, a 63-year-old woman who used to collect waste paper for a living. She led a visitor up a dark staircase to her small fourth-floor apartment, in which five people live. Like all the other apartments, it has no fire escape. Officials describe the entire slum as a fire trap.

Mrs. Chan, like many residents, welcomes the prospect of relocation into a new building but is concerned that she be adequately compensated.

Pleased About Demolition

Indeed, nearly everyone seems happy about the demolition of the slum. ''This plan will not only be for the benefit of the residents, it will also be advantageous for the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong as a whole,'' said the Hong Kong branch of the New China News Agency, Beijing's unofficial representative in the territory.

The general acceptance of relocation today contrasts with bitter opposition to such moves in the past. Twenty-five years ago a proposal similar to the present one led to sharp protests from both residents and from Beijing. Many residents were deeply suspicious of the motives of Hong Kong's Government, and thought that only China should decide their fate.

The Hong Kong Government withdrew that plan, but tensions have remained high over the years. Residents often appealed to Beijing to intercede on their behalf, and just three years ago a Chinese official, Xu Jiatun, caused a stir by visiting the Walled City. British officials protested that he was aggravating tensions by implicitly raising again the question of jurisdiction over the enclave.

At a news conference last week, Hong Kong Government officials declined to discuss who now has jurisdiction in the Walled City. Both Beijing and London appear to feel that the dispute will soon become immaterial, as in 1997 the old lease will expire and all of Hong Kong will go to China.

Some Businesses May Suffer

While most residents appear content at the demolition proposal - so long as they are adequately paid for their apartments and are not moved too far from the city - some business people may suffer considerably.

Doctors and dentists who have licenses from China but not from Hong Kong, for example, now have tiny practices in the Walled City. A dentist's office consists of a chair, a few tools and a set of dentures in the window. Patients wait to get their teeth pulled in the same small room in which someone is already being treated.

Such dentists and doctors, who would not be allowed to practice elsewhere, probably would have to turn to new lines of work. ''Faced with pending unemployment, the chance that they will not cooperate is rather high,'' the Chinese-language Ming Pao Daily News cautioned in an editorial.

Concern Among Brokers

Real-estate brokers are also concerned.

''I'm furious,'' said Chu Yuehshan, who said he earned about $30,000 a year as a real-estate broker for the Walled City. ''This is my livelihood. Here I know everything, but elsewhere I would have no connections.''

Mr. Chu's wife looked up from her sewing and suggested that their young boy would do better growing up in a modern housing project. But Mr. Chu gloomily rejected the idea.

''The father's unemployed,'' he said. ''So what good does it do for the kid to live some place else?''

[MolsonExport]

Thanks for posting the rest! Fascinating read.

[mrnyc]

im not sure anyone mentioned it, but one of my favorite movies of all time and one of the most famous movies of the golden era of hong kong cinema was wong kar wai's chun hing sam lam aka chunking express (1994), which was mostly filmed in chunking mansions. one of the two main characters works in a restaurant there and one is a cop. its best seen on the big screen, but the whole movie is up on youtube -- just be aware its an atmospheric art movie not a wuxia or kung fu movie -- haha!

heres part one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKygEki7tu0

edit: here is the imdb info:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109424/

[dchan]

im not sure anyone mentioned it, but one of my favorite movies of all time and one of the most famous movies of the golden era of hong kong cinema was wong kar wai's chun hing sam lam aka chunking express (1994), which was mostly filmed in chunking mansions. one of the two main characters works in a restaurant there and one is a cop. its best seen on the big screen, but the whole movie is up on youtube -- just be aware its an atmospheric art movie not a wuxia or kung fu movie -- haha!

heres part one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKygEki7tu0

edit: here is the imdb info:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109424/


Well, the "whole" movie is on youtube. Too bad some recording company took off the audio for at least one of the parts, simply because it just happened to feature of its songs. So I didn't even bother watching the rest of it.

Now, I'll never be able to figure out why that guy was eating all that expired canned-food from the convenience stores. :( Well, at least until I get an actual copy. ;)

[MolsonExport]

This memorial photo is on the site of the Walled city (Wikipedia commons):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/HK_Kln_Walled_City_Southwest_1990.jpg

[MolsonExport]

Expedition into the vacated Walled City of Kowloon:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020208225753/www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/story/index_e.html

[Kilgore Trout]

im not sure anyone mentioned it, but one of my favorite movies of all time and one of the most famous movies of the golden era of hong kong cinema was wong kar wai's chun hing sam lam aka chunking express (1994), which was mostly filmed in chunking mansions. one of the two main characters works in a restaurant there and one is a cop. its best seen on the big screen, but the whole movie is up on youtube -- just be aware its an atmospheric art movie not a wuxia or kung fu movie -- haha!

only the first part of the movie is filmed in chungking mansions. the second part (with faye wong as the restaurant worker and tony leung as the copy) was filmed in central, around the central street market and the central mid-levels escalator.

[MolsonExport]

If I find myself in HK in the near future, I am going to stay one night at Chungking mansions, just for the experience.

[ncassaro]

I have compiled a bunch of articles about the walled city - 45 pages worth. However, it would most likely be illegal to post this so PM me with your e-mail address if you are interested.

[staff]

If I find myself in HK in the near future, I am going to stay one night at Chungking mansions, just for the experience.
Haha, I can't recommend it, honestly. :)

[ncassaro]

OK well I don't think ppl believe me so Ima just post it here:\


The Globe and Mail (Canada)

September 18, 1982 Saturday

A nervy tour of Kowloon's Walled City It's fairly safe these days, but the Westerner is wise to take a police escort if he wants to wander in dark alleys

BYLINE: PAUL BENEDETTI; GAM

LENGTH: 1334 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG
BY PAUL BENEDETTI
HONG KONG
IT
IS MIDDAY, but there is no light. The narrow, winding alleyway is
scarcely five feet wide, the walls are dark and clammy. On the ground, a
stream of oily, fetid water winds along the corridor. By the wall a large
rat lies dead. Rats are a common sight in this part of Hong Kong. They
outnumber people two to one.
I walk slowly while my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The alleys
are ink black in spots, with only thin strands of weak sunlight leaking
through the maze of pipes and wiring overhead. Inside these corridors it
is always night. Every few hundred feet a naked light bulb casts a faint,
yellowish light, creating strange shadows.
This is the Walled City of Kowloon. An embarrassment to Hong Kong
officials, the Walled City is considered a no man's land. It is five
minutes on foot from Kai Tak Airport in the heart of the Kowloon
Peninsula, across the bay from Hong Kong's central business district, yet
it is taboo to Hong Kong residents and most of them never set foot inside
the area.
Tourists seldom hear of the Walled City. For those who do, the advice
is specific: Stay out. One guidebook cautions that a step inside may lead
to a journey "from which there is a good chance you may never return." The
warning is out-dated and melodramatic. Although the Walled City once was a
dangerous underworld and it remains a headquarters for gangs, it is now a
fairly safe part of town with a low crime rate. The walls that used to
surround it were torn down years ago. Still, visitors are almost bound to
get lost in its twilit maze of streets.
I am inside the Walled City with an escort - Sergeant Yip of the Royal
Hong Kong Police, Kowloon Division. A short, friendly man in plainclothes,
he has worked the area for almost a year. On the bright, busy street
bordering the city, he tells me to ask him before taking photographs and
to stay close to him once we go inside the concrete puzzle, where we will
rendezvous with a uniformed patrol making rounds. Police always travel in
pairs in the district, whose tunnel-like walls make radio communication
impossible.
Despite the patrols, police have limited jurisdiction inside the Walled
City, but they are the only physical evidence of a Hong Kong Government
presence of any kind. This area, the size of a few city blocks and housing
about 50,000 people, is in a kind of official limbo. In the eyes of
municipal bureaucrats, the Walled City almost doesn't exist.
Water within the district is illegally tapped from city pipes.
Electricity is provided, but there are no meters or billing. There is no
sewage system or street lighting. Only a few residents pay property taxes.
Doctors, dentists and businesses are unsupervised and unregulated. The
city may be an orderly place, but because police power is limited, it is a
haven for organized crime rings, prostitutes and opium dealers.
The reasons for this strange status lie in the origins of the Walled
City of Kowloon. In 1841, Britain signed a treaty with China making the
island of Hong Kong a Crown colony. Later, the British also acquired the
adjacent Kowloon Peninsula. China, however, insisted on retaining control
of the City of Kowloon, meaning the walled Chinese garrison on the
peninsula. The presence of a Chinese garrison in the middle of a Crown
colony offended the sensibilities of many Britons, particularly since the
area enclosed by the walls was reputedly a collection of gambling halls,
brothels and opium dens. Nevertheless, an agreement was signed in 1889
acknowledging China's control of the territory "except so far as may be
inconsistent with the military requirements of Hong Kong."
A month after the agreement was signed, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and
the Hong Kong Volunteers moved in and expelled the Chinese troops. The
area still legally belonged to China, however, and jurisdiction over the
city became a political and legal mess.
Neither side exercized control and squatters moved in. The area became
a tangle of huts and sweatshops. Crime flourished. Illegal immigrants,
pickpockets, petty thieves or murderers could easily hide in the city's
alleyways, where they were officially on Chinese territory and outside the
power of the Hong Kong police. As late as 1963, when Hong Kong officials
attempted to resettle squatters in the city, China objected and the action
was halted.
Despite its name, the Walled City has been without walls since 1943,
when they were dismantled and the stones were used to lengthen the runway
at the nearby international airport.
Since the demolition of the walls, the exact boundaries of the city
have been obscure. The last official count of the population living and
working in the area, taken in 1977, was 26,000, but many estimate the
number has since grown to 50,000.
From the noisy hustle of Tung Tau Tsuen Road, Sgt. Yip leads me through
a narrow opening between two buildings. Within seconds we are in a
cramped, gloomy alley, and as we wind our way through the corridors I am
amazed at the mole-like existence around me. The houses are cement boxes
or wood and tin shacks. I stay close to Sgt. Yip, but several times I
almost stumble, unable to see the ground in the darkness. We pass a small
factory where two men in undershirts sweat over machines punching out
plastic toy parts. The room they work in is about the size of a walk-in
closet. In summer, when outside temperatures climb above 30 degrees, these
cramped, airless rooms and passageways become a stifling world.
I feel an unsettling emptiness about the city. It is early afternoon,
but we have only seen a few men and women in the streets. People stare
from a window or door as we approach and then quickly retreat as we draw
closer. Their curiosity is understandable. A Westerner is a rare sight
here, and one with a camera and a policeman is best avoided.
Most residents of the Walled City work outside, except for the few who
man small textile mills or presses, and the unregistered doctors and
dentists whose shops line an entire street here.
In such a ghetto you would expect to see dogs roaming about, but the
narrow streets are devoid of pets - and for good reason. Young dogs would
be snapped up and served in one of the city's "fragrant flesh"
restaurants. The only dogs in sight are old mongrels, too tough and thin
to eat.
We come to a small opening where women are washing clothes around a
water pipe. We stop at a one-room variety store. The stooped shop owner,
his mouth gleaming with gold teeth, offers me a beer and chats with Sgt.
Yip. When we leave I try to pay for the beer, but he refuses, smiling and
waving my money away. Farther along the laneways, we come upon a clean,
well-run kindergarten and old folks home. The Salvation Army operates both
facilities, giving the young and old a change from their hot and cramped
houses for a few hours a day.
I ask Sgt. Yip about crime in the Walled City. There is surprisingly
little of it, he says. Serious crimes such as assault and murder used to
be a major problem, but effective police work and the vigilance of the
people have made life relatively safe. Even today, though, real power is
in the hands of Triad Secret Societies whose headquarters are in the
Walled City. These gangs, often called the Chinese Mafia, control
gambling, prostitution and drugs in Hong Kong.
Why, I ask Sgt. Yip, do 50,000 people live, and work and raise families
in what seems to me like a huge basement? His answer is simple: Where else
can they go? In Hong Kong, where an apartment can cost more than in
Canada, where the lucky live in cramped government housing and the unlucky
in one-room shacks or on little fishing boats, people are happy to have a
place to stay.
Neither Chinese nor British, the district remains in the limbo created
by an ambiguous treaty signed almost a century ago. It is a shadow world,
physically and politically - the strangest of urban ghettos. We step back
into the bright bustle of Tung Tau Tsuen Road and leave the Walled City
behind. It is good to be out.
The Washington Post

September 22, 1983, Thursday, Final Edition

China's Small Exclave in Hong Kong Is a Forbidding Slum

BYLINE: By Michael Weisskopf, Washington Post Foreign Service

SECTION: First Section; World News; A29

LENGTH: 863 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG



Amid the skyscrapers and other glittery monuments to this capitalist dynamo lies a squalid warren of tenements that looks like a fossil from pre-modern China.
The place is called the Walled City, and, in fact, it has been largely forgotten since the Qing Dynasty leased the rest of Hong Kong to Great Britain in 1898. By a historical quirk, the tiny area of 6.5 acres has effectively remained a political no man's land, left to degenerate into a world of such filth and crime that one of its main streets is aptly named Dragon's Saliva.
Although the community's high walls were razed long ago, it has been politically and economically walled off from this fast-modernizing territory for almost a century.


As the wheel of history comes full circle, however, the little city within a city that everyone chose to ignore has suddenly become part of a high-stakes political contest involving the future of all Hong Kong.
The contest began last year when the Communist regime in Peking announced plans to recover sovereignty over Hong Kong after the British lease expires in 1997. Chinese officials have spoken of creating a "special administrative region" with "Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong" while keeping the current socioeconomic system intact.
London reportedly is ready to drop its claim to sovereignty, but it hopes to retain some role in administering the prosperous colony on China's southeastern coast.
The Walled City began figuring into the issue last month. Xu Jiatun, Peking's new senior representative in Hong Kong, visited the community's 30,000 people as one of his first public outings.
Xu's motives were obvious to political observers here. He went to reassert Chinese domain over the Walled City and to cite it as an example of the kind of self-rule Peking is planning for the rest of Hong Kong's 5.5 million residents, almost all of Chinese descent.
Indeed, Xu was quoted as saying he was very pleased with the management of the area by the Kaifong Welfare Advancement Association, a locally selected body.
Pro-Chinese observers were heartened by the visit, saying Xu displayed real concern for the Walled City.
But supporters of British administration were puzzled as to why Xu chose one of Hong Kong's most blighted sections as a model of self-government. They assumed he was misled by his advisers.
"At the end of the day, Xu must have realized the whole thing backfired," a political source said. "He must not have known what he was getting into. Most people feel if the Walled City is a sight of the future, they don't want any part of it."
The Walled City became known as Hong Kong's neglected stepchild because of an unresolved wrinkle in the 1898 lease agreement. London originally agreed to let Chinese mandarins continue to run the then-enclosed exclave except when the security of the rest of the colony was in jeopardy.
London revoked the right a year later, but China has persistently claimed sovereignty over the years. Nevertheless, no Chinese representative has lived in the Walled City for decades.
The British, careful to avoid a clash with Peking, have likewise kept hands off the area.
As result, the Walled City has been left to its own devices. Until Hong Kong police began making cursory patrols in recent times, it was a center of prostitution, opium dens and gambling. Organized crime groups known as triads still are said to operate in the all but lawless community, and it reportedly is a haven for drug dealers, illegal immigrants and unlicensed dentists.
Located on the Kowloon peninsula near the busy Hong Kong airport, the Walled City looks like a scene from Dante's "Inferno." Its dank, garbage-clogged passageways form a forbidding labyrinth visited by few outsiders.
Buildings are pressed together so closely that neighbors can shake hands through their bedroom windows. Only one space between the crumbling structures is wide enough to admit sunshine.
Residents face daily safety and health dangers from rats, open sewers, dangling electricity wires and the steady drip of water from overhead pipes illegally connected to mains outside the community. There is no public water supply. There are no public schools. Fire trucks would be hard pressed to enter the area in an emergency.
"Environmentally, it is a cancer," said Victor Ng, assistant officer of the Hong Kong district encompassing the Walled City.
Ng said that despite jurisdictional fuzziness the Hong Kong government now sends in police to patrol the Walled City and trucks to pick up trash. There are plans to demolish a surrounding slum of squatter huts so water lines can be extended.
"We look at these people as part of us," Ng said. "We feel an obligation to help them."
To the inhabitants of the Walled City, political identity is not as important as the pressing needs of daily life.
Some residents regard the place as part of China. They hoist Chinese flags on national day and welcome the Communist return in 1997.
Twenty years ago, those people appealed to Peking to stop British plans to tear down the Walled City. Communist officials protested, and Hong Kong's administrators backed off to prevent a showdown.
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

March 3, 1987 Tuesday

SLUM CLEARANCE Death knell sounds for Hong Kong's chaotic Walled City

BYLINE: JAMES RUSK; GAM

LENGTH: 941 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG
BY JAMES RUSK
Globe and Mail Correspondent
HONG KONG
Wong Yan pulls herself up to her full 4 feet 3 inches and wags her
finger at the Hong Kong official.
"I am too old to move now and all my money has been spent on my flat,"
Mrs. Wong says. "I am very unhappy."
Mrs. Wong's complaints are those of anyone who is going to lose a house
to Government-ordered demolition. She does not know where she is going to
live, whether she will get a fair shake for the money invested in her
house or what will happen to the recreation centre for the elderly where
she and her friends meet.
She is about to be moved because Hong Kong plans to turn an accident of
history - currently one of the most densely crowded slums in the world -
into a park.
It is hard to believe that Mrs. Wong would want to stay, even though
she lives in one of the few parts of Hong Kong that the poor can afford
without turning to public housing. Her house is in one of the worst urban
firetraps imaginable, a jumble of buildings where windows seldom let in
sunlight and streets are not safe even for residents.
A young official who made her first visit to the slum when she acted as
a interpreter for The Globe and Mail was silent a long time when asked
what she thought of it.
"My heart grieves that there is such a place in Hong Kong," she finally
said.
The Kowloon Walled City, the area to be cleared, must be one of the
unique areas in any city in the world. For nearly a century, the Walled
City, on whose 2.8 hectares 35,000 residents are jammed, has been a place
largely outside the law.
Although it has not been exercised in this century, the legal authority
over the Walled City - so-called even though the Japanese occupiers of
Hong Kong tore down its walls during Second World War for material to
extend the nearby airport into Victoria Harbor - may still belong to
China.
After the peninsula adjacent to Hong Kong was leased to Britain in
1898, China retained authority over a small enclave known as Kowloon City.
A Qing Dynasty magistrate landed at a special pier and, without touching
British-ruled soil, walked in to dispense justice.
The British appeared to recognise the arrangement in an 1898 Order-in-
Council, but threw the magistrate out in 1899. Since then, however, they
have exercised power only in criminal law and to keep structures there
from encroaching into the western flight path into Kai Tek airport.
Consequently, the anarchy of the Walled City has become an example of
what modern urban life could be like without the exercise of civil power.
No building code has ruled the construction of its approximately 300
buildings, some 15 stories tall. The result is a honeycomb of structures
sharing retaining walls and stairwells in such a way that Hong Kong
authorities think they will have to tear it down all at once after the
residents are moved out by 1990.
Narrow passages and stairs make the city a firetrap. In only a few
spots can people walk two abreast. Hong Kong authorities, who have long
feared that thousands would die if a fire broke out, say their main worry
as they move inhabitants out is that a fire might start in an abandoned
flat.
It would not be hard for one to begin. In the absence of a building
code and internal infrastructure, both electrical lines and dripping water
hoses from one of the seven standpipes that provide all the Walled City's
water run side by side just over people's heads.
The absence of a civil code means that the city has 87 unlicenced
dentists, 63 unlicenced doctors and 148 unlicenced business
establishments, many of them restaurants that have never seen a sanitary
inspector.
There is criminal law. Bolstered by a long-standing court ruling in a
murder trial, the Hong Kong police patrol the area.
A senior officer said the force has succeeded in reducing crime levels
from those of the early 1960s, when the area was a haven for fugitives,
including illegal immigrants, and for prostitution, drug peddling and
gambling.
Even so, it is a difficult place to police. To catch burglars, for
example, the police must climb to rooftops and peer down the slits between
buildings in the hope of catching a thief shimmying up.
Hong Kong authorities have wanted to tear the place down since the
1960s, but plans were shelved until earlier this year after traditionally
pro-Chinese residents rioted to protest against earlier demolition plans.
Although the authorities have not erased the suspicions of Mrs. Wong
and her friends at the centre for the aged, most residents appear to have
accepted the sudden decision - announced only in January - to tear down
the Walled City.
Residents who were registered in a snap survey or those who can prove
they live in one of the few flats that were empty at the time of the
survey will go to the top of the queue for public housing, if they need
it.
Those flat and building owners who can prove ownership - difficult in a
place lacking a land and property registry - will be helped.
Businesses will be compensated for loss of trade and their relocation
costs picked up. One group of businesses that the Hong Kong Government
does not know what to do with is the seven "water syndicates" that operate
the piping and hose systems snaking from the standpipes.
The most difficult problem faced by the Hong Kong Government, which
does not yet have an estimate of the total cost of the clearance although
it is expected to be in the billions of Hong Kong dollars, is the
unlicenced doctors and dentists.
Most were trained in mainland China but lack qualifications to practice
in Hong Kong. Some of the doctors may join traditional Chinese medicine
clinics in Hong Kong, but the best the rest can hope for is employment as
a paramedic of some type, officials say.
The Advertiser

April 2, 1988 Saturday

City of Darkness

SOURCE: aap

BYLINE: RODNEY TYLER

LENGTH: 1591 words



I F such things were included in the section on housing in the Guinness Book Of Records, the Walled City of Kowloon, in Hong Kong, would undoubtedly merit a mention on at least five counts: it is the world's longest-lasting, largest, most lawless, most dangerous and most overcrowded squat. And if notoriety were quantifiable, it would head that list as well.
Of course, now that it is going to be pulled down some are already talking as though they are going to miss it; but you wouldn't want to keep it - except perhaps as a monument to man's capacity to survive in adverse circumstances. It has a nightmarish quality; a teeming, twilight world; a jumble of totally unreal images springing at you out of the gloom.
Here, the left legs of Barbie dolls are being stamped out in their thousands by a hissing, clanking machine supervised by a seven-year-old boy, while All I Have to Do is Dream on the radio completes the cacophony. There, in a filthy, dingy room, a dozen chefs in singlets and shorts stand in a row preparing an endless stream of glistening white meringues. And over there, row upon row of ready-to-munch false teeth grimace at you through the window of an illegal dentist's shop. Inside, crouched over a victim, the man practises with impunity.


Turn a corner in the dark, dank, narrow winding passages that pass for streets and there, sitting on its haunches, sleek and as fat as a cat, is a rat munching on a piece of bread. Tread unwarily on the duckboarding beneath your feet as you recoil in surprise and you slide into the open sewer below.
Three huge women sit around a table in the doorway to a room, chattering happily as they wrap sweets in paper, shoving the piles of finished product off the table into a box which lies in the festering rubbish in the street. In the gloomy room behind, Madonna singing Who's That Girl? on the radio and the slap of mahjong tiles compete in a strange syncopation.
A heroin addict makes his way upstairs for his afternoon fix. In his ninth-floor room - which measures three metres by four metres and is living, eating, toilet and sleeping accommodation for him, his wife and his brother - he carefully cooks up his drug in a spoon, siphons it into a syringe, tightens the rope around his arm and starts the search for a vein. Meanwhile, his brother eats lunch, his wife tidies up and Joan Collins shouts at John Forsythe on the color television which stands on top of the ancient fridge.
In the darkness and slime an ancient prostitute sits in a doorway hoping for some early trade - though the young girls, the 11- and 12-year-olds, will not be at their posts until night falls. You pass the one-metre by two-metre cupboard on Old Man Street, which is home to the two old alcoholics Ka Lui and Ho Wak. They are into their third bottle of rotgut and feeling no pain. They are happy to tell you how their cupboard used to be the dividing line between the warring Triad factions, the Ging Wu and the 14K, one of which ruled the east side and the other the west.
Finally, at the bottom of Old Man Street - past the standpipe, one of only half a dozen in the entire city, where the children come down through the labyrinth and queue with their buckets to get the only available drinking water - you emerge again into the sunlight. There, only 200 metres away, across the rubble and the new park where the shanties were and the guards used to sit to warn off strangers, is the huge, comforting structure of the Airport Hotel.
You turn and look back at the place and you see now what it is: a huge, multi-layered rabbit warren. It is as though it was built to a larger scale, then crunched up in some child's capricious dream to occupy a quarter of the space it should do. Now it measures less than 150 metres square and it is inhabited by an estimated 40,000 people. Not all of them are nice.
Nevertheless, the wonder is not that it was built in the first place but that agreement should finally have been reached to pull it down. For, alongside all the dubious superlatives in the record book, the Walled City should also be mentioned as one of the oddest historical anomalies of all time.
In 1898, three months after the Chinese signed the deal to lease Hong Kong to the British - the famous lease which is due to expire at midnight on June 30, 1997 - a special Order in Council was issued which gave the enclave known as the Walled City of Kowloon back to the Chinese and gave Chinese officials the right to exercise jurisdiction over it.
Two months later the order was unilaterally rescinded by the British, thus laying the way open for a long series of less-than-diplomatic incidents down the years. The common pattern was that the Brits would try to impose some form of order on the place, the residents would promptly complain to Peking and the Chinese Government
- of whichever hue - would complain in turn to the Brits, citing the matter of the first Order in Council. The British proposals would then be dropped because of their "politically sensitive" nature - and the residents would proudly boast of their independence and ability to tweak the lion's tail.
Things changed rapidly after the war and the Communist revolution. Thousands of mainland Chinese swept into the colony and the Walled City found itself in a swiftly developing urban area. It began to build - upwards rather than outwards - and, in the 25 years up to 1975, the present labyrinth took shape.
But there were no laws. Sporadic attempts, particularly in the '60s, to impose colonial rule on the place met with the predictable Peking response. So none of the local building or fire regulations were enforced and structures went ever onwards and upwards with no foundations. Eventually they came to lean on the one next door as the most convenient way of staying up. And while they were leaning there, people thought, why not knock a hole through from one to another and link one 11th-storey passage to another?
There was no refuse disposal - only the window. No sewers - only the streets. The electricity was stolen from the official lines outside the Walled City and (sometimes literally) hotwired all over the maze.
Water was taken from brackish wells dug under the buildings, pumped by private enterprise up to the top of the buildings then sold for $10 a month to anyone who could buy the piping to reach the tanks.
The Triad gangs moved in. Opium dens, heroin trafficking, gambling and all forms of prostitution became rife. The place was turned into an armed fortress of anarchy and, it was said, the Hong Kong police - never anxious to dash into the place at the best of times - fell into the habit of taking thousands of dollars a day to steer totally clear. In its own violent way the enclave policed itself. The two main gangs divided it up among themselves and guarded it day and night against outsiders.
With no controls, dozens of illegal dentists and doctors set up - even now there are 100 such dentists in the city. Abortions and other illegal operations thrived in one-roomed "hospitals".
Only in the '70s, when the Walled City's notoriety reached far beyond Hong Kong (as did the corrupt reputation of the Hong Kong police) was a real start made to clear up the place. The more public displays of vice and drugs were closed down. The police began to patrol, occasionally and in pairs.
The Triad hegemony waned. The standpipes were put in. The open sewers were duckboarded over. Rat poison was put down. Official electricity arrived to supplement the illegal supply and limited strip lighting was put along the walls of some of the principal "streets".
Hong Kong officials also give some of the credit for the change in the Walled City to a 40-year-old British "missionary", Jackie Pullinger, who arrived in Hong Kong 20 years ago with $16 in her pocket and no clear idea of what she wanted to do. Her work among drug addicts - she has cured hundreds of them through a fundamentalist Christian approach involving the laying on of hands and speaking in tongues - is a legend in the colony, to the extent that she is now given limited official help in her work.
More importantly, her reputation within the Walled City has grown the more for having cured two senior Triad leaders by converting them, for having challenged the power of the gangs head-on and for never considering anyone to be too low or in too bad a state to merit her help. At the very least she has shown the cowed populace that a light could shine in the City of Darkness (as the Chinese call it).
"I have always seen it as the City of Light, not darkness," she told me. "It has been used for violence and crime and greed
- it had become a victim city. But I saw the opposite could happen. And it did. People - even addicts - used to stay away because the place had such a bad name. Now the worst in the land comes to our room in the Walled City because they have heard their life can be changed there."
The first of the 10,000 or so "registered" families will be moved out in April. Such is the nature of the place that everyone knows there are many more unregistered families still living in the city. But just how many is unknown.
It will take two years to rehouse everyone and to clear the place out entirely. Then - and only then - will they move in to demolish it, because the expert assessment is that it cannot be demolished piecemeal.
They reckon it could be spectacular - another superlative for the record book: one push and it could all fall down.

The Boston Globe

June 13, 1991, Thursday, City Edition

Dooming a slum;
Hong Kong's infamous Walled City will be dynamited

BYLINE: By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 782 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG



For nine decades the Walled City has festered in the heart of this British colony's sleek Kowloon district, a lawless seven-acre enclave of opium parlors, whorehouses and gambling dens where police, health inspectors, and even tax collectors have not dared to tread.
The Cantonese call it Hak Nam, the City of Darkness. It is a ghetto of bizarre history whose 40,000 denizens, ranging from criminal gangs called triads to hundreds of unlicensed dentists and doctors, dwell in perpetual twilight.
Ramshackle multistory structures, put up without regard to any building code, tower so high and lean so precariously together that hardly a ray of light reaches the tangle of dank alleys and reeking open sewers below.


All that will change when the enclave is leveled sometime next year.
The Walled City took its name from the immense ramparts studded with six great watchtowers that once surrounded the fabulous Qing dynasty home and gardens of the emperor of China's special envoy.
China had been forced to cede Hong Kong island to Britain in 1842 and Kowloon peninsula in 1860. In 1898, Britain obtained a 99-year lease on the New Territories, a large swath of adjacent land, but agreed that the walled compound with its small garrison would remain legally a part of China, a sort of foreign embassy. The British broke their promise a year later, driving out the emperor's envoy and soldiers, but under the treaty, the enclave remained Chinese territory. The Japanese, who occupied Hong Kong during World War II, tore down the original wall, but the old name stuck.
In 1949, the Communists seized power in Beijing and asserted their right to occupy and police the Walled City. Hong Kong's British governor ignored the demand, but, fearing their enormous neighbor, colonial authorities made no attempt to maintain law or regulate the zone.
So, for the people of the Walled City, there would be no schools, no modern sewerage, no electricity, no postal service or garbage collection, and no interference from the state.
The enclave evolved into a crime-infested no man's land, the haunt of the triads, opium addicts, cutthroats and home for the poorest of Hong Kong's poor.
It also became famous for its cheap dental and medical "clinics," filthy, if thriving, places whose practitioners' low fees reflected the fact that they were unlicensed and, often as not, untrained.
Gambling parlors flourished. Illegal abortion centers did, too. Restaurant stalls served up everything from raw snake liver to dog soup.
Now, with Hong Kong scheduled to be absorbed into China when Britain's lease on the colony expires in 1997, officials in London and Beijing have agreed it is high time to raze the city.
About 10,000 residents of the Walled City have already been resettled, and the infamous enclave will be dynamited into oblivion sometime next year at a cost of $ 350 million. Most of the sum represents compensation to owners of buildings and businesses.
"That is a cheap price to excise the cancer of Kowloon," said H. T. Lui, Hong Kong's deputy secretary for home affairs. "No one will mourn the loss of this dreadful place."
Not true, said Lee Kyung Lam, who operates a tiny bakery inherited from his father and whose family has lived in the Walled City for three generations.
"It is true there are many drug traffickers and poor girls who sell themselves on the street. But there is not only badness here," he said. "For many hard-working people with little money, it is the only home we know. I do not want to leave. My mother cries all day knowing we must."
A Christian missionary, John Pullinger, who for years has ministered to a tiny congregation in the Walled City, agreed that the enclave is "a dark, corrupt place of horror and shame."
"There are murders, and no one asks questions," he said. "The gangs extort the shopkeepers terribly. Yet there is a community of decent souls here just struggling to get on with their lives."
Entrepreneurs, heavily "taxed" by the triads, have rigged mile after mile of leaky hose above the narrow lanes to bring water tapped illegally from city reservoirs and sold to residents at a hefty price. Those who protest the prices face beatings and even executions by the gangs, who also control the illegal electric lines.
It is the constant fear of violence that makes some Walled City dwellers pleased by the prospect of new apartments and financial compensation.
Hong Kong has tried to raze the Walled City three times, but has been thwarted by angry residents supported by Chinese authorities.
"The Chinese are with us this time," said a colonial official. "After all, they will inherit this pit if we don't destroy it."
November 28, 1991, Thursday, FINAL EDITION

Families evicted from slum city

BYLINE: AP

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 404 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG


HONG KONG (AP) - Despite protests and threats of suicide, Hong Kong began evicting families from its old Walled City today in a move to clear the squalid seven-acre enclave that is a haven for organized crime, drugs and pro-Communist agitation.
Scores of police officers descended on the slum, rousting out unlicensed dentists and doctors, aging prostitutes and the owner of a grocery store.
Today's operation, which resulted in 39 families or businesses being evicted from the neighborhood, was the first of a four-phase program to clear the city and turn it into a park.


Most of the original 33,000 residents have already left under a $295 million compensation package. Several thousand diehards remain, seeking more money.
The Walled City has been a victual no-man's land since 1898, when the British government expanded its control in Hong Kong to include Kowloon where the neighborhood, now a vast slum, sits.
Because the area was the site of a Qing Dynasty fort, the Chinese imperial government refused to allow the British jurisdiction over the place.
The Hong Kong government attempted to assert control over the city in 1963 but abandoned the plan after a vehement "hands off" order by Beijing.
Hong Kong is now clearing the city, with China's agreement, to build a park.
Posters criticizing the government's move flapped from rundown facades. "Down with colonialist running dogs," one read. "Hong Kong government must respect human rights," said another.
"I am extremely sad," said Wong Ming, owner of the Pat Tat Crystal Arts Co., who has made keychains and lucite flower balls in the Walled City for 22 years. "My business will die and I'm wondering what will happen to my family."
Wong said he would try to hold out for higher compensation before packing up and leaving. Already he's been offered $40,000 by the Hong Kong government to vacate.
After World War II, thousands of squatters poured into the neighborhood and it fast developed into a haven for organized crime, drugs, opium smoking and pro-Communist agitation.
Residents didn't need to pay property taxes, obtain business or medical licenses or get building permits. The place became a vast slum - a maze of dank alleyways lined with spaghetti wiring where the smell of rotting garbage mixed with that of fish, pork's blood and open sewers. Water dripped from air conditioners and open air plumbing.
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

November 29, 1991 Friday
Late Edition

End nears for Kowloon Walled City

BYLINE: HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 143 words
Hong Kong police and bailiffs today began evicting people from the Kowloon Walled City _ a jumble of patched-together tenement buildings that have traditionally served as a refuge for Chinese gangsters and drug addicts in the heart of the British colony.
In a historical quirk, Beijing never relinquished sovereignty over the area.
Britain let China keep a garrison on the site when it leased the colony in 1898. The walled city became a lawless enclave _ a labyrinth of dank alleys that was home to more than 30,000 people.
Every time the Hong Kong Government tried to move in, Beijing sent a diplomatic protest. Once, in 1948, Chinese mobs set fire to a British consulate.
Now, under the agreement to hand over power in 1997, it is to be cleared in phases and then pulled down.
By June 1992, the Kowloon Walled City may well be blown up and then turned into a park.
The Independent (London)

November 29, 1991, Friday

Empire conquers a fetid colony

BYLINE: From ANDREW HIGGINS in Hong Kong

SECTION: FOREIGN NEWS PAGE; Page 12

LENGTH: 666 words



IN A BRIEF spasm before its collapse, the British Empire yesterday seized one last, tiny chunk of territory for the Crown - a fetid slum crawling with rats, dripping with sewage yet stoutly defended to the last by an angry battalion of Chinese shopkeepers, faith healers and self-taught dentists.
The new acquisition is the Walled City of Kowloon, a squalid no man's land riddled with brothels, drug dens, hole-in-the- wall shops and grimy surgeries offering cheap but painful fillings, dentures and gold teeth.
Neither walled nor a city anymore, the area degenerated long ago into a dank and often dangerous sanctuary from the law - the only patch of Hong Kong from which the Union flag has never flown, its murky autonomy assured by a quirk of colonial history.
When Britain seized the Kowloon peninsula from the Qing Dynasty, hazy wording in the 1898 treaty left Peking a foothold in its lost domain - vague jurisdiction over the Walled City, a tenth-century fort from which Chinese officials and soldiers once ruled. While wary of trying to enforce its claim over the area, Peking was also unwilling to relinquish it. With neither Britain nor China in charge, the Walled City fell under the control of Triads instead.


After decades of legal quibbling and patriotic posturing, both sides agree the anomaly must go. The Walled City, a single block of land next to the airport, is to be razed and replaced with a public park - just in time to save China the trouble of cleaning up the mess when it regains sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong in six years' time.
Enforcing the agreement is the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, which moved in yesterday to help evict the last die-hard residents. ''Nobody should be in there anymore,'' said Terrence Osel, a chubby colonial police officer overseeing the operation. ''The Walled City belongs to the Crown. Anyone who stays is trespassing on Crown land.''
Thousands of residents have already left, accepting compensation from the colonial government and promises of new housing elsewhere. Their apartments have been cleared, their doors chained shut, their grimy, mud- splattered walls plastered with stern official notices: ''NO Trespassing.''
Others, though, have vowed to stay, fearful of losing their homes and wary of dealing with tax collectors, health inspectors and other agents of the law previously kept at arm's length by the Walled City's uncertain status. Particularly anxious are scores of dentists and doctors who, lacking the licences needed to practise elsewhere, will lose their livelihood once they leave.
Yesterday, the start of a six- month eviction drive, saw only 11 families dislodged. Many more remain inside, barricaded behind piles of rubbish and rusty iron gates. One man was dragged screaming from his shop; another hurled abuse at police through a loudhailer. Others marched to the Hong Kong governor's mansion carrying black banners demanding more money.
The most dramatic act of resistance was staged by a doddery old man in his 70s: he hobbled atop the roof of his 12-storey block and threatened to jump, only to be lured down with assurances that the government's offer of cash compensation - up to pounds 50,000 - might be negotiable.
The Walled City's bizarre status, has overturned the usual pattern of protest. Instead of accusing the British government of caving in to Peking - the usual complaint of Hong Kong's jittery population - the residents of the Walled City accuse Peking and local Chinese officials of caving in to colonialism.
''Have you not forgotten the humiliation of the Opium War?'' asked a poster put up yesterday by the local residents' association. ''Stinking officials have forgotten the interests of the Chinese people.''
Colonial officials and police, however, are unmoved. ''It's sad that people must leave their homes, but the bottom line is they must go,'' said District Police Commissioner Osler. ''I'm not sad to see this mess go. Nobody can be sad about that.''
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

February 28, 1992 Friday

Inside the walls of a secret city DEPRIVATION"Canadian youngsters might benefit from living in a dark and crammed slum of Hong Kong, says a woman with first-hand experience

BYLINE: WENDY TANG; GAM

LENGTH: 758 words
BY WENDY TANG
THE photograph in the newspaper shows a woman protesting against her
eviction from Hong Kong's Walled City, a slum left over from the 19th
century. The entire district is being torn down.
A magazine article describes it as "one of the darkest corners of Hong
Kong: an overcrowded warren of poverty, disease and lawlessness." But to
its 33,000 inhabitants, the Walled City has been a refuge for the less
fortunate souls of an otherwise prosperous Hong Kong.
This undoubtedly is why the woman in the photograph "screams in
protest" at her eviction. The Walled City is her home, as it was once
mine.
In 1955, when I was 7, my father abandoned his wife and concubine for
an 18-year-old woman. His wife, my "elder mother," sued for divorce, but
being a concubine, she had no legal recourse.
Even if she had, she wouldn't have known of it. Orphaned at 15, and
having tried in vain to become a Chinese opera singer, she entered into
concubinage with my father when she was only 17. When my father left, she
was defenceless - a woman with no working skills supporting three
children, from five to 15 years old.
The four of us ended up in the Walled City. Did my mother move there
for the cheaper rent? Or was she running away from the pity and sighs of
her helpless friends? Poor mother, trying along with my sister to sew
gloves for a living by the light of a kerosene lamp. But no matter how
hard they worked, it was never enough.
Rice cooked with oil and salt, rather than thin rice porridge, was a
rare treat. There was no school. My brother and I passed the time by
playing hide-and-seek among the linens hung in the open yard of the dyeing
factory, or by catching flies for sport.
The district's actual walls were torn down decades ago, but the quarter
remains a ramshackle firetrap of tunnel-like passages and dripping pipes,
all jammed so close together that almost no light filters in. Squeezed
into the British colony's Kowloon district, the Walled City was always
claimed as Chinese territory by the Beijing regime, which left it in 150
years of legal limbo.
Life there was harsh, but I was too young to know. With little to do, I
found excitement in work instead. Lining up for water at the street faucet
was a joy because it meant that there was something to cook. And I eagerly
answered each call of my neighbour to help paste together her cream-filled
cookies, because she always rewarded me with one when the work was done.
Of course, there were things to dread, like going to the dentist, who was
unlicenced and who pulled out my teeth with no anesthetic or even a
soothing word.
The Walled City, as I remember it, was a world onto itself. There were
no smiling and generous neighbours, but neither was there any snobbery to
bear. Police would not venture inside the district, but we didn't live in
fear of crime or criminals. I was never taught how to be "street wise" -
there were no strangers or rapists to fear. I am sure thieves and
criminals were present, but they were there because the Walled City was
their home.
My one and only dress was stolen through the open window near which it
was hung, but my mother didn't make a fuss. She felt it might have been
stolen for a "good" reason. Nor was she angry with me when she found out I
had sold a silver cup, my kindergarten prize, to a gleeful hawker for two
chunky malt candy sticks.
When my father regained his conscience and "reclaimed" us, we were
happy to leave the Walled City. I didn't look back. I took every
opportunity that came my way to make sure that I wouldn't starve again.
The 1960s and 1970s were good times and, as I gradually climbed into the
middle class, the Walled City receded.
Consciously or unconsciously, however, my life was partly molded by my
Walled City experience - an experience of sheer survival and deprivation.
I had missed the Western youth culture of my time, and the philosophical
debates of the hippies and flower children. But, in a way, I believe my
young life was more "real."
The experience helped sharpen my appreciation and sensitivity for the
value and simple joys of life. Now I seldom fail to enjoy a meal, and I'm
always excited about things going on around me. When I look at today's
teen-agers, I lament what appears to be their shallow sense of life. They
take for granted their "right" to food and shelter, and to every
electronic gadget on the market. The pride and joy of struggle and
achievement have been lost amid the material abundance of North American
life. Perhaps every middle-class kid should live in a walled city for a
while.
Wendy Tang is a writer living in Oakville, Ont.

The New York Times

June 16, 1992, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

Hong Kong Journal;
The Walled City, Home to Huddled Masses, Falls

BYLINE: By BARBARA BASLER, Special to The New York Times

SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk

LENGTH: 892 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG, June 11



The Walled City is a colony within this colony, a dark little enclave of narrow, twisting streets and rickety walk-ups that has defied British law and order for almost 100 years.
The two square city blocks, just beyond the glittering hotels and fashionable boutiques of Kowloon, have been contested territory since 1899, claimed by both Britain and China.


Over the years both countries have maintained their right to the area, but have seldom asserted their authority.
Because of this historical quirk, the Walled City has been a haven for those on the fringes of colonial society -- poor Chinese immigrant families seeking cheap housing, mainland doctors and dentists who set up practices with no licenses, drug dealers and thieves fleeing the Royal Hong Kong Police. (The enclave has no walls now because occupying Japanese forces tore them down in World War II.)

No Taxes, No Laws
Inside the Walled City, even today, no one pays taxes and everyone lives and works in strange contorted buildings that defy all safety and building ordinances. Restaurants obey no health codes.
Cut off from or denied most regular city services, some families still fetch their water in buckets, and pay workers to collect the waste from their chamber pots each morning.
"The Walled City shows what people will give up for the sake of money -- sunlight, fresh air, space," said Suenn Ho, an American architect who is studying the neighborhood on a Fulbright grant.
A senior colonial government official said: "The basic problem is that the Chinese consider the Walled City to be China and we consider it Hong Kong, and this has not been resolved to this day. But we have agreed to put aside our differences because it is in everyone's best interest that something be done about the Walled City."
The place, he said, "is a health and environmental hazard."
Now, with each side still asserting its sovereignty over the area, the Chinese and British have agreed that the Walled City must be torn down, its warrenlike buildings razed and replaced by a park.
This plan has outraged many Walled City residents, even though the Hong Kong government is paying out $384 million to compensate the 900 businesses and 10,700 households that must be relocated.
Many have been forced to vacate their apartments and businesses in eviction operations that have been rowdy and even violent. Only about 2,000 people remain and they will be gone soon, with demolition to start next January.
To an outsider, it is hard to understand the appeal of the Walled City, which has a dark, dank medieval atmosphere. The streets are so narrow that when you stretch your arms you can touch buildings on either side.
The wooden buildings, 10 to 14 stories tall, have little foundation, and grow wider as they go up, blocking the sunlight.
Ms. Ho, the American architect, said that when the population of the Walled City was at its peak of 40,000 recently, each person had about seven square feet of living space, and it was common for whole families to live and work in one tiny room.

$2,000 a Month and No Taxes
A Chinese herbalist, recently evicted from the Walled City, said he and his family of four lived in a 290-square-foot apartment where he also ran a medicine shop and even operated on patients, all without a license. "Of course I liked it," he said. "I made $2,000 a month and paid no taxes, only a little rent."
The 58-year-old man, who had come from China and had lived in the Walled City for seven years, discounted its reputation as a haven for criminals, saying, "If you live here you know that it is peaceful."
In fact, the Walled City was riddled with brothels, peep shows and drug dens in the 1950's and 60's when criminal gangs virtually ran the area, Ms. Ho said. The Hong Kong police began more vigorous law enforcement in the 70's, and the place settled down, attracting more businesses seeking to avoid regulations and taxes. and fewer thugs.
A recent government survey found scores of small bakeries, butcher shops, clothing, toy and noodle manufacturers, and medical and dental clinics thriving here, catering to customers who live outside the Walled City but prefer its lower prices.
The area was once a Chinese fort and administrative center. When the British forced China to lease to Hong Kong an area of the mainland now known as the New Territories, they agreed that the Chinese could retain the Walled City.

'Good Place' for a Family
A year later the British unilaterally amended that accord and invaded the Walled City. Once Chinese troops were routed, Britain never tried to enforce its new claim.
Over the years Hong Kong tried several times to clean out the Walled City, but China always objected.
After the 1984 agreement by Britain to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, the two countries began negotiations on the Walled City. In 1987 a plan to raze it was announced.
Eviction operations began a year and a half ago. Residents are reluctant to leave the Walled City because the price was right, and the life was good.
"This is a good place to raise a family," Cheng Siu-tsing, a housewife, said, standing beneath a huge tangle of wires on Kung Street. "We save money by living here, and my husband is close to the factory where he works."
She added, "We will never find a place like this one again."
The Times

July 3, 1992, Friday

Last squatters evicted in Kowloon

BYLINE: From Jonathan Braude in Hong Kong

SECTION: Overseas news

LENGTH: 607 words



THE Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong's once teaming den of drug addicts, prostitutes and criminals, stands empty this morning, for the second time in its 94-year history.
Enclosed by a newly erected fence where the famous wall once stood, its deserted buildings await the demolition teams. Eventually the site will be turned into a park.
Scores of riot police yesterday moved in with shields and clubs to evict the last remaining squatters from a hastily-erected encampment on the perimeter. They occupied a small Buddhist temple at the entrance and surrounded about 20 former Walled City residents who had made their homes on the pavement since being evicted from the interior six months ago. Ten people had to be dragged from their kerbside dwellings, many of them struggling, and one woman was arrested for assaulting a government worker.


They were the last to go. On Wednesday, in a nine-hour operation, six households were forcibly removed from their homes in the final section of the city to be cleared while others left peacefully, though with obvious reluctance.
Under the original lease, China refused to move its garrison from the old Qing dynasty fort on the site and the seven-acre Walled City remained beyond British jurisdiction. But when the garrison was finally ejected a few years later, Britain chose not to develop or police the area for fear of offending Peking. For more than 80 years, the labyrinthine streets of the city were a no-man's land beyond the control of either government.
Soon squatters escapers from Chinese or British justice and taxes moved in. They received no services or rights, but lived in squalor until they were driven out by the Japanese. But after the surrender of the Japanese empire, the squatters came back in force.
In another milestone today Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, the outgoing governor, flies out of the British colony for the last time this evening leaving his successor, Chris Patten, to take over the reins of power at one of the most difficult and sensitive periods in the territory's 150-year history. Lord Wilson will leave with full ceremonial honours but the verdict on his five years in power is still open.
Undoubtedly an efficient administrator, with a detailed grasp of every aspect of policy, he presided over boom years interrupted only briefly by the 1987 stock market crash and the consequences of the 1989 upheavals in China. But for many his tenure was a disaster, which allowed China to extend its power over Hong Kong and crush all hope of democratic reform in a colony Britain has ruled as a benevolent dictatorship.
His detractors say he failed to stand up for the development of parliamentary democracy, and his constant fear of pushing China too far soon taught the authorities in Peking that Hong Kong could be intimidated and brought to heel. He was, in the words of a retired senior civil servant John Walden, ''the best governor of Hong Kong China ever had''.
He won friends in the colony with his pressure in London for full United Kingdom passports for all 3.2 million Hong Kong British citizens, his support for the environment and his ambitious proposal for a new airport, conceived as a move to boost morale in Hong Kong after China's supression in Tiananmen square.
However the airport backfired seriously, leaving Peking with the power to veto the project by the simple expedient of scaring away international investors. China could thus blackmail Britain into conceding valuable bargaining points and sending John Major on an official visit to Peking at a time when China had barely come in from the diplomatic cold.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

July 29, 1992

Walled City protest threat

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG

SECTION: News; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 150 words



DEFIANT former Kowloon Walled City residents have threatened to start a marathon sit-in outside the office of the Secretary for Home Affairs, Mr Michael Suen Ming-yeung, from tomorrow if officials refuse to discuss compensation with them.
Ten residents have been occupying an arbour in a park at the Tung Tau Estate, opposite the Walled City, since their eviction early this month from the slum area.


They petitioned the City and New Territories Administration (CNTA) and demanded a meeting with officials on compensation packages on Monday but were rejected.
Protest organiser Mr Cheng Shing-shi, 59, said yesterday that if they did not receive a positive reply from the Government today they would set up camp outside Mr Suen's office.
A Government spokesman said officials were yesterday considering the need to meet the residents and would be sending them a written reply today.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

September 4, 1992

Scuffles as Governor visits the Walled City

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG and SUSAN FURLONG

SECTION: News; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 426 words



TEN former Walled City residents scuffled with police after being stopped from handing a petition to the Governor, Mr Chris Patten, when he made a surprise visit to the Kowloon slum area yesterday.
The protesters, who had hung banners and wrote a protest petition as soon as they saw Mr Patten arrive, waited until he had finished his tour and then flocked around his party to present the letter.
At one point someone tried to block Mr Patten's path, and later other demonstrators sat down on the road to stop his car from leaving. They were quickly removed.


The residents have been camping outside the Tung Tau Estate, opposite the Walled City, for eight months. They claim the Government has not given them enough compensation for being evicted from their homes in the condemned tenement.
Government Information Co-ordinator Mr Mike Hanson said the Governor had not been overly-disturbed by the incident.
"It is not really a major event for us or for the Governor. People have the right to protest as long as it's peaceful," he said.
A government spokeswoman said the protesters' petition had been received.
Some residents accused the police of using excessive force to protect Mr Patten, who toured the Walled City for 20 minutes.
Mr Chan Sai-yuen, 54, said: "We stayed orderly and peaceful, but the police beat us and stopped us from handing in our petition to the Governor."
Mr Chan and Ms Cheung Shun-fong, 49, filed complaints to the Kowloon City police station. A force spokesman said they had been referred to its complaints and internal investigation branch.
Kowloon City Division Commander Superintendent Fung Kam-wong, who led about 30 police officers accompanying the Governor during his visit, dismissed the residents' claims and said no protester had been beaten.
Mr Hanson said the Governor wanted to keep his visit low-key and decided against telling the press.
"He wanted to see the Walled City before it disappears, but we didn't want a huge press corp trying to follow him down those narrow lanes," Mr Hanson said. "It would be too difficult to manage."
Even government information officers were kept in the dark about the visit. Mr Hanson said unannounced visits were part of Mr Patten's programme to get to know the territory.
Yesterday's incident was not the first time protests at the Walled City have degenerated into scuffles.
In April, two policemen, a clearance official and his assistant were hurt during a clearance operation when an angry resident lunged at them with a chopper.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

January 30, 1993

Walled City protest ends

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG

SECTION: News; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 194 words



THE last batch of former Kowloon Walled City residents said yesterday they were prepared to accept the Government's rehousing terms after admitting that their year-long protest to press for more compensation had failed.
The move could see the end to the 14- month dispute and violent demonstrations.


The 10 residents, some of whom have accepted cash compensation, have been camping out in an open space on Tung Tau Estate opposite the Walled City after being evicted in the clearances.
They admitted defeat yesterday and agreed to accept a government rehousing offer of public flats but maintained that they had been unfairly treated during compensation discussions.
Their representative, Mr Tsang Chor-hing, said: "Some elderly women had been sleeping on the street for a year. The weather has turned cold in recent weeks and the most important thing is to let them get a home as soon as possible.
"We shall continue to fight for more compensation through the appeal board but we hope we can be assured a fair hearing."
A Housing Department official said flats had been reserved for eligible residents and they could move in whenever they liked.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

February 16, 1993

Illegal immigrants using Walled City as a refuge

BYLINE: By BELINDA WALLIS

SECTION: News; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 439 words



POLICE have found illegal immigrants hiding in the Kowloon Walled City and believe there could be more using the condemned maze of alleyways and crumbling buildings as a refuge.
The mainlanders know their way around the labyrinth and have set up home, police believe.
Acting Chief Inspector Jonathan Fraser, the last officer to hold the now-defunct post in charge of the Walled City, said yesterday that two illegals immigrants were chased in there after an attempt to rob a grocery store in Wong Tai Sin three weeks ago.


But while Mr Fraser does not believe police have a big problem on their hands, they may step up operations when the demolition of the 2.7 hectare site begins later this month or early in March.
"There is no indication now that there is a problem, but everybody is aware that the Walled City is there and it's a place to hide," Mr Fraser said.
"When illegal immigrants come to Hongkong they are looking for temporary work and somewhere to live - a construction site is ideal. It's maybe that the Walled City provides the ideal home."
On average, Kowloon City Division police arrest one illegal immigrant every day in their area, which includes the Walled City.
During 100 years of infamy, the Wall City has been described as a slum, a squalid eyesore, the city of darkness, and even the cancer of Kowloon. Now the 8,800 flats stand empty; the 1,500 clinics, 570 workshops and 148 shops little more than shells.
Even the rats have gone, deprived of their source of survival - man and his rubbish.
The Walled City is not a desirable residence.
"There's no water, no electricity, it would have to be a desperate person who chose to live in there," Mr Fraser said.
But police are keeping a lookout. Yesterday, the smell of cooking gas had Mr Fraser peering down dark alleyways and stairwells, a large spanner in hand, but no unwelcome visitors were found.
Details of the Walled City's demolition are expected to be announced soon. The Civil Engineering Department and the Hongkong half of the consortium, Express Builders, will meet today to discuss a timetable.
While some single-storey buildings and temporary structures have already been destroyed on the eastern side of the city, the Civil Engineering Department is waiting for a structural survey before Hongkong's biggest demolition job can get underway.
At the end of this month, members of the American Cleveland Wrecking Joint Venture arrive in Hongkong, bringing with them an array of equipment to destroy the city.
Conventional methods will be used, because explosives have been deemed to be too dangerous.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

March 24, 1993

First blow landed as the walls come tumbling down

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG

SECTION: News; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 436 words



BULLDOZERS moved into the condemned Kowloon Walled City yesterday, marking the beginning of a year-long project to flatten the 2.7-hectare slum area which had been a military fort of the Qing Dynasty.
Contractors expected the 350 buildings, mostly built without proper planning in the 1960s, to be pulled down two months ahead of schedule because of their weak structure.
After the Director of Civil Engineering Dr Edward Brand cut a ribbon, a crane operator swung a heavy metal ball to smash the walls of a five-storey building.


Wide applause followed each blow, smothering a protest by former Walled City residents.
They said yesterday was "a day of shame" for Chinese, claiming the government should not have been allowed to knock down buildings on a piece of Chinese land.
Twenty protesters, kept from the site by barricades and 10 policemen, shouted slogans and condemned the 100 officials and guests attending the demolition ceremony.
A handful of spectators also gathered at the gate of the site to watch the historic event.
According to the $ 42 million contract, the Express Builders-Cleveland Wrecking joint venture is required to flatten the site before May next year.
But company experts expect the buildings to topple easily, enabling the project to be completed before then.
The poor state of the buildings, which had been a haven for criminals and home to a host of unlicensed dentists, could also pose difficulties as they come down.
Detailed surveying will be necessary as huge excavators and bulldozers from the United States eat their way through the tilting piles of homes and factories.
A plan to drop the building yesterday with explosives was shelved for fear of dust pollution in nearby residential areas and the airport.
Three US supervisors have been flown in to train workers on the big machinery, not commonly used in Hongkong.
One of the supervisors, Mr James Hutchins, described the demolition as an easy job.
"The buildings are very weak. We can pull down the walls of a five-storey building in around 15 minutes," he said.
Cleveland Wrecking Company president and chief executive officer, Mr William Fenning, said it was planned to take down one building at a time to avoid a domino effect.
He said the 150,000 cubic metres of debris and rubbish would be used in reclamation.
The site will be turned into a park, which will include some existing wells and a yamen - a military office of the Qing Dynasty built in the early 1800s - to house relics.
The park will cost about $ 50 million and is scheduled to be opened in early 1996.
Business Week

March 29, 1993

Bulldozing The World of Suzie Wong

BYLINE: Pete Engardio; When not taking in the view, Engardio covers much of Asia from Hong Kong.

SECTION: LETTER FROM HONG KONG; Number 3311; Pg. 22 D

LENGTH: 1159 words



Since they were built in the 1920s, the giant picture windows of my cliffside apartment atop Victoria Peak have witnessed a lot of history. The first tenants, British managers of the funicular that zips 1,200 feet up and down the peak, had a panormic view of downtown Hong Kong, bustling Victoria Harbor, and the misty mountains of the New Territories in the distance. They watched the Japanese invade on the day after Pearl Harbor and saw the flood of immigrants following the communist conquest of China in 1949.
Even though many of the graceful, white colonial buildings have been replaced by skyscrapers, and the junks and steamboats by monster barges, the view -- especially at night -- remains one of the best in the world. These days, though, I gaze out over this metropolis and brood. A few weeks ago, the Peninsula Group, owner of my building, notified me that it would be razed to make way for yet another retail complex. I have to be out by May 31.


lost soul. With 1997 just around the corner, I'm in the company of many other brooders in Hong Kong. We don't know what life will be like under Bei-jing -- only that Hong Kong never will be the same. But what's really disturbing is that in the race to squeeze more profits out of the colony, developers are already burying Hong Kong's old charm. I'm not talking just about architecture: Frankly, the ugly Peak Tower (except for my apartment) should have been knocked down long ago. More valuable are the vibrant, bewildering neighborhoods that give the city its soul.
From the quaint to the notorious, the places that have been favorites with both tourists and locals for generations are vanishing. Bird Street, a colorful alley in the Mong Kok district, is lined with elderly Chinese vendors selling singing birds and elaborate bamboo cages. It's to be cleared this year. And if you want to visit the "poor man's nightclub," it's too late. For 34 years, the open-air bazaar on the harbor offered cheap clothes, fresh seafood and, in the old days, comedians, acrobats, and Chinese opera singers. Last April, it was closed for redevelopment.
Highest on the endangered list are the seedy areas, which for years have furnished grist for cheap novels and kung-fu movies. I regret waiting too long to see the famed Kowloon Walled City, an area of a dozen blocks near Kai Tak Airport. Starting in the 1890s, it grew into a maze of dark passageways and tiny rooms housing more than 30,000 squatters. Under the jurisidiction of neither Beijing nor London, the Walled City was essentially lawless. In the 1940s, Governor Alexander Grantham called it "a cesspool of iniquity, with heroin divans, everything unsavory." I first read about it in Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies, the New Mafia, a sensationalized account of the Asian drug trade by Gerald L. Posner. As Posner told it, the place was so infested with hoods and dope fiends that he needed an escort of five policeman just to enter. "If you go in alone, the chances are you won't be coming back out," one cop cautioned melodramatically. This place I've got to see, I vowed, upon arriving here 212 years ago. But when I went there this January, all the tenants had been evicted. The site is being converted into a park.
cockroaches. This makes me fear for another of my favorite eyesores: the Chungking Mansion on Nathan Road in the Kowloon district. Like hundreds of other Western kids, I had stayed in one of the cheap hostels in this sooty 17-story structure when I backpacked through Asia on a shoestring. Granted, you slept with your wallet under the pillow, cockroaches and unsavory-looking characters were everywhere, and the building was a firetrap.
Still, the Chungking building functions as a self-contained community, housing mostly Indian families. I still enjoy dropping in to browse through the Indian food shops or simply to watch the array of transients lined up at the creaky elevator -- Sri Lankan Tamils, Nigerians, Malaysian Muslims, and young Chinese. The only thing keeping the Chungking and its valuable land from being turned into a luxury hotel is that ownership is dispersed among many shopkeepers, who can't agree on a price.
Wrecking balls are swinging much more freely in my favorite neighborhood: Wanchai. Most people know Wan Chai as the setting for Richard Mason's 1957 novel The World of Suzie Wong, the tale of a Western artist who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute and marries her. The red-light district hit its peak during the Vietnam War, when shiploads of sailors spilled into more than 100 clubs. The routine was for bar girls, working on commission, to get patrons to buy them expensive drinks. "The main trick was getting as many drinks as possible out of an American sailor without having to go to bed with him," recalls popular historian Arthur Hacker, a 25-year Hong Kong resident. Peacetime has been hard on Wan- chai nightlife, but several bars survive. At the dingy Suzie Wong Club, there are few patrons for Bobo and the other aging, overweight hostesses.
But Wanchai is also a showcase of Cantonese entrepreneurialism and social life. And, it's home to the BUSINESS WEEK bureau. Within a few blocks, we have a vegetable market, butchers selling smoked ducks hanging by their necks, family-owned restaurants serving the gamut of Asian gastronomic delights and horrors, and myriad shops and stalls selling rosewood furniture, used TVs, seconds of designer clothes, and fresh carrot juice. I can get my shoes repaired, my clothes dry-cleaned, my fortune told, and my body tattooed.
sealed fate. "The trouble is, what you see as picturesque is actually squalor," says Peter J. Mann, the district officer for Wanchai. He has a point. Given the horror of AIDS in Asia, it's difficult to argue for the preservation of a red-light district. Also, he notes, all those quaint alleys and tiny shops create other health and environmental problems. The issue of preservation is largely moot. Although Mann encourages developers to maintain some of the local color, Wan Chai's fate is sealed by its location, abutting the central business district. Towering office complexes are in the works, and every other week another chunk of old Wan Chai disappears.
Many fear Hong Kong will become like Singapore. It, too, was once loaded with beautiful colonial buildings and thousands of picturesque shops. Almost all have been replaced by gleaming towers. Now, Singapore realizes that in obliterating its past, it became incredibly dull. The recent effort to spruce up surviving old facades to revive a Chinatown feel is too late and too obviously artificial. Singapore has lost its soul.
Officials vow not to allow the "Singaporization of Hong Kong." Personally, I don't think they need to worry. I can't imagine a city under the control of Beijing ever being that efficient. Until May, though, I'll continue to brood about it all from my perch on Victoria Peak.
The Daily Yomiuri

May 17, 1993, Monday

Death throes;
for the 'city;
of darkness';
Former residents watch as;
Kowloon slum is torn down

BYLINE: Hideo Tanaka; Special to The Daily Yomiuri

SECTION: Pg. 3

LENGTH: 484 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG

The British territory is bringing the final curtain down on one of the most bizarre chapters of Hong Kong's colonial history--Kowloon's Walled City.
The walls are crashing down in the 2.7-hectare warren of squatter shacks, rat-infested factories, vice dens, gambling joints and unregistered dental clinics that were piled, over the years, more than a dozen stories on top of each other to form one of the world's most notorious slums.
The Hong Kong government began its final demolition program on the slum last October. Known in Cantonese as the "city of darkness," because no daylight can penetrate its labyrinth of dark, dank alleys, the Walled City rose up to become a blot on the landscape of Kowloon City, situated as it is just in front of Hong Kong's busy Kai Tak Airport.


Because of a historical anomaly, under which Beijing claimed the site as an enclave within the British colony, the Walled City developed into a lawless haven where vice and triads thrived. For years, the site was not only a no-go area for tourists and locals, even police shunned the place.
But it was a sore thumb amid Hong Kong's high-tech, high-rise landscape and its days were numbered. As the complex was emptied in stages, it developed a new notoriety--as an offbeat sight for adventurous tourists who would get lost in its confusing maze of alleys.
The Hong Kong government plans to build a park on the site after the ramshackle walls have come tumbling down.
Local workers are pounding the dirty buildings with concrete balls, but the Walled City is proving sturdier than expected and it is not likely that demolition will be finished within this year.
As the work continues, crowds watch the demolition work from a nearby park. Many of the spectators are former residents of the slum, and they watch without expression as their former homes are pounded down, until, when one of the buildings gives way, there is a quiet cry from the crowd.
One of the spectators, Deng Kuan-hsi, 80, says he lived in the Walled City for about 30 years. He says he was a carpenter and lived in a small basement room.
Deng says he comes to watch the demolition work at his old abode two to three times a week.
"Many people flooded into the Walled City from China and the area became unsafe about 10 years after I started to live there," Deng recalls.
He said that although the rumors of robberies and drug dealing in the Walled City were true, none of the residents had been the target of these crimes because it was close-knit community where everyone knew each other's faces.
He says he does not work now but manages to live on a monthly pension of HK$1,000 (about 15,000 yen) provided by the Hong Kong government.
Asked about the fate of the Walled City, Deng says, "I do not feel sad, for I am now leading a better life." "By the way, the demolition work is proceeding too slowly," he complains.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

December 9, 1993

Walled City squatters ordered to end protest

SECTION: News; Pg. 8

LENGTH: 345 words

A SMALL group of elderly tenants of the Kowloon Walled City camping out at a public housing estate nearby in protest against the Government's compensation package were yesterday ordered to leave.
At a chambers hearing, Master Woolley gave the 21 tenants until January 8 to leave the Tung Tau Housing Estate rest garden where they have been camping since July last year.
They have been offered compensation for their shops of between $ 6 million for 700 square feet to $ 276,000 for 400 square feet. This works out at between $ 1,000 and $ 7,000 per square foot.


The tenants claim that shop space in the area near the Walled City costs between $ 12,000 and $ 22,000 per square foot.
"The Government has robbed us of our shops. We will not move out until we get reasonable compensation and resettlement," said Cheng Shing-sze, chairman of the Kowloon Walled City representatives.
Mr Cheng operated a herbal shop there for many years. He has rejected the offer of $ 391,000 compensation for his 410 square foot shop space. He claims that the payment would not buy a shop of a similar size.
He rejected government claims that they were trespassing, adding that they had no choice as they had nowhere else to sleep.
Mr Cheng said he had asked Master Woolley to offer them fairer compensation and was told the court was sympathetic but did not have the jurisdiction to make such an award.
He stressed that his group was willing to leave the rest garden if their request was dealt with satisfactorily. Asked if the group would leave as ordered, Mr Cheng said: "We will wait and see what happens on the day."
According to Lee Chu-yin, senior housing manager of the Housing Authority, 15 of the 21 tenants had been resettled on public housing estates. Suitable places were also offered to three others but they rejected them.
Mr Lee, who was heckled by the tenants outside the Supreme Court, said he hoped the people would respect the court ruling and move out. Police were on standby as the tenants shouted abuse and waved their fists at Mr Lee.

[MolsonExport]

I have compiled a bunch of articles about the walled city - 45 pages worth. However, it would most likely be illegal to post this so PM me with your e-mail address if you are interested.

How so? You could post the URL's. It is appropriate in most cases to do so.

[MolsonExport]

^Scratch the above post. Thanks for the articles. Will read over lunch today.

[Aimlessy_trip]

It's been ages!　
The movie is Japanese but precious.

No_vQ8FiQiw

[MolsonExport]

^love that video. Great find!

[teekay]

Wow. I started reading through this thread assuming that since it began in 2004 it'd be long dead, only to discover that the last post had been just a few weeks ago.

I'm quite interested in Kowloon Walled City, and am currently in the process of revamping its Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City). To summarize what I've found here and elsewhere, I agree with other posters that the City of Darkness is the best source of info on KWC, though I'd very much like to get my hands on the book that had those intricately (http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cross-section-kwc-1.jpg) detailed (http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cross-section-kwc-2.jpg) cross-sections. These (http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/kowloon-walled-city-bw.jpg) two (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/60-70/60klnwcity_overview_large.jpg) photos from 1973 give us a good idea of how such an incredibly dense structure came together, and this map (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/intro_history/intro_history_figure12_large.jpg) is quite helpful as well, particularly when combined with the map on pages 214-15 of City of Darkness. I think these (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/80/80klnwcity_figure10_large.jpg) three (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/80/80klnwcity_figure12_large.jpg) images (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/80/80klnwcity_figure11_large.jpg) give the best overall view of the city at its peak. If you flip between them, you can even get a sort of rotation effect with a little imagination.

I've also found some pretty amazing concept art for the Guild Wars video game series that the artist says (http://www.guildwars.com/events/press/interviews/20070309-danield.php) was inspired by KWC: these (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/2438963914/in/set-72157604704477575/) two (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/2437402445/in/set-72157604704477575/) definitely are, and some of the others (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/sets/72157604704477575/) may be also.

[Reesonov]

Haha, I can't recommend it, honestly. :)

The quality and cleanliness of the guesthouses vary quite a bit. I know from personal experience that some are cockroach infested while others are quite clean and comfortable, although they do all smell a bit like curry (from all the Pakistani canteens). I feel comfortable recommending it.

[MolsonExport]

City of Darkness is by far the best resource that I have ever come across in my research on the Walled City. It was probably the only book on urban development (aside from a title or two on skyscrapers) that I immediately decided I "had to buy". Much of the info on the walled city lies here and there in bits and pieces (some of which are dead links, or links in Japanese/Cantonese). I like to keep this thread going, because ever now and then someone will post something novel (photo, article, link, etc.) about the walled city of kowloon that I had not come across. My interest in the place is unswavering.

[teekay]

MolsonExport, did you see my post on the previous page, with links to the Guild Wars concept art, etc.? Since you seem most interested in this subject, just want to make sure you did.

Also, this forum thread (http://www.zenheart.hk/viewthread.php?tid=12378) (text in Chinese, unfortunately) has a ton of images, some of which I hadn't seen, plus some videos at the bottom of the page.

[MolsonExport]

OK well I don't think ppl believe me so Ima just post it here:\


... Police were on standby as the tenants shouted abuse and waved their fists at Mr Lee.

thanks so very much for the great articles. I've been enthralled for an hour!:tup:

[MolsonExport]

Wow. I started reading through this thread assuming that since it began in 2004 it'd be long dead, only to discover that the last post had been just a few weeks ago.

I'm quite interested in Kowloon Walled City, and am currently in the process of revamping its Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City). To summarize what I've found here and elsewhere, I agree with other posters that the City of Darkness is the best source of info on KWC, though I'd very much like to get my hands on the book that had those intricately (http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cross-section-kwc-1.jpg) detailed (http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cross-section-kwc-2.jpg) cross-sections. These (http://www.doobybrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/kowloon-walled-city-bw.jpg) two (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/60-70/60klnwcity_overview_large.jpg) photos from 1973 give us a good idea of how such an incredibly dense structure came together, and this map (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/intro_history/intro_history_figure12_large.jpg) is quite helpful as well, particularly when combined with the map on pages 214-15 of City of Darkness. I think these (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/80/80klnwcity_figure10_large.jpg) three (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/80/80klnwcity_figure12_large.jpg) images (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/large/klnwcity/80/80klnwcity_figure11_large.jpg) give the best overall view of the city at its peak. If you flip between them, you can even get a sort of rotation effect with a little imagination.

I've also found some pretty amazing concept art for the Guild Wars video game series that the artist says (http://www.guildwars.com/events/press/interviews/20070309-danield.php) was inspired by KWC: these (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/2438963914/in/set-72157604704477575/) two (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/2437402445/in/set-72157604704477575/) definitely are, and some of the others (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/sets/72157604704477575/) may be also.

Awesome. My first reply on this page was actually directed towards you. I am very much looking forward to what you are able to put together, as a tribute to the late, great Walled City of Kowloon.

[MolsonExport]

MolsonExport, did you see my post on the previous page, with links to the Guild Wars concept art, etc.? Since you seem most interested in this subject, just want to make sure you did.

Also, this forum thread (http://www.zenheart.hk/viewthread.php?tid=12378) (text in Chinese, unfortunately) has a ton of images, some of which I hadn't seen, plus some videos at the bottom of the page.

enjoying my time perusing through the above link. thanks!:cheers:


fucking awesome! actual shots of the city being torn down. great contribution!

[mthq]

OK well I don't think ppl believe me so Ima just post it here:\


The Globe and Mail (Canada)

September 18, 1982 Saturday

A nervy tour of Kowloon's Walled City It's fairly safe these days, but the Westerner is wise to take a police escort if he wants to wander in dark alleys

BYLINE: PAUL BENEDETTI; GAM

LENGTH: 1334 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG
BY PAUL BENEDETTI
HONG KONG
IT
IS MIDDAY, but there is no light. The narrow, winding alleyway is
scarcely five feet wide, the walls are dark and clammy. On the ground, a
stream of oily, fetid water winds along the corridor. By the wall a large
rat lies dead. Rats are a common sight in this part of Hong Kong. They
outnumber people two to one.
I walk slowly while my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The alleys
are ink black in spots, with only thin strands of weak sunlight leaking
through the maze of pipes and wiring overhead. Inside these corridors it
is always night. Every few hundred feet a naked light bulb casts a faint,
yellowish light, creating strange shadows.
This is the Walled City of Kowloon. An embarrassment to Hong Kong
officials, the Walled City is considered a no man's land. It is five
minutes on foot from Kai Tak Airport in the heart of the Kowloon
Peninsula, across the bay from Hong Kong's central business district, yet
it is taboo to Hong Kong residents and most of them never set foot inside
the area.
Tourists seldom hear of the Walled City. For those who do, the advice
is specific: Stay out. One guidebook cautions that a step inside may lead
to a journey "from which there is a good chance you may never return." The
warning is out-dated and melodramatic. Although the Walled City once was a
dangerous underworld and it remains a headquarters for gangs, it is now a
fairly safe part of town with a low crime rate. The walls that used to
surround it were torn down years ago. Still, visitors are almost bound to
get lost in its twilit maze of streets.
I am inside the Walled City with an escort - Sergeant Yip of the Royal
Hong Kong Police, Kowloon Division. A short, friendly man in plainclothes,
he has worked the area for almost a year. On the bright, busy street
bordering the city, he tells me to ask him before taking photographs and
to stay close to him once we go inside the concrete puzzle, where we will
rendezvous with a uniformed patrol making rounds. Police always travel in
pairs in the district, whose tunnel-like walls make radio communication
impossible.
Despite the patrols, police have limited jurisdiction inside the Walled
City, but they are the only physical evidence of a Hong Kong Government
presence of any kind. This area, the size of a few city blocks and housing
about 50,000 people, is in a kind of official limbo. In the eyes of
municipal bureaucrats, the Walled City almost doesn't exist.
Water within the district is illegally tapped from city pipes.
Electricity is provided, but there are no meters or billing. There is no
sewage system or street lighting. Only a few residents pay property taxes.
Doctors, dentists and businesses are unsupervised and unregulated. The
city may be an orderly place, but because police power is limited, it is a
haven for organized crime rings, prostitutes and opium dealers.
The reasons for this strange status lie in the origins of the Walled
City of Kowloon. In 1841, Britain signed a treaty with China making the
island of Hong Kong a Crown colony. Later, the British also acquired the
adjacent Kowloon Peninsula. China, however, insisted on retaining control
of the City of Kowloon, meaning the walled Chinese garrison on the
peninsula. The presence of a Chinese garrison in the middle of a Crown
colony offended the sensibilities of many Britons, particularly since the
area enclosed by the walls was reputedly a collection of gambling halls,
brothels and opium dens. Nevertheless, an agreement was signed in 1889
acknowledging China's control of the territory "except so far as may be
inconsistent with the military requirements of Hong Kong."
A month after the agreement was signed, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and
the Hong Kong Volunteers moved in and expelled the Chinese troops. The
area still legally belonged to China, however, and jurisdiction over the
city became a political and legal mess.
Neither side exercized control and squatters moved in. The area became
a tangle of huts and sweatshops. Crime flourished. Illegal immigrants,
pickpockets, petty thieves or murderers could easily hide in the city's
alleyways, where they were officially on Chinese territory and outside the
power of the Hong Kong police. As late as 1963, when Hong Kong officials
attempted to resettle squatters in the city, China objected and the action
was halted.
Despite its name, the Walled City has been without walls since 1943,
when they were dismantled and the stones were used to lengthen the runway
at the nearby international airport.
Since the demolition of the walls, the exact boundaries of the city
have been obscure. The last official count of the population living and
working in the area, taken in 1977, was 26,000, but many estimate the
number has since grown to 50,000.
From the noisy hustle of Tung Tau Tsuen Road, Sgt. Yip leads me through
a narrow opening between two buildings. Within seconds we are in a
cramped, gloomy alley, and as we wind our way through the corridors I am
amazed at the mole-like existence around me. The houses are cement boxes
or wood and tin shacks. I stay close to Sgt. Yip, but several times I
almost stumble, unable to see the ground in the darkness. We pass a small
factory where two men in undershirts sweat over machines punching out
plastic toy parts. The room they work in is about the size of a walk-in
closet. In summer, when outside temperatures climb above 30 degrees, these
cramped, airless rooms and passageways become a stifling world.
I feel an unsettling emptiness about the city. It is early afternoon,
but we have only seen a few men and women in the streets. People stare
from a window or door as we approach and then quickly retreat as we draw
closer. Their curiosity is understandable. A Westerner is a rare sight
here, and one with a camera and a policeman is best avoided.
Most residents of the Walled City work outside, except for the few who
man small textile mills or presses, and the unregistered doctors and
dentists whose shops line an entire street here.
In such a ghetto you would expect to see dogs roaming about, but the
narrow streets are devoid of pets - and for good reason. Young dogs would
be snapped up and served in one of the city's "fragrant flesh"
restaurants. The only dogs in sight are old mongrels, too tough and thin
to eat.
We come to a small opening where women are washing clothes around a
water pipe. We stop at a one-room variety store. The stooped shop owner,
his mouth gleaming with gold teeth, offers me a beer and chats with Sgt.
Yip. When we leave I try to pay for the beer, but he refuses, smiling and
waving my money away. Farther along the laneways, we come upon a clean,
well-run kindergarten and old folks home. The Salvation Army operates both
facilities, giving the young and old a change from their hot and cramped
houses for a few hours a day.
I ask Sgt. Yip about crime in the Walled City. There is surprisingly
little of it, he says. Serious crimes such as assault and murder used to
be a major problem, but effective police work and the vigilance of the
people have made life relatively safe. Even today, though, real power is
in the hands of Triad Secret Societies whose headquarters are in the
Walled City. These gangs, often called the Chinese Mafia, control
gambling, prostitution and drugs in Hong Kong.
Why, I ask Sgt. Yip, do 50,000 people live, and work and raise families
in what seems to me like a huge basement? His answer is simple: Where else
can they go? In Hong Kong, where an apartment can cost more than in
Canada, where the lucky live in cramped government housing and the unlucky
in one-room shacks or on little fishing boats, people are happy to have a
place to stay.
Neither Chinese nor British, the district remains in the limbo created
by an ambiguous treaty signed almost a century ago. It is a shadow world,
physically and politically - the strangest of urban ghettos. We step back
into the bright bustle of Tung Tau Tsuen Road and leave the Walled City
behind. It is good to be out.
The Washington Post

September 22, 1983, Thursday, Final Edition

China's Small Exclave in Hong Kong Is a Forbidding Slum

BYLINE: By Michael Weisskopf, Washington Post Foreign Service

SECTION: First Section; World News; A29

LENGTH: 863 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG



Amid the skyscrapers and other glittery monuments to this capitalist dynamo lies a squalid warren of tenements that looks like a fossil from pre-modern China.
The place is called the Walled City, and, in fact, it has been largely forgotten since the Qing Dynasty leased the rest of Hong Kong to Great Britain in 1898. By a historical quirk, the tiny area of 6.5 acres has effectively remained a political no man's land, left to degenerate into a world of such filth and crime that one of its main streets is aptly named Dragon's Saliva.
Although the community's high walls were razed long ago, it has been politically and economically walled off from this fast-modernizing territory for almost a century.


As the wheel of history comes full circle, however, the little city within a city that everyone chose to ignore has suddenly become part of a high-stakes political contest involving the future of all Hong Kong.
The contest began last year when the Communist regime in Peking announced plans to recover sovereignty over Hong Kong after the British lease expires in 1997. Chinese officials have spoken of creating a "special administrative region" with "Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong" while keeping the current socioeconomic system intact.
London reportedly is ready to drop its claim to sovereignty, but it hopes to retain some role in administering the prosperous colony on China's southeastern coast.
The Walled City began figuring into the issue last month. Xu Jiatun, Peking's new senior representative in Hong Kong, visited the community's 30,000 people as one of his first public outings.
Xu's motives were obvious to political observers here. He went to reassert Chinese domain over the Walled City and to cite it as an example of the kind of self-rule Peking is planning for the rest of Hong Kong's 5.5 million residents, almost all of Chinese descent.
Indeed, Xu was quoted as saying he was very pleased with the management of the area by the Kaifong Welfare Advancement Association, a locally selected body.
Pro-Chinese observers were heartened by the visit, saying Xu displayed real concern for the Walled City.
But supporters of British administration were puzzled as to why Xu chose one of Hong Kong's most blighted sections as a model of self-government. They assumed he was misled by his advisers.
"At the end of the day, Xu must have realized the whole thing backfired," a political source said. "He must not have known what he was getting into. Most people feel if the Walled City is a sight of the future, they don't want any part of it."
The Walled City became known as Hong Kong's neglected stepchild because of an unresolved wrinkle in the 1898 lease agreement. London originally agreed to let Chinese mandarins continue to run the then-enclosed exclave except when the security of the rest of the colony was in jeopardy.
London revoked the right a year later, but China has persistently claimed sovereignty over the years. Nevertheless, no Chinese representative has lived in the Walled City for decades.
The British, careful to avoid a clash with Peking, have likewise kept hands off the area.
As result, the Walled City has been left to its own devices. Until Hong Kong police began making cursory patrols in recent times, it was a center of prostitution, opium dens and gambling. Organized crime groups known as triads still are said to operate in the all but lawless community, and it reportedly is a haven for drug dealers, illegal immigrants and unlicensed dentists.
Located on the Kowloon peninsula near the busy Hong Kong airport, the Walled City looks like a scene from Dante's "Inferno." Its dank, garbage-clogged passageways form a forbidding labyrinth visited by few outsiders.
Buildings are pressed together so closely that neighbors can shake hands through their bedroom windows. Only one space between the crumbling structures is wide enough to admit sunshine.
Residents face daily safety and health dangers from rats, open sewers, dangling electricity wires and the steady drip of water from overhead pipes illegally connected to mains outside the community. There is no public water supply. There are no public schools. Fire trucks would be hard pressed to enter the area in an emergency.
"Environmentally, it is a cancer," said Victor Ng, assistant officer of the Hong Kong district encompassing the Walled City.
Ng said that despite jurisdictional fuzziness the Hong Kong government now sends in police to patrol the Walled City and trucks to pick up trash. There are plans to demolish a surrounding slum of squatter huts so water lines can be extended.
"We look at these people as part of us," Ng said. "We feel an obligation to help them."
To the inhabitants of the Walled City, political identity is not as important as the pressing needs of daily life.
Some residents regard the place as part of China. They hoist Chinese flags on national day and welcome the Communist return in 1997.
Twenty years ago, those people appealed to Peking to stop British plans to tear down the Walled City. Communist officials protested, and Hong Kong's administrators backed off to prevent a showdown.
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

March 3, 1987 Tuesday

SLUM CLEARANCE Death knell sounds for Hong Kong's chaotic Walled City

BYLINE: JAMES RUSK; GAM

LENGTH: 941 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG
BY JAMES RUSK
Globe and Mail Correspondent
HONG KONG
Wong Yan pulls herself up to her full 4 feet 3 inches and wags her
finger at the Hong Kong official.
"I am too old to move now and all my money has been spent on my flat,"
Mrs. Wong says. "I am very unhappy."
Mrs. Wong's complaints are those of anyone who is going to lose a house
to Government-ordered demolition. She does not know where she is going to
live, whether she will get a fair shake for the money invested in her
house or what will happen to the recreation centre for the elderly where
she and her friends meet.
She is about to be moved because Hong Kong plans to turn an accident of
history - currently one of the most densely crowded slums in the world -
into a park.
It is hard to believe that Mrs. Wong would want to stay, even though
she lives in one of the few parts of Hong Kong that the poor can afford
without turning to public housing. Her house is in one of the worst urban
firetraps imaginable, a jumble of buildings where windows seldom let in
sunlight and streets are not safe even for residents.
A young official who made her first visit to the slum when she acted as
a interpreter for The Globe and Mail was silent a long time when asked
what she thought of it.
"My heart grieves that there is such a place in Hong Kong," she finally
said.
The Kowloon Walled City, the area to be cleared, must be one of the
unique areas in any city in the world. For nearly a century, the Walled
City, on whose 2.8 hectares 35,000 residents are jammed, has been a place
largely outside the law.
Although it has not been exercised in this century, the legal authority
over the Walled City - so-called even though the Japanese occupiers of
Hong Kong tore down its walls during Second World War for material to
extend the nearby airport into Victoria Harbor - may still belong to
China.
After the peninsula adjacent to Hong Kong was leased to Britain in
1898, China retained authority over a small enclave known as Kowloon City.
A Qing Dynasty magistrate landed at a special pier and, without touching
British-ruled soil, walked in to dispense justice.
The British appeared to recognise the arrangement in an 1898 Order-in-
Council, but threw the magistrate out in 1899. Since then, however, they
have exercised power only in criminal law and to keep structures there
from encroaching into the western flight path into Kai Tek airport.
Consequently, the anarchy of the Walled City has become an example of
what modern urban life could be like without the exercise of civil power.
No building code has ruled the construction of its approximately 300
buildings, some 15 stories tall. The result is a honeycomb of structures
sharing retaining walls and stairwells in such a way that Hong Kong
authorities think they will have to tear it down all at once after the
residents are moved out by 1990.
Narrow passages and stairs make the city a firetrap. In only a few
spots can people walk two abreast. Hong Kong authorities, who have long
feared that thousands would die if a fire broke out, say their main worry
as they move inhabitants out is that a fire might start in an abandoned
flat.
It would not be hard for one to begin. In the absence of a building
code and internal infrastructure, both electrical lines and dripping water
hoses from one of the seven standpipes that provide all the Walled City's
water run side by side just over people's heads.
The absence of a civil code means that the city has 87 unlicenced
dentists, 63 unlicenced doctors and 148 unlicenced business
establishments, many of them restaurants that have never seen a sanitary
inspector.
There is criminal law. Bolstered by a long-standing court ruling in a
murder trial, the Hong Kong police patrol the area.
A senior officer said the force has succeeded in reducing crime levels
from those of the early 1960s, when the area was a haven for fugitives,
including illegal immigrants, and for prostitution, drug peddling and
gambling.
Even so, it is a difficult place to police. To catch burglars, for
example, the police must climb to rooftops and peer down the slits between
buildings in the hope of catching a thief shimmying up.
Hong Kong authorities have wanted to tear the place down since the
1960s, but plans were shelved until earlier this year after traditionally
pro-Chinese residents rioted to protest against earlier demolition plans.
Although the authorities have not erased the suspicions of Mrs. Wong
and her friends at the centre for the aged, most residents appear to have
accepted the sudden decision - announced only in January - to tear down
the Walled City.
Residents who were registered in a snap survey or those who can prove
they live in one of the few flats that were empty at the time of the
survey will go to the top of the queue for public housing, if they need
it.
Those flat and building owners who can prove ownership - difficult in a
place lacking a land and property registry - will be helped.
Businesses will be compensated for loss of trade and their relocation
costs picked up. One group of businesses that the Hong Kong Government
does not know what to do with is the seven "water syndicates" that operate
the piping and hose systems snaking from the standpipes.
The most difficult problem faced by the Hong Kong Government, which
does not yet have an estimate of the total cost of the clearance although
it is expected to be in the billions of Hong Kong dollars, is the
unlicenced doctors and dentists.
Most were trained in mainland China but lack qualifications to practice
in Hong Kong. Some of the doctors may join traditional Chinese medicine
clinics in Hong Kong, but the best the rest can hope for is employment as
a paramedic of some type, officials say.
The Advertiser

April 2, 1988 Saturday

City of Darkness

SOURCE: aap

BYLINE: RODNEY TYLER

LENGTH: 1591 words



I F such things were included in the section on housing in the Guinness Book Of Records, the Walled City of Kowloon, in Hong Kong, would undoubtedly merit a mention on at least five counts: it is the world's longest-lasting, largest, most lawless, most dangerous and most overcrowded squat. And if notoriety were quantifiable, it would head that list as well.
Of course, now that it is going to be pulled down some are already talking as though they are going to miss it; but you wouldn't want to keep it - except perhaps as a monument to man's capacity to survive in adverse circumstances. It has a nightmarish quality; a teeming, twilight world; a jumble of totally unreal images springing at you out of the gloom.
Here, the left legs of Barbie dolls are being stamped out in their thousands by a hissing, clanking machine supervised by a seven-year-old boy, while All I Have to Do is Dream on the radio completes the cacophony. There, in a filthy, dingy room, a dozen chefs in singlets and shorts stand in a row preparing an endless stream of glistening white meringues. And over there, row upon row of ready-to-munch false teeth grimace at you through the window of an illegal dentist's shop. Inside, crouched over a victim, the man practises with impunity.


Turn a corner in the dark, dank, narrow winding passages that pass for streets and there, sitting on its haunches, sleek and as fat as a cat, is a rat munching on a piece of bread. Tread unwarily on the duckboarding beneath your feet as you recoil in surprise and you slide into the open sewer below.
Three huge women sit around a table in the doorway to a room, chattering happily as they wrap sweets in paper, shoving the piles of finished product off the table into a box which lies in the festering rubbish in the street. In the gloomy room behind, Madonna singing Who's That Girl? on the radio and the slap of mahjong tiles compete in a strange syncopation.
A heroin addict makes his way upstairs for his afternoon fix. In his ninth-floor room - which measures three metres by four metres and is living, eating, toilet and sleeping accommodation for him, his wife and his brother - he carefully cooks up his drug in a spoon, siphons it into a syringe, tightens the rope around his arm and starts the search for a vein. Meanwhile, his brother eats lunch, his wife tidies up and Joan Collins shouts at John Forsythe on the color television which stands on top of the ancient fridge.
In the darkness and slime an ancient prostitute sits in a doorway hoping for some early trade - though the young girls, the 11- and 12-year-olds, will not be at their posts until night falls. You pass the one-metre by two-metre cupboard on Old Man Street, which is home to the two old alcoholics Ka Lui and Ho Wak. They are into their third bottle of rotgut and feeling no pain. They are happy to tell you how their cupboard used to be the dividing line between the warring Triad factions, the Ging Wu and the 14K, one of which ruled the east side and the other the west.
Finally, at the bottom of Old Man Street - past the standpipe, one of only half a dozen in the entire city, where the children come down through the labyrinth and queue with their buckets to get the only available drinking water - you emerge again into the sunlight. There, only 200 metres away, across the rubble and the new park where the shanties were and the guards used to sit to warn off strangers, is the huge, comforting structure of the Airport Hotel.
You turn and look back at the place and you see now what it is: a huge, multi-layered rabbit warren. It is as though it was built to a larger scale, then crunched up in some child's capricious dream to occupy a quarter of the space it should do. Now it measures less than 150 metres square and it is inhabited by an estimated 40,000 people. Not all of them are nice.
Nevertheless, the wonder is not that it was built in the first place but that agreement should finally have been reached to pull it down. For, alongside all the dubious superlatives in the record book, the Walled City should also be mentioned as one of the oddest historical anomalies of all time.
In 1898, three months after the Chinese signed the deal to lease Hong Kong to the British - the famous lease which is due to expire at midnight on June 30, 1997 - a special Order in Council was issued which gave the enclave known as the Walled City of Kowloon back to the Chinese and gave Chinese officials the right to exercise jurisdiction over it.
Two months later the order was unilaterally rescinded by the British, thus laying the way open for a long series of less-than-diplomatic incidents down the years. The common pattern was that the Brits would try to impose some form of order on the place, the residents would promptly complain to Peking and the Chinese Government
- of whichever hue - would complain in turn to the Brits, citing the matter of the first Order in Council. The British proposals would then be dropped because of their "politically sensitive" nature - and the residents would proudly boast of their independence and ability to tweak the lion's tail.
Things changed rapidly after the war and the Communist revolution. Thousands of mainland Chinese swept into the colony and the Walled City found itself in a swiftly developing urban area. It began to build - upwards rather than outwards - and, in the 25 years up to 1975, the present labyrinth took shape.
But there were no laws. Sporadic attempts, particularly in the '60s, to impose colonial rule on the place met with the predictable Peking response. So none of the local building or fire regulations were enforced and structures went ever onwards and upwards with no foundations. Eventually they came to lean on the one next door as the most convenient way of staying up. And while they were leaning there, people thought, why not knock a hole through from one to another and link one 11th-storey passage to another?
There was no refuse disposal - only the window. No sewers - only the streets. The electricity was stolen from the official lines outside the Walled City and (sometimes literally) hotwired all over the maze.
Water was taken from brackish wells dug under the buildings, pumped by private enterprise up to the top of the buildings then sold for $10 a month to anyone who could buy the piping to reach the tanks.
The Triad gangs moved in. Opium dens, heroin trafficking, gambling and all forms of prostitution became rife. The place was turned into an armed fortress of anarchy and, it was said, the Hong Kong police - never anxious to dash into the place at the best of times - fell into the habit of taking thousands of dollars a day to steer totally clear. In its own violent way the enclave policed itself. The two main gangs divided it up among themselves and guarded it day and night against outsiders.
With no controls, dozens of illegal dentists and doctors set up - even now there are 100 such dentists in the city. Abortions and other illegal operations thrived in one-roomed "hospitals".
Only in the '70s, when the Walled City's notoriety reached far beyond Hong Kong (as did the corrupt reputation of the Hong Kong police) was a real start made to clear up the place. The more public displays of vice and drugs were closed down. The police began to patrol, occasionally and in pairs.
The Triad hegemony waned. The standpipes were put in. The open sewers were duckboarded over. Rat poison was put down. Official electricity arrived to supplement the illegal supply and limited strip lighting was put along the walls of some of the principal "streets".
Hong Kong officials also give some of the credit for the change in the Walled City to a 40-year-old British "missionary", Jackie Pullinger, who arrived in Hong Kong 20 years ago with $16 in her pocket and no clear idea of what she wanted to do. Her work among drug addicts - she has cured hundreds of them through a fundamentalist Christian approach involving the laying on of hands and speaking in tongues - is a legend in the colony, to the extent that she is now given limited official help in her work.
More importantly, her reputation within the Walled City has grown the more for having cured two senior Triad leaders by converting them, for having challenged the power of the gangs head-on and for never considering anyone to be too low or in too bad a state to merit her help. At the very least she has shown the cowed populace that a light could shine in the City of Darkness (as the Chinese call it).
"I have always seen it as the City of Light, not darkness," she told me. "It has been used for violence and crime and greed
- it had become a victim city. But I saw the opposite could happen. And it did. People - even addicts - used to stay away because the place had such a bad name. Now the worst in the land comes to our room in the Walled City because they have heard their life can be changed there."
The first of the 10,000 or so "registered" families will be moved out in April. Such is the nature of the place that everyone knows there are many more unregistered families still living in the city. But just how many is unknown.
It will take two years to rehouse everyone and to clear the place out entirely. Then - and only then - will they move in to demolish it, because the expert assessment is that it cannot be demolished piecemeal.
They reckon it could be spectacular - another superlative for the record book: one push and it could all fall down.

The Boston Globe

June 13, 1991, Thursday, City Edition

Dooming a slum;
Hong Kong's infamous Walled City will be dynamited

BYLINE: By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 782 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG



For nine decades the Walled City has festered in the heart of this British colony's sleek Kowloon district, a lawless seven-acre enclave of opium parlors, whorehouses and gambling dens where police, health inspectors, and even tax collectors have not dared to tread.
The Cantonese call it Hak Nam, the City of Darkness. It is a ghetto of bizarre history whose 40,000 denizens, ranging from criminal gangs called triads to hundreds of unlicensed dentists and doctors, dwell in perpetual twilight.
Ramshackle multistory structures, put up without regard to any building code, tower so high and lean so precariously together that hardly a ray of light reaches the tangle of dank alleys and reeking open sewers below.


All that will change when the enclave is leveled sometime next year.
The Walled City took its name from the immense ramparts studded with six great watchtowers that once surrounded the fabulous Qing dynasty home and gardens of the emperor of China's special envoy.
China had been forced to cede Hong Kong island to Britain in 1842 and Kowloon peninsula in 1860. In 1898, Britain obtained a 99-year lease on the New Territories, a large swath of adjacent land, but agreed that the walled compound with its small garrison would remain legally a part of China, a sort of foreign embassy. The British broke their promise a year later, driving out the emperor's envoy and soldiers, but under the treaty, the enclave remained Chinese territory. The Japanese, who occupied Hong Kong during World War II, tore down the original wall, but the old name stuck.
In 1949, the Communists seized power in Beijing and asserted their right to occupy and police the Walled City. Hong Kong's British governor ignored the demand, but, fearing their enormous neighbor, colonial authorities made no attempt to maintain law or regulate the zone.
So, for the people of the Walled City, there would be no schools, no modern sewerage, no electricity, no postal service or garbage collection, and no interference from the state.
The enclave evolved into a crime-infested no man's land, the haunt of the triads, opium addicts, cutthroats and home for the poorest of Hong Kong's poor.
It also became famous for its cheap dental and medical "clinics," filthy, if thriving, places whose practitioners' low fees reflected the fact that they were unlicensed and, often as not, untrained.
Gambling parlors flourished. Illegal abortion centers did, too. Restaurant stalls served up everything from raw snake liver to dog soup.
Now, with Hong Kong scheduled to be absorbed into China when Britain's lease on the colony expires in 1997, officials in London and Beijing have agreed it is high time to raze the city.
About 10,000 residents of the Walled City have already been resettled, and the infamous enclave will be dynamited into oblivion sometime next year at a cost of $ 350 million. Most of the sum represents compensation to owners of buildings and businesses.
"That is a cheap price to excise the cancer of Kowloon," said H. T. Lui, Hong Kong's deputy secretary for home affairs. "No one will mourn the loss of this dreadful place."
Not true, said Lee Kyung Lam, who operates a tiny bakery inherited from his father and whose family has lived in the Walled City for three generations.
"It is true there are many drug traffickers and poor girls who sell themselves on the street. But there is not only badness here," he said. "For many hard-working people with little money, it is the only home we know. I do not want to leave. My mother cries all day knowing we must."
A Christian missionary, John Pullinger, who for years has ministered to a tiny congregation in the Walled City, agreed that the enclave is "a dark, corrupt place of horror and shame."
"There are murders, and no one asks questions," he said. "The gangs extort the shopkeepers terribly. Yet there is a community of decent souls here just struggling to get on with their lives."
Entrepreneurs, heavily "taxed" by the triads, have rigged mile after mile of leaky hose above the narrow lanes to bring water tapped illegally from city reservoirs and sold to residents at a hefty price. Those who protest the prices face beatings and even executions by the gangs, who also control the illegal electric lines.
It is the constant fear of violence that makes some Walled City dwellers pleased by the prospect of new apartments and financial compensation.
Hong Kong has tried to raze the Walled City three times, but has been thwarted by angry residents supported by Chinese authorities.
"The Chinese are with us this time," said a colonial official. "After all, they will inherit this pit if we don't destroy it."
November 28, 1991, Thursday, FINAL EDITION

Families evicted from slum city

BYLINE: AP

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A3

LENGTH: 404 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG


HONG KONG (AP) - Despite protests and threats of suicide, Hong Kong began evicting families from its old Walled City today in a move to clear the squalid seven-acre enclave that is a haven for organized crime, drugs and pro-Communist agitation.
Scores of police officers descended on the slum, rousting out unlicensed dentists and doctors, aging prostitutes and the owner of a grocery store.
Today's operation, which resulted in 39 families or businesses being evicted from the neighborhood, was the first of a four-phase program to clear the city and turn it into a park.


Most of the original 33,000 residents have already left under a $295 million compensation package. Several thousand diehards remain, seeking more money.
The Walled City has been a victual no-man's land since 1898, when the British government expanded its control in Hong Kong to include Kowloon where the neighborhood, now a vast slum, sits.
Because the area was the site of a Qing Dynasty fort, the Chinese imperial government refused to allow the British jurisdiction over the place.
The Hong Kong government attempted to assert control over the city in 1963 but abandoned the plan after a vehement "hands off" order by Beijing.
Hong Kong is now clearing the city, with China's agreement, to build a park.
Posters criticizing the government's move flapped from rundown facades. "Down with colonialist running dogs," one read. "Hong Kong government must respect human rights," said another.
"I am extremely sad," said Wong Ming, owner of the Pat Tat Crystal Arts Co., who has made keychains and lucite flower balls in the Walled City for 22 years. "My business will die and I'm wondering what will happen to my family."
Wong said he would try to hold out for higher compensation before packing up and leaving. Already he's been offered $40,000 by the Hong Kong government to vacate.
After World War II, thousands of squatters poured into the neighborhood and it fast developed into a haven for organized crime, drugs, opium smoking and pro-Communist agitation.
Residents didn't need to pay property taxes, obtain business or medical licenses or get building permits. The place became a vast slum - a maze of dank alleyways lined with spaghetti wiring where the smell of rotting garbage mixed with that of fish, pork's blood and open sewers. Water dripped from air conditioners and open air plumbing.
The Age (Melbourne, Australia)

November 29, 1991 Friday
Late Edition

End nears for Kowloon Walled City

BYLINE: HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 7

LENGTH: 143 words
Hong Kong police and bailiffs today began evicting people from the Kowloon Walled City _ a jumble of patched-together tenement buildings that have traditionally served as a refuge for Chinese gangsters and drug addicts in the heart of the British colony.
In a historical quirk, Beijing never relinquished sovereignty over the area.
Britain let China keep a garrison on the site when it leased the colony in 1898. The walled city became a lawless enclave _ a labyrinth of dank alleys that was home to more than 30,000 people.
Every time the Hong Kong Government tried to move in, Beijing sent a diplomatic protest. Once, in 1948, Chinese mobs set fire to a British consulate.
Now, under the agreement to hand over power in 1997, it is to be cleared in phases and then pulled down.
By June 1992, the Kowloon Walled City may well be blown up and then turned into a park.
The Independent (London)

November 29, 1991, Friday

Empire conquers a fetid colony

BYLINE: From ANDREW HIGGINS in Hong Kong

SECTION: FOREIGN NEWS PAGE; Page 12

LENGTH: 666 words



IN A BRIEF spasm before its collapse, the British Empire yesterday seized one last, tiny chunk of territory for the Crown - a fetid slum crawling with rats, dripping with sewage yet stoutly defended to the last by an angry battalion of Chinese shopkeepers, faith healers and self-taught dentists.
The new acquisition is the Walled City of Kowloon, a squalid no man's land riddled with brothels, drug dens, hole-in-the- wall shops and grimy surgeries offering cheap but painful fillings, dentures and gold teeth.
Neither walled nor a city anymore, the area degenerated long ago into a dank and often dangerous sanctuary from the law - the only patch of Hong Kong from which the Union flag has never flown, its murky autonomy assured by a quirk of colonial history.
When Britain seized the Kowloon peninsula from the Qing Dynasty, hazy wording in the 1898 treaty left Peking a foothold in its lost domain - vague jurisdiction over the Walled City, a tenth-century fort from which Chinese officials and soldiers once ruled. While wary of trying to enforce its claim over the area, Peking was also unwilling to relinquish it. With neither Britain nor China in charge, the Walled City fell under the control of Triads instead.


After decades of legal quibbling and patriotic posturing, both sides agree the anomaly must go. The Walled City, a single block of land next to the airport, is to be razed and replaced with a public park - just in time to save China the trouble of cleaning up the mess when it regains sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong in six years' time.
Enforcing the agreement is the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, which moved in yesterday to help evict the last die-hard residents. ''Nobody should be in there anymore,'' said Terrence Osel, a chubby colonial police officer overseeing the operation. ''The Walled City belongs to the Crown. Anyone who stays is trespassing on Crown land.''
Thousands of residents have already left, accepting compensation from the colonial government and promises of new housing elsewhere. Their apartments have been cleared, their doors chained shut, their grimy, mud- splattered walls plastered with stern official notices: ''NO Trespassing.''
Others, though, have vowed to stay, fearful of losing their homes and wary of dealing with tax collectors, health inspectors and other agents of the law previously kept at arm's length by the Walled City's uncertain status. Particularly anxious are scores of dentists and doctors who, lacking the licences needed to practise elsewhere, will lose their livelihood once they leave.
Yesterday, the start of a six- month eviction drive, saw only 11 families dislodged. Many more remain inside, barricaded behind piles of rubbish and rusty iron gates. One man was dragged screaming from his shop; another hurled abuse at police through a loudhailer. Others marched to the Hong Kong governor's mansion carrying black banners demanding more money.
The most dramatic act of resistance was staged by a doddery old man in his 70s: he hobbled atop the roof of his 12-storey block and threatened to jump, only to be lured down with assurances that the government's offer of cash compensation - up to pounds 50,000 - might be negotiable.
The Walled City's bizarre status, has overturned the usual pattern of protest. Instead of accusing the British government of caving in to Peking - the usual complaint of Hong Kong's jittery population - the residents of the Walled City accuse Peking and local Chinese officials of caving in to colonialism.
''Have you not forgotten the humiliation of the Opium War?'' asked a poster put up yesterday by the local residents' association. ''Stinking officials have forgotten the interests of the Chinese people.''
Colonial officials and police, however, are unmoved. ''It's sad that people must leave their homes, but the bottom line is they must go,'' said District Police Commissioner Osler. ''I'm not sad to see this mess go. Nobody can be sad about that.''
The Globe and Mail (Canada)

February 28, 1992 Friday

Inside the walls of a secret city DEPRIVATION"Canadian youngsters might benefit from living in a dark and crammed slum of Hong Kong, says a woman with first-hand experience

BYLINE: WENDY TANG; GAM

LENGTH: 758 words
BY WENDY TANG
THE photograph in the newspaper shows a woman protesting against her
eviction from Hong Kong's Walled City, a slum left over from the 19th
century. The entire district is being torn down.
A magazine article describes it as "one of the darkest corners of Hong
Kong: an overcrowded warren of poverty, disease and lawlessness." But to
its 33,000 inhabitants, the Walled City has been a refuge for the less
fortunate souls of an otherwise prosperous Hong Kong.
This undoubtedly is why the woman in the photograph "screams in
protest" at her eviction. The Walled City is her home, as it was once
mine.
In 1955, when I was 7, my father abandoned his wife and concubine for
an 18-year-old woman. His wife, my "elder mother," sued for divorce, but
being a concubine, she had no legal recourse.
Even if she had, she wouldn't have known of it. Orphaned at 15, and
having tried in vain to become a Chinese opera singer, she entered into
concubinage with my father when she was only 17. When my father left, she
was defenceless - a woman with no working skills supporting three
children, from five to 15 years old.
The four of us ended up in the Walled City. Did my mother move there
for the cheaper rent? Or was she running away from the pity and sighs of
her helpless friends? Poor mother, trying along with my sister to sew
gloves for a living by the light of a kerosene lamp. But no matter how
hard they worked, it was never enough.
Rice cooked with oil and salt, rather than thin rice porridge, was a
rare treat. There was no school. My brother and I passed the time by
playing hide-and-seek among the linens hung in the open yard of the dyeing
factory, or by catching flies for sport.
The district's actual walls were torn down decades ago, but the quarter
remains a ramshackle firetrap of tunnel-like passages and dripping pipes,
all jammed so close together that almost no light filters in. Squeezed
into the British colony's Kowloon district, the Walled City was always
claimed as Chinese territory by the Beijing regime, which left it in 150
years of legal limbo.
Life there was harsh, but I was too young to know. With little to do, I
found excitement in work instead. Lining up for water at the street faucet
was a joy because it meant that there was something to cook. And I eagerly
answered each call of my neighbour to help paste together her cream-filled
cookies, because she always rewarded me with one when the work was done.
Of course, there were things to dread, like going to the dentist, who was
unlicenced and who pulled out my teeth with no anesthetic or even a
soothing word.
The Walled City, as I remember it, was a world onto itself. There were
no smiling and generous neighbours, but neither was there any snobbery to
bear. Police would not venture inside the district, but we didn't live in
fear of crime or criminals. I was never taught how to be "street wise" -
there were no strangers or rapists to fear. I am sure thieves and
criminals were present, but they were there because the Walled City was
their home.
My one and only dress was stolen through the open window near which it
was hung, but my mother didn't make a fuss. She felt it might have been
stolen for a "good" reason. Nor was she angry with me when she found out I
had sold a silver cup, my kindergarten prize, to a gleeful hawker for two
chunky malt candy sticks.
When my father regained his conscience and "reclaimed" us, we were
happy to leave the Walled City. I didn't look back. I took every
opportunity that came my way to make sure that I wouldn't starve again.
The 1960s and 1970s were good times and, as I gradually climbed into the
middle class, the Walled City receded.
Consciously or unconsciously, however, my life was partly molded by my
Walled City experience - an experience of sheer survival and deprivation.
I had missed the Western youth culture of my time, and the philosophical
debates of the hippies and flower children. But, in a way, I believe my
young life was more "real."
The experience helped sharpen my appreciation and sensitivity for the
value and simple joys of life. Now I seldom fail to enjoy a meal, and I'm
always excited about things going on around me. When I look at today's
teen-agers, I lament what appears to be their shallow sense of life. They
take for granted their "right" to food and shelter, and to every
electronic gadget on the market. The pride and joy of struggle and
achievement have been lost amid the material abundance of North American
life. Perhaps every middle-class kid should live in a walled city for a
while.
Wendy Tang is a writer living in Oakville, Ont.

The New York Times

June 16, 1992, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

Hong Kong Journal;
The Walled City, Home to Huddled Masses, Falls

BYLINE: By BARBARA BASLER, Special to The New York Times

SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk

LENGTH: 892 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG, June 11



The Walled City is a colony within this colony, a dark little enclave of narrow, twisting streets and rickety walk-ups that has defied British law and order for almost 100 years.
The two square city blocks, just beyond the glittering hotels and fashionable boutiques of Kowloon, have been contested territory since 1899, claimed by both Britain and China.


Over the years both countries have maintained their right to the area, but have seldom asserted their authority.
Because of this historical quirk, the Walled City has been a haven for those on the fringes of colonial society -- poor Chinese immigrant families seeking cheap housing, mainland doctors and dentists who set up practices with no licenses, drug dealers and thieves fleeing the Royal Hong Kong Police. (The enclave has no walls now because occupying Japanese forces tore them down in World War II.)

No Taxes, No Laws
Inside the Walled City, even today, no one pays taxes and everyone lives and works in strange contorted buildings that defy all safety and building ordinances. Restaurants obey no health codes.
Cut off from or denied most regular city services, some families still fetch their water in buckets, and pay workers to collect the waste from their chamber pots each morning.
"The Walled City shows what people will give up for the sake of money -- sunlight, fresh air, space," said Suenn Ho, an American architect who is studying the neighborhood on a Fulbright grant.
A senior colonial government official said: "The basic problem is that the Chinese consider the Walled City to be China and we consider it Hong Kong, and this has not been resolved to this day. But we have agreed to put aside our differences because it is in everyone's best interest that something be done about the Walled City."
The place, he said, "is a health and environmental hazard."
Now, with each side still asserting its sovereignty over the area, the Chinese and British have agreed that the Walled City must be torn down, its warrenlike buildings razed and replaced by a park.
This plan has outraged many Walled City residents, even though the Hong Kong government is paying out $384 million to compensate the 900 businesses and 10,700 households that must be relocated.
Many have been forced to vacate their apartments and businesses in eviction operations that have been rowdy and even violent. Only about 2,000 people remain and they will be gone soon, with demolition to start next January.
To an outsider, it is hard to understand the appeal of the Walled City, which has a dark, dank medieval atmosphere. The streets are so narrow that when you stretch your arms you can touch buildings on either side.
The wooden buildings, 10 to 14 stories tall, have little foundation, and grow wider as they go up, blocking the sunlight.
Ms. Ho, the American architect, said that when the population of the Walled City was at its peak of 40,000 recently, each person had about seven square feet of living space, and it was common for whole families to live and work in one tiny room.

$2,000 a Month and No Taxes
A Chinese herbalist, recently evicted from the Walled City, said he and his family of four lived in a 290-square-foot apartment where he also ran a medicine shop and even operated on patients, all without a license. "Of course I liked it," he said. "I made $2,000 a month and paid no taxes, only a little rent."
The 58-year-old man, who had come from China and had lived in the Walled City for seven years, discounted its reputation as a haven for criminals, saying, "If you live here you know that it is peaceful."
In fact, the Walled City was riddled with brothels, peep shows and drug dens in the 1950's and 60's when criminal gangs virtually ran the area, Ms. Ho said. The Hong Kong police began more vigorous law enforcement in the 70's, and the place settled down, attracting more businesses seeking to avoid regulations and taxes. and fewer thugs.
A recent government survey found scores of small bakeries, butcher shops, clothing, toy and noodle manufacturers, and medical and dental clinics thriving here, catering to customers who live outside the Walled City but prefer its lower prices.
The area was once a Chinese fort and administrative center. When the British forced China to lease to Hong Kong an area of the mainland now known as the New Territories, they agreed that the Chinese could retain the Walled City.

'Good Place' for a Family
A year later the British unilaterally amended that accord and invaded the Walled City. Once Chinese troops were routed, Britain never tried to enforce its new claim.
Over the years Hong Kong tried several times to clean out the Walled City, but China always objected.
After the 1984 agreement by Britain to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, the two countries began negotiations on the Walled City. In 1987 a plan to raze it was announced.
Eviction operations began a year and a half ago. Residents are reluctant to leave the Walled City because the price was right, and the life was good.
"This is a good place to raise a family," Cheng Siu-tsing, a housewife, said, standing beneath a huge tangle of wires on Kung Street. "We save money by living here, and my husband is close to the factory where he works."
She added, "We will never find a place like this one again."
The Times

July 3, 1992, Friday

Last squatters evicted in Kowloon

BYLINE: From Jonathan Braude in Hong Kong

SECTION: Overseas news

LENGTH: 607 words



THE Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong's once teaming den of drug addicts, prostitutes and criminals, stands empty this morning, for the second time in its 94-year history.
Enclosed by a newly erected fence where the famous wall once stood, its deserted buildings await the demolition teams. Eventually the site will be turned into a park.
Scores of riot police yesterday moved in with shields and clubs to evict the last remaining squatters from a hastily-erected encampment on the perimeter. They occupied a small Buddhist temple at the entrance and surrounded about 20 former Walled City residents who had made their homes on the pavement since being evicted from the interior six months ago. Ten people had to be dragged from their kerbside dwellings, many of them struggling, and one woman was arrested for assaulting a government worker.


They were the last to go. On Wednesday, in a nine-hour operation, six households were forcibly removed from their homes in the final section of the city to be cleared while others left peacefully, though with obvious reluctance.
Under the original lease, China refused to move its garrison from the old Qing dynasty fort on the site and the seven-acre Walled City remained beyond British jurisdiction. But when the garrison was finally ejected a few years later, Britain chose not to develop or police the area for fear of offending Peking. For more than 80 years, the labyrinthine streets of the city were a no-man's land beyond the control of either government.
Soon squatters escapers from Chinese or British justice and taxes moved in. They received no services or rights, but lived in squalor until they were driven out by the Japanese. But after the surrender of the Japanese empire, the squatters came back in force.
In another milestone today Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, the outgoing governor, flies out of the British colony for the last time this evening leaving his successor, Chris Patten, to take over the reins of power at one of the most difficult and sensitive periods in the territory's 150-year history. Lord Wilson will leave with full ceremonial honours but the verdict on his five years in power is still open.
Undoubtedly an efficient administrator, with a detailed grasp of every aspect of policy, he presided over boom years interrupted only briefly by the 1987 stock market crash and the consequences of the 1989 upheavals in China. But for many his tenure was a disaster, which allowed China to extend its power over Hong Kong and crush all hope of democratic reform in a colony Britain has ruled as a benevolent dictatorship.
His detractors say he failed to stand up for the development of parliamentary democracy, and his constant fear of pushing China too far soon taught the authorities in Peking that Hong Kong could be intimidated and brought to heel. He was, in the words of a retired senior civil servant John Walden, ''the best governor of Hong Kong China ever had''.
He won friends in the colony with his pressure in London for full United Kingdom passports for all 3.2 million Hong Kong British citizens, his support for the environment and his ambitious proposal for a new airport, conceived as a move to boost morale in Hong Kong after China's supression in Tiananmen square.
However the airport backfired seriously, leaving Peking with the power to veto the project by the simple expedient of scaring away international investors. China could thus blackmail Britain into conceding valuable bargaining points and sending John Major on an official visit to Peking at a time when China had barely come in from the diplomatic cold.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

July 29, 1992

Walled City protest threat

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG

SECTION: News; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 150 words



DEFIANT former Kowloon Walled City residents have threatened to start a marathon sit-in outside the office of the Secretary for Home Affairs, Mr Michael Suen Ming-yeung, from tomorrow if officials refuse to discuss compensation with them.
Ten residents have been occupying an arbour in a park at the Tung Tau Estate, opposite the Walled City, since their eviction early this month from the slum area.


They petitioned the City and New Territories Administration (CNTA) and demanded a meeting with officials on compensation packages on Monday but were rejected.
Protest organiser Mr Cheng Shing-shi, 59, said yesterday that if they did not receive a positive reply from the Government today they would set up camp outside Mr Suen's office.
A Government spokesman said officials were yesterday considering the need to meet the residents and would be sending them a written reply today.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

September 4, 1992

Scuffles as Governor visits the Walled City

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG and SUSAN FURLONG

SECTION: News; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 426 words



TEN former Walled City residents scuffled with police after being stopped from handing a petition to the Governor, Mr Chris Patten, when he made a surprise visit to the Kowloon slum area yesterday.
The protesters, who had hung banners and wrote a protest petition as soon as they saw Mr Patten arrive, waited until he had finished his tour and then flocked around his party to present the letter.
At one point someone tried to block Mr Patten's path, and later other demonstrators sat down on the road to stop his car from leaving. They were quickly removed.


The residents have been camping outside the Tung Tau Estate, opposite the Walled City, for eight months. They claim the Government has not given them enough compensation for being evicted from their homes in the condemned tenement.
Government Information Co-ordinator Mr Mike Hanson said the Governor had not been overly-disturbed by the incident.
"It is not really a major event for us or for the Governor. People have the right to protest as long as it's peaceful," he said.
A government spokeswoman said the protesters' petition had been received.
Some residents accused the police of using excessive force to protect Mr Patten, who toured the Walled City for 20 minutes.
Mr Chan Sai-yuen, 54, said: "We stayed orderly and peaceful, but the police beat us and stopped us from handing in our petition to the Governor."
Mr Chan and Ms Cheung Shun-fong, 49, filed complaints to the Kowloon City police station. A force spokesman said they had been referred to its complaints and internal investigation branch.
Kowloon City Division Commander Superintendent Fung Kam-wong, who led about 30 police officers accompanying the Governor during his visit, dismissed the residents' claims and said no protester had been beaten.
Mr Hanson said the Governor wanted to keep his visit low-key and decided against telling the press.
"He wanted to see the Walled City before it disappears, but we didn't want a huge press corp trying to follow him down those narrow lanes," Mr Hanson said. "It would be too difficult to manage."
Even government information officers were kept in the dark about the visit. Mr Hanson said unannounced visits were part of Mr Patten's programme to get to know the territory.
Yesterday's incident was not the first time protests at the Walled City have degenerated into scuffles.
In April, two policemen, a clearance official and his assistant were hurt during a clearance operation when an angry resident lunged at them with a chopper.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

January 30, 1993

Walled City protest ends

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG

SECTION: News; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 194 words



THE last batch of former Kowloon Walled City residents said yesterday they were prepared to accept the Government's rehousing terms after admitting that their year-long protest to press for more compensation had failed.
The move could see the end to the 14- month dispute and violent demonstrations.


The 10 residents, some of whom have accepted cash compensation, have been camping out in an open space on Tung Tau Estate opposite the Walled City after being evicted in the clearances.
They admitted defeat yesterday and agreed to accept a government rehousing offer of public flats but maintained that they had been unfairly treated during compensation discussions.
Their representative, Mr Tsang Chor-hing, said: "Some elderly women had been sleeping on the street for a year. The weather has turned cold in recent weeks and the most important thing is to let them get a home as soon as possible.
"We shall continue to fight for more compensation through the appeal board but we hope we can be assured a fair hearing."
A Housing Department official said flats had been reserved for eligible residents and they could move in whenever they liked.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

February 16, 1993

Illegal immigrants using Walled City as a refuge

BYLINE: By BELINDA WALLIS

SECTION: News; Pg. 3

LENGTH: 439 words



POLICE have found illegal immigrants hiding in the Kowloon Walled City and believe there could be more using the condemned maze of alleyways and crumbling buildings as a refuge.
The mainlanders know their way around the labyrinth and have set up home, police believe.
Acting Chief Inspector Jonathan Fraser, the last officer to hold the now-defunct post in charge of the Walled City, said yesterday that two illegals immigrants were chased in there after an attempt to rob a grocery store in Wong Tai Sin three weeks ago.


But while Mr Fraser does not believe police have a big problem on their hands, they may step up operations when the demolition of the 2.7 hectare site begins later this month or early in March.
"There is no indication now that there is a problem, but everybody is aware that the Walled City is there and it's a place to hide," Mr Fraser said.
"When illegal immigrants come to Hongkong they are looking for temporary work and somewhere to live - a construction site is ideal. It's maybe that the Walled City provides the ideal home."
On average, Kowloon City Division police arrest one illegal immigrant every day in their area, which includes the Walled City.
During 100 years of infamy, the Wall City has been described as a slum, a squalid eyesore, the city of darkness, and even the cancer of Kowloon. Now the 8,800 flats stand empty; the 1,500 clinics, 570 workshops and 148 shops little more than shells.
Even the rats have gone, deprived of their source of survival - man and his rubbish.
The Walled City is not a desirable residence.
"There's no water, no electricity, it would have to be a desperate person who chose to live in there," Mr Fraser said.
But police are keeping a lookout. Yesterday, the smell of cooking gas had Mr Fraser peering down dark alleyways and stairwells, a large spanner in hand, but no unwelcome visitors were found.
Details of the Walled City's demolition are expected to be announced soon. The Civil Engineering Department and the Hongkong half of the consortium, Express Builders, will meet today to discuss a timetable.
While some single-storey buildings and temporary structures have already been destroyed on the eastern side of the city, the Civil Engineering Department is waiting for a structural survey before Hongkong's biggest demolition job can get underway.
At the end of this month, members of the American Cleveland Wrecking Joint Venture arrive in Hongkong, bringing with them an array of equipment to destroy the city.
Conventional methods will be used, because explosives have been deemed to be too dangerous.

South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

March 24, 1993

First blow landed as the walls come tumbling down

BYLINE: By NG KANG-CHUNG

SECTION: News; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 436 words



BULLDOZERS moved into the condemned Kowloon Walled City yesterday, marking the beginning of a year-long project to flatten the 2.7-hectare slum area which had been a military fort of the Qing Dynasty.
Contractors expected the 350 buildings, mostly built without proper planning in the 1960s, to be pulled down two months ahead of schedule because of their weak structure.
After the Director of Civil Engineering Dr Edward Brand cut a ribbon, a crane operator swung a heavy metal ball to smash the walls of a five-storey building.


Wide applause followed each blow, smothering a protest by former Walled City residents.
They said yesterday was "a day of shame" for Chinese, claiming the government should not have been allowed to knock down buildings on a piece of Chinese land.
Twenty protesters, kept from the site by barricades and 10 policemen, shouted slogans and condemned the 100 officials and guests attending the demolition ceremony.
A handful of spectators also gathered at the gate of the site to watch the historic event.
According to the $ 42 million contract, the Express Builders-Cleveland Wrecking joint venture is required to flatten the site before May next year.
But company experts expect the buildings to topple easily, enabling the project to be completed before then.
The poor state of the buildings, which had been a haven for criminals and home to a host of unlicensed dentists, could also pose difficulties as they come down.
Detailed surveying will be necessary as huge excavators and bulldozers from the United States eat their way through the tilting piles of homes and factories.
A plan to drop the building yesterday with explosives was shelved for fear of dust pollution in nearby residential areas and the airport.
Three US supervisors have been flown in to train workers on the big machinery, not commonly used in Hongkong.
One of the supervisors, Mr James Hutchins, described the demolition as an easy job.
"The buildings are very weak. We can pull down the walls of a five-storey building in around 15 minutes," he said.
Cleveland Wrecking Company president and chief executive officer, Mr William Fenning, said it was planned to take down one building at a time to avoid a domino effect.
He said the 150,000 cubic metres of debris and rubbish would be used in reclamation.
The site will be turned into a park, which will include some existing wells and a yamen - a military office of the Qing Dynasty built in the early 1800s - to house relics.
The park will cost about $ 50 million and is scheduled to be opened in early 1996.
Business Week

March 29, 1993

Bulldozing The World of Suzie Wong

BYLINE: Pete Engardio; When not taking in the view, Engardio covers much of Asia from Hong Kong.

SECTION: LETTER FROM HONG KONG; Number 3311; Pg. 22 D

LENGTH: 1159 words



Since they were built in the 1920s, the giant picture windows of my cliffside apartment atop Victoria Peak have witnessed a lot of history. The first tenants, British managers of the funicular that zips 1,200 feet up and down the peak, had a panormic view of downtown Hong Kong, bustling Victoria Harbor, and the misty mountains of the New Territories in the distance. They watched the Japanese invade on the day after Pearl Harbor and saw the flood of immigrants following the communist conquest of China in 1949.
Even though many of the graceful, white colonial buildings have been replaced by skyscrapers, and the junks and steamboats by monster barges, the view -- especially at night -- remains one of the best in the world. These days, though, I gaze out over this metropolis and brood. A few weeks ago, the Peninsula Group, owner of my building, notified me that it would be razed to make way for yet another retail complex. I have to be out by May 31.


lost soul. With 1997 just around the corner, I'm in the company of many other brooders in Hong Kong. We don't know what life will be like under Bei-jing -- only that Hong Kong never will be the same. But what's really disturbing is that in the race to squeeze more profits out of the colony, developers are already burying Hong Kong's old charm. I'm not talking just about architecture: Frankly, the ugly Peak Tower (except for my apartment) should have been knocked down long ago. More valuable are the vibrant, bewildering neighborhoods that give the city its soul.
From the quaint to the notorious, the places that have been favorites with both tourists and locals for generations are vanishing. Bird Street, a colorful alley in the Mong Kok district, is lined with elderly Chinese vendors selling singing birds and elaborate bamboo cages. It's to be cleared this year. And if you want to visit the "poor man's nightclub," it's too late. For 34 years, the open-air bazaar on the harbor offered cheap clothes, fresh seafood and, in the old days, comedians, acrobats, and Chinese opera singers. Last April, it was closed for redevelopment.
Highest on the endangered list are the seedy areas, which for years have furnished grist for cheap novels and kung-fu movies. I regret waiting too long to see the famed Kowloon Walled City, an area of a dozen blocks near Kai Tak Airport. Starting in the 1890s, it grew into a maze of dark passageways and tiny rooms housing more than 30,000 squatters. Under the jurisidiction of neither Beijing nor London, the Walled City was essentially lawless. In the 1940s, Governor Alexander Grantham called it "a cesspool of iniquity, with heroin divans, everything unsavory." I first read about it in Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies, the New Mafia, a sensationalized account of the Asian drug trade by Gerald L. Posner. As Posner told it, the place was so infested with hoods and dope fiends that he needed an escort of five policeman just to enter. "If you go in alone, the chances are you won't be coming back out," one cop cautioned melodramatically. This place I've got to see, I vowed, upon arriving here 212 years ago. But when I went there this January, all the tenants had been evicted. The site is being converted into a park.
cockroaches. This makes me fear for another of my favorite eyesores: the Chungking Mansion on Nathan Road in the Kowloon district. Like hundreds of other Western kids, I had stayed in one of the cheap hostels in this sooty 17-story structure when I backpacked through Asia on a shoestring. Granted, you slept with your wallet under the pillow, cockroaches and unsavory-looking characters were everywhere, and the building was a firetrap.
Still, the Chungking building functions as a self-contained community, housing mostly Indian families. I still enjoy dropping in to browse through the Indian food shops or simply to watch the array of transients lined up at the creaky elevator -- Sri Lankan Tamils, Nigerians, Malaysian Muslims, and young Chinese. The only thing keeping the Chungking and its valuable land from being turned into a luxury hotel is that ownership is dispersed among many shopkeepers, who can't agree on a price.
Wrecking balls are swinging much more freely in my favorite neighborhood: Wanchai. Most people know Wan Chai as the setting for Richard Mason's 1957 novel The World of Suzie Wong, the tale of a Western artist who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute and marries her. The red-light district hit its peak during the Vietnam War, when shiploads of sailors spilled into more than 100 clubs. The routine was for bar girls, working on commission, to get patrons to buy them expensive drinks. "The main trick was getting as many drinks as possible out of an American sailor without having to go to bed with him," recalls popular historian Arthur Hacker, a 25-year Hong Kong resident. Peacetime has been hard on Wan- chai nightlife, but several bars survive. At the dingy Suzie Wong Club, there are few patrons for Bobo and the other aging, overweight hostesses.
But Wanchai is also a showcase of Cantonese entrepreneurialism and social life. And, it's home to the BUSINESS WEEK bureau. Within a few blocks, we have a vegetable market, butchers selling smoked ducks hanging by their necks, family-owned restaurants serving the gamut of Asian gastronomic delights and horrors, and myriad shops and stalls selling rosewood furniture, used TVs, seconds of designer clothes, and fresh carrot juice. I can get my shoes repaired, my clothes dry-cleaned, my fortune told, and my body tattooed.
sealed fate. "The trouble is, what you see as picturesque is actually squalor," says Peter J. Mann, the district officer for Wanchai. He has a point. Given the horror of AIDS in Asia, it's difficult to argue for the preservation of a red-light district. Also, he notes, all those quaint alleys and tiny shops create other health and environmental problems. The issue of preservation is largely moot. Although Mann encourages developers to maintain some of the local color, Wan Chai's fate is sealed by its location, abutting the central business district. Towering office complexes are in the works, and every other week another chunk of old Wan Chai disappears.
Many fear Hong Kong will become like Singapore. It, too, was once loaded with beautiful colonial buildings and thousands of picturesque shops. Almost all have been replaced by gleaming towers. Now, Singapore realizes that in obliterating its past, it became incredibly dull. The recent effort to spruce up surviving old facades to revive a Chinatown feel is too late and too obviously artificial. Singapore has lost its soul.
Officials vow not to allow the "Singaporization of Hong Kong." Personally, I don't think they need to worry. I can't imagine a city under the control of Beijing ever being that efficient. Until May, though, I'll continue to brood about it all from my perch on Victoria Peak.
The Daily Yomiuri

May 17, 1993, Monday

Death throes;
for the 'city;
of darkness';
Former residents watch as;
Kowloon slum is torn down

BYLINE: Hideo Tanaka; Special to The Daily Yomiuri

SECTION: Pg. 3

LENGTH: 484 words

DATELINE: HONG KONG

The British territory is bringing the final curtain down on one of the most bizarre chapters of Hong Kong's colonial history--Kowloon's Walled City.
The walls are crashing down in the 2.7-hectare warren of squatter shacks, rat-infested factories, vice dens, gambling joints and unregistered dental clinics that were piled, over the years, more than a dozen stories on top of each other to form one of the world's most notorious slums.
The Hong Kong government began its final demolition program on the slum last October. Known in Cantonese as the "city of darkness," because no daylight can penetrate its labyrinth of dark, dank alleys, the Walled City rose up to become a blot on the landscape of Kowloon City, situated as it is just in front of Hong Kong's busy Kai Tak Airport.


Because of a historical anomaly, under which Beijing claimed the site as an enclave within the British colony, the Walled City developed into a lawless haven where vice and triads thrived. For years, the site was not only a no-go area for tourists and locals, even police shunned the place.
But it was a sore thumb amid Hong Kong's high-tech, high-rise landscape and its days were numbered. As the complex was emptied in stages, it developed a new notoriety--as an offbeat sight for adventurous tourists who would get lost in its confusing maze of alleys.
The Hong Kong government plans to build a park on the site after the ramshackle walls have come tumbling down.
Local workers are pounding the dirty buildings with concrete balls, but the Walled City is proving sturdier than expected and it is not likely that demolition will be finished within this year.
As the work continues, crowds watch the demolition work from a nearby park. Many of the spectators are former residents of the slum, and they watch without expression as their former homes are pounded down, until, when one of the buildings gives way, there is a quiet cry from the crowd.
One of the spectators, Deng Kuan-hsi, 80, says he lived in the Walled City for about 30 years. He says he was a carpenter and lived in a small basement room.
Deng says he comes to watch the demolition work at his old abode two to three times a week.
"Many people flooded into the Walled City from China and the area became unsafe about 10 years after I started to live there," Deng recalls.
He said that although the rumors of robberies and drug dealing in the Walled City were true, none of the residents had been the target of these crimes because it was close-knit community where everyone knew each other's faces.
He says he does not work now but manages to live on a monthly pension of HK$1,000 (about 15,000 yen) provided by the Hong Kong government.
Asked about the fate of the Walled City, Deng says, "I do not feel sad, for I am now leading a better life." "By the way, the demolition work is proceeding too slowly," he complains.
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

December 9, 1993

Walled City squatters ordered to end protest

SECTION: News; Pg. 8

LENGTH: 345 words

A SMALL group of elderly tenants of the Kowloon Walled City camping out at a public housing estate nearby in protest against the Government's compensation package were yesterday ordered to leave.
At a chambers hearing, Master Woolley gave the 21 tenants until January 8 to leave the Tung Tau Housing Estate rest garden where they have been camping since July last year.
They have been offered compensation for their shops of between $ 6 million for 700 square feet to $ 276,000 for 400 square feet. This works out at between $ 1,000 and $ 7,000 per square foot.


The tenants claim that shop space in the area near the Walled City costs between $ 12,000 and $ 22,000 per square foot.
"The Government has robbed us of our shops. We will not move out until we get reasonable compensation and resettlement," said Cheng Shing-sze, chairman of the Kowloon Walled City representatives.
Mr Cheng operated a herbal shop there for many years. He has rejected the offer of $ 391,000 compensation for his 410 square foot shop space. He claims that the payment would not buy a shop of a similar size.
He rejected government claims that they were trespassing, adding that they had no choice as they had nowhere else to sleep.
Mr Cheng said he had asked Master Woolley to offer them fairer compensation and was told the court was sympathetic but did not have the jurisdiction to make such an award.
He stressed that his group was willing to leave the rest garden if their request was dealt with satisfactorily. Asked if the group would leave as ordered, Mr Cheng said: "We will wait and see what happens on the day."
According to Lee Chu-yin, senior housing manager of the Housing Authority, 15 of the 21 tenants had been resettled on public housing estates. Suitable places were also offered to three others but they rejected them.
Mr Lee, who was heckled by the tenants outside the Supreme Court, said he hoped the people would respect the court ruling and move out. Police were on standby as the tenants shouted abuse and waved their fists at Mr Lee.


Could you summarize that post plz? k thx.

[MolsonExport]

Photographic essay of the Walled City of Kowloon:

dZmzV8gZ4H4

[POLA]

Okay, it might not be photos of the Walled City, but this photo essay on Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate really give a great feel for 100x100 feel living. And I knew MolsonExport would love this:
http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/100x100/

[teekay]

Very nice video. As I mentioned in the comments section there, this image (http://mtidry.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/kowloon.jpg) (which, unfortunately, is the first to come up when searching in Google Images) is actually not of the Walled City, as it has at least 16 stories while KWC had no more than 14.

My work on the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City) is progressing slowly but surely. There a lot of facts to wade through, but I'm hoping to submit it as a candidate for Good Article status once everything is finished. By the way, if you guys know of any relevant images that would be usable under Wikipedia's image use policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_FAQ#Can_I_add_something_to_Wikipedia_that_I_got_from_somewhere_else.3F), please let me know.

Edit: Those Hong Kong photos are quite impressive as well, POLA.

[MolsonExport]

Okay, it might not be photos of the Walled City, but this photo essay on Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate really give a great feel for 100x100 feel living. And I knew MolsonExport would love this:
http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/100x100/

:D :tup:

You are absolutely right on that one. Of course, I already came across this work several years back, in my research on the WCK.

[SAM_1234]

Been following this thread for awhile.
I see it was started in 2004.

Here's 2 parts of 4 part video of inside footage of the Walled City
It's in German, so maybe someone can watch and translate some of the narration.

http://www.youtube.com/user/aveletrian

Youtube profile says the poster is from New Zealand.

Hope they post the remaining 2 parts.

[KWCFan]

Been following this thread for awhile.
I see it was started in 2004.

Here's 2 parts of 4 part video of inside footage of the Walled City
It's in German, so maybe someone can watch and translate some of the narration.

http://www.youtube.com/user/aveletrian

Youtube profile says the poster is from New Zealand.

Hope they post the remaining 2 parts.

Great post, wd. Haven't seen this one yet. Also the wikipedia page on WKC has been thouroughly edditted and I must say job well done. Also the link to the japanese doc on youtube is one I haven't seen before.
Good to see this thread is still going.

:tup:

[MolsonExport]

Been following this thread for awhile.
I see it was started in 2004.

Here's 2 parts of 4 part video of inside footage of the Walled City
It's in German, so maybe someone can watch and translate some of the narration.

http://www.youtube.com/user/aveletrian

Youtube profile says the poster is from New Zealand.

Hope they post the remaining 2 parts.

I liked this one:
fbsPEVbcsXc

really shows day-to-day life in the walled city of kowloon

[SAM_1234]

The Australian Youtube poster hasuploaded
The German Documentry parts 3 & 4

I think they said the lady in part 3 is 80 years old and lives on the 10th floor.
It looked like Shai Tau was still standing in some of the cuts and the racing pigeon excersize sessions between planes at KaiTak

Great footage

[SAM_1234]

Sorry, forgot link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/aveletrian

[MolsonExport]

thanks for the updates. video footage of the walled city is extremely rare. very interesting stuff!

[SAM_1234]

Veoh Videos Site

The Law of Love
Jackie Pullinger talks about her time in the Walled City of Kowloon, Hong Kong

First half of the video has quite abit of footage inside the Walled City.
Since it is a show about her religious quest, it has religious theme.

50 minutes 267 mb download

Note: You must download the Veoh player to view full film
(Don't know if it contains spyware or not)

You can watch 1st 5 mintues w/o DL Veoh Player

Link:
http://www.veoh.com/collection/true/watch/v980745fRAgGdjA

[MolsonExport]

Thanks for digging up these great resources on the WCK. will watch the video when I have a moment. I read some pieces by Jackie Pullinger about the Walled City. I do believe that she also wrote a book about her 2 decades in the WCK.

[SAM_1234]

Here's a blog that has some interesting schematics of the Walled City



Links for more Walled City posts are on right hand side:

http://arch1932010-kwcandcrusoe.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post_21.html

January entries:

http://arch1932010-kwcandcrusoe.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html

[SAM_1234]

Kowloon Walled City

German Documentary
as posted by Aveletrian's Walled City film on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/aveletrian


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Brief translation by German friend.
Not word by word, but sort of narration
(Had a hard time writing as fast as she talked
Sorry for the bad English)


0:00 Introduction
No streets, house to house
Solid wall of houses. Mass of houses
No police, no law
The Walled city town of No Man’s Land
50,000 estimated population(incl surround SaiTau)
Living in stacked crates-caged balconies
Own laws, self-governing
Outsiders are unwelcome.
Shops line the streets
A few pay for electrical, the rest is pirated.
Water drips everywhere on lower (streets)
No outside interference.
Everyone works in Walled City. Own laws

3:09 Noodle Factory
Noodles for Hong Kong made here
Man cut off finger while working
7 day 12 hours a day working hours. Work all year round
No food inspectors, no much sanitation nobody seems to get sick
Noodles made for Hong Kong’s finest restaurants
Noodles made cheap.

Street shot
Streets are dark
Cannons and relics scattered around

4:51 Spring Roll Wrapper Factory
Man is like robot.
Makes super paper thin and still hold together
Always consistent size, no measure no machine
He’s not alone, rats are always watching

5:58 Eel Factory
Eel delicacy, cleaning and washing. Perfectly clean
Later make fishballs and dumplings
One man production. Not a good place to work, low pay.
Cheap labor pool of 50,000 people

7:27 Weaving Factory
Old fashioned machinery, one man operation
12 hours a day
Makes cloth for suits/shirts
Machinery from before WW2, from mainland China
Owner fled from Japanese occupation of Hong Kong (WW2) returned afterwards

Street shot
Business owners paid protection money to Mafia (Triads)
Underground world in Walled City

8:30 Plastics Factory
7 Women work here
Packing material of all sizes.
Plastic covers for VHS cassette tapes
Kids come to factory to work with Mother. Make bags like many kids.
Kids just assemble.
Size of factory 20sq meters(250sq ft) 1 room


10:14 Machine Shop
Manufacturer from raw materials. Iron and steel
Camera crew was only allowed to see small part of manufacturer.
Crew kicked out, didn’t want them to film final product.
Secret product (Counterfeit goods)

Street Shot
Chinese Hak Nam-Black Forest, Dark Place(City)

11:27 Metal Stamping Factory (Watch bands)
Home factory.
Children do school work.
Student practices calligraphy. Must be perfect letters
Mother does same thing over and over.
Making counterfeit watch bands(Rolex)
Mother watches kids and works at same time.
No schools in Walled City. Lots of children left at home alone while parent’s work.
Kids to stay home where safe.
10-20sq meter(110-215 sq ft) average sized flat(apartment)

13:03 Kindergarten
2 ladies take care of kids. They have meals and lessons. Hygiene lessons. Washing, clean.
Different groups of kids, sleeping, activities. Other must be quiet while children are sleeping.
No windows in kindergarten. 1 fan circulates the air. Just some children can afford.
Many children left at home, locked in house while Mom and Dad work, no learning.
Television entertains
Back of room sleep, front for play activities.

15:00 Jackie Pullinger Rehab Center
Under ground passages for drugs. Drug dens(Opium and Heroine)
“Rauschgift” = dope
She helps to get off heroine without drugs(methadone)
She talks to them in tongues, they go into trance.
She talk to them and they shake, their body shakes to get dope out of them.
All other see trance and they must do this to get off dope.
She is their last hope.
Addicts work for Mafia(Triads) Triads don’t like addicts to get off dope.
Some have been on heroine for 15 years.
She(Pullinger) lives in Walled City. No windows, don’t know if day or night.
Her house is always wet. She thinks the city is not healthy.
“They would be better to move out.” Stale, damp air

Street shot
Many live here all their lives.
Kwong Ming Street—Bright Street is dark!
Rainstorms flood many streets.
Some streets abandoned , too much debris(trash)

19:26 Stand Pipes
Safe drinking water, not all wells safe to drink from.
Wealthier people have running water in their homes, all others must go to standpipes.
Some pay to have water hauled up to their houses.
Some well water stains clothes. Many wash clothes at standpipes to prevent hauling water up.


20:48 Scavenger Salvage
She salvages old pipes. Not worth much money.
She lives hand to mouth

Stairs, Power, & Mail
Better off have personal mail boxes. All have power, city law
No elevators. Some building 15 floors high





21:37 Old Lady
Walk 10 floors to home. 82 years (old)
She is afraid of burglars. She makes superstitious motions at door to keep thieves out.
Her apartment is 16 sq meters(172 sq ft)
One room and a kitchen and (bathroom)
Kitchen and personal possession (in entrance)
She rents one room out.
She has one son, but he has nothing to do with her. No help.

23:30 Old Couples
Many share cooking. They live for themselves.
They lived here for 25 years and barely see sunlight.
He made(makes?) dolls, cheap pay

24:30 Homeless in Walled City
They look for a dry place to sleep.
They get asked to leave, but someone else replaces them.
They sleep with dead rats

25:00 Ex-Addict
He was kicked out of home. He gets small pension.
Cigarettes and rice wine.
Lives in 4 sq meters(6’ x 7’ ft room)

25:48 Walk the Birds
Pets are birds. House birds
Nightingales must have light. Takes to roof for sunlight.
Canadian Nightingales. He gives them a bath.
The Walled City has grown into flight path(Kai Tak)
Most noisy in daylight, every twice minute(30 seconds)

27:38 Racing Pigeon Breeder
He breeds racing pigeons.
Races pigeons to Shanghai and Canton
All birds have band. More money for fastest birds.
No breeding animals allowed in Hong Kong.
Walled City only place to raise birds.
One pigeon can cost HK$50,000 (appx $7,000US)
Guard dog watches bird(?)

29:06 Old Ladies Play Cards
Play cards outside in fresh air. Play for a little money .
They are good at playing.
Women play only, the men play different games for more money

30:00 Shrine
Pray to ghost for good luck.
Communicate with spirits, make happy
See if they win game

30:33 Fortune Tellers
Fortune Bird. Trained to foresee. He picks fortune
Palm Reading. She has good business

31:20 Dentists
Learned trade from Father & Uncle when teenager.
Displays good teeth(dentures) Mostly dentures and teeth cleanings.



32:32 Herb Shop
Plants, animals drug store
Mix and Cook. Ointment topical application



33:18 Home Shrine
House seller agent died recently.
People die young in Walled City.
Family shrine(?) Food offerings, favorite foods, cigarettes to send with him.
All family members attends to him


Street shot
Evening now.
Work 12 hours. Nighttime
It’s dark outside, everyone goes home

35:02 Restaurant
Street food outside for those who can afford it. All shell fish are fresh. Foods are fresh.
You can tell Walled City Residents by their clothes when they come outside(to eat)
Some eat in city (inside city) restaurants for residents.

36:13 Entertainment
Old traditional songs from 100 years ago.
Sing for rich and poor, music just like 100 years ago.

37:34 End
When you go outside, you see old China in new China.
Residents lost in time
Out of a village came a big town
Police keep eye out
The city is still there, higher up, more crates(balconies)
The Walled City protects the honest and dishonest people

[MolsonExport]

^the link is incorrect, but I found the information. Thanks for that! How is your project on the WCK going?

[MolsonExport]

WCK art:

http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs37/i/2009/209/e/f/KOWLOON_Walled_City_by_HR_FM.jpg
deviantart.net by HR_FM

[SAM_1234]

If you like Hong Kong Kung Fu movies, then
Kung Fu Hustle is a fun movie to watch.
It has definite references to the Walled City.

Kung Fu Hustle and the Walled City
references from Jump Cut review

Link for full text:
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Szeto/2.html


>>>>>>
"Pig Sty Alley is “Chu Lung Shing Chai,” which is a Cantonese

pun on the Kowloon Walled City (“Gau Lung Shing Chai”)."


.....Pig Sty Alley and its residents are reminiscent of the Hong

Kong film The House of 72 Tenants (1972). Chow mentioned

that he created Pig Sty from his childhood experience, with the

design of the Alley being similar to the crowded Hong Kong

complexes of his youth (City 34). In the film Pig Sty Alley is set

against huge commercial billboards of local Hong Kong

businesses or products such as traditional Chinese bakeries and

herbal syrup. Despite its local connections, “Pig Sty Alley”

literally has translocal association with one of the earliest

gangster films by D.W. Griffith, The Musketeers of Pig Alley

(1912). These crosscultural references are further complicated

by the fact that the Chinese translation of Pig Sty Alley is “Chu

Lung Shing Chai,” which is a Cantonese pun on the Kowloon

Walled City (“Gau Lung Shing Chai”). In commenting on

Chow’s recoding and play on Cantonese slang, Linda Lai Chiu

-Han notes that Chow’s early nonsensical films are executed

with a “rhetoric of subversion” (as distinguished from actual

“subversion”) that opposes official discourse. The films indicate

a politics of “internal commemoration” that creates a sense of

solidarity among the local viewers that is impenetrable to those

“outside” viewers who are not part of this communal

membership (246).

.....In Kung Fu Hustle, this Cantonese reference to the Kowloon

Walled City marks out a distinct territory of word play that is

impenetrable to audiences who are outside of the Hong Kong

community. The Kowloon Walled City has a unique role in

Hong Kong's colonial history. It was China's tiny enclave in the

middle of British Hong Kong for decades, an extra-territory

within the British colonial Hong Kong that became a place of

no-man’s land since even the British colonialist did not have

sovereignty over it. It was said that as late as the 1970s the local

triads were the only real administration within the Walled City

until it was finally torn down in 1993 (Leung 34). Chow

expands his early nonsensical wordplay of Cantonese

vocabulary and slang, and in Kung Fu Hustle creates a new

source of communal solidarity for Hong Kong people who are

familiar with the history of the Walled City.


...In this case, the Walled City is a nodal point of the anarchic

social landscape of jianghu. In 1997, the Hong Kong Special

Administrative Region (HKSAR) enacted a Basic Law providing

those regions with a high degree of autonomy, a separate

political system and a capitalist economy, under the principle of

"one country, two systems" proposed by Deng Xiaoping.

Despite Hong Kong's political transformation from a former

British colony to part of the PRC, Chow attempts to replace the

reality of post-1997 Hong Kong and its reunification with the

PRC with his own imaginative projection of the present on to a

Kowloon Walled City/ Shanghai in which histories of British

colonialism and Chinese revolution/ socialism are to be

suspended. He also projects such a present onto a 1940s urban

gangland, which has clear crosscultural references to both U.S.

and Hong Kong gangster films. Kung Fu Hustle, therefore,

redefines China by imagining Shanghai before 1949 and

transposing it into an urban landscape nurtured in a capitalist

economy and ideology.
>>>>

[SAM_1234]

http://www.youtube.com/user/kowloonsgate522

[SAM_1234]

Sorry goofed that up

Will try again


Kowloons Gate video playthrough.
http://www.youtube.com/user/kowloonsgate522


There's about 50 videos.
All in Japanese, but the signs are in Chinese with quite abit of English for some reeason.


Shows passages and various buildings.
Don't know how percisly accurate, but has quite abit of detail.
Pipes, wires, the wet passages and the host of metal gates that
poliferated the Walled City

[MolsonExport]

what an awesome landscape for a quest computer game: the walled city of Kowloon. Something like Doom, perhaps.

[chemkid]

@MolsonExport

thank you for starting this thread. the collection of kwc material is awesome!

some years ago i stumbled over some information regarding kwc, and i was pretty surprised to find out that i've already been there playing shenmue 2 on dreamcast.. ;-)

the book 'city of darkness' was on my must-have list but the price of the english release much to high. i went with the japanese version. same pictures and almost as easy to understand if one has a japanese background. lucky me!

anyway, the documentary from haymann lau came to my attention and i, too, was searching for a way to get my eyes on this film. no luck, though... i lost track of her in australia (some kind of goverment office...) and never tried the telefon number provided on their old webpage. too sad, this documentary seems so promising. i can't understand that they keep the film closed to the public. ???

i was so surprised to find this forum... in my quest for kowloon material i totally overlooked to search the forums. hahaha!

nobody, at least it seems so, has replyed to this thread with a link to gibson's book 'idoru'... funny, because he has some kwc links, too. anyhow, a digital version of kwc is on it's way and will be released someday.

the images in this thread are almost always from 'regular' imagesearch. whenever you search on flicker, for example, you'll find so much more. especially the scale model of kwc. very fine material for measurements and other rebuilding hints.

before finishing this post, please check the wonderjapan magazine.

http://wonderjapan.jp/w/

if you're able to order this magazine or can visit japan... please have a look!

cheers and thanks again!


chem!

[MolsonExport]

^thanks for the link. I will be in Japan for a conference in September.

[Cornholio0815]

Hi all,

what a fascinating bunch of buildings...! Found this article about about 'The Walled City'.

http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/6408/die_festung_der_friedlichen_anarchie.html


However it's only in german, it shows some pics as well, probably from the book 'City of Darkness:
Life in Kowloon Walled City'.

I don't know if it has alredy been posted, but for everyone interested in the book...
it can be found and ordered here...

http://www.watermarkpublications.co.uk/kowloon.htm


Best regards
Cornholio0815

[MolsonExport]

^At least three forumers own copies of that book, including myself (a very, very, very good read).

[SAM_1234]

Molson(and all others), here's a couple of 1970's clips from RTHK TV
on YouTube from our friend the KWC Phantom.

Some more inside footage

http://www.youtube.com/user/KWCPhantom

[MolsonExport]

Thanks for that link...I am enjoying it now as I eat my lunch.

[YoMattD]

Count me as another one who is happily surprised that this thread isn't dead!

MolsonExport - thanks for starting and tending to this thread - it's great.

teekay - You've done a great job with the Wikipedia article - kudos.

In fact, I dug through the links in the references section from the article and found some things that I don't think have been posted in this thread yet.

Another ground level map, including the locations of the 8 standpipes:

http://imgur.com/6wG41.png

And this interesting tidbit:

"According to a survey conducted by the Kowloon Walled City Kai Fong Welfare Advancement Association in 1983, there was a total of 645 business and factory establishments operating within the Walled City. These include 89 clinics, 97 dental clinics, 77 shops, 28 restaurants, 12 electrical appliance shops, 10 real estate agencies, 30 factories in textiles, 44 in garment manufacturing, 35 in meat and 33 in cake production."

source for both: Ho Siu Fong, Betty. (1986) "Redevelopment of the Kowloon Walled City: a feasibility study" University of Hong Kong


I also read that because developers were limited to buildings under a certain level, they often minimized floor-to-floor heights to maximize how many units they could sell. You can kind of see this in some of the exterior photos, where the stories don't always match up from building to building. It is somewhat frightening to think about just how high people would have tried to build KWC if it wasn't for Kai Tak being so close by.

edited for clarity

[MolsonExport]

^Great contribution! I had not come across this map before. I find the business statistics very interesting. In "City of Darkness", there were 3-5 page segments with photos of BBQ-pork roasting businesses (The whole pig roasted at once), fishball factories (apparently supplying 90% of the entire market in Hong Kong), candy factories (with 30 people tediously wrapping hard candy, all day, everyday), family-run noodle factories (everything covered in thick rice-flour dust, but for the lit cigarettes). Also, there were literally hundreds of unlicensed dental establishments. Get a tooth yanked, and pick up your roasted whole BBQ pig. One stop shopping in the Walled City of Kowloon.

[SAM_1234]

YoMatt, does the article have a lists of the manufacturers at the time?
We are trying to locate a couple of manufacturers from there at
the time.

Thanks

[YoMattD]

...one stop shopping...

I get the impression from my readings that many, if not most, of the inhabitants of KWC rarely left the complex. I can see this being true if you were an illegal immigrant or someone wanted on criminal charges: why leave the relative safety of the city when you risk being deported or arrested outside of the city?

Too, given the general lack of city services and infrastructure, there were many opportunities for work. Some of the common jobs I've seen mentioned are water deliveries (from water suppliers that mixed water from the standpipes with water from private wells to increase supply), emptying chamber pots (!!), and delivering messages within KWC.

YoMatt, does the article have a lists of the manufacturers at the time?
We are trying to locate a couple of manufacturers from there at
the time.

Unfortunately, the document I've been quoting from doesn't give much more information about the business aspects of KWC. The lack of tax records and such makes it hard to quantify the full scope of the economics of KWC. However, there is a chart showing the general location of businesses by type, cross-referenced by street (hope it helps!):

http://imgur.com/OWU0Y.png

I've been searching in my free time for the original study by the KWC Kai Fong Welfare Advancement Committee, but haven't had any luck yet. I feel like I've exhausted searches at google.com and have been doing searches at google.hk, making extensive using of online translators.


Which reminds me: as someone mentioned earlier, doing image searches in Chinese at google.hk is a great way to find information about KWC.

I stumbled across the following picture in one of those searches. I forget the original source, but it appears to come from one the Hong Kong Library resources. It's an interesting picture, an angle you don't often see of the KWC:

(Thumbnail shown below. Click image for larger original. ~770 KB)
http://imgur.com/AqjYXl.jpg (http://imgur.com/AqjYX.jpg)

I'm not sure when the photo is dated, but it was taken at an interesting time for the KWC. The land just to the N/NW of KWC (across Tung Tau Tsuen Road) has been cleared for new development, but the complex has not yet been built (and the name of that apartment complex escapes me at the moment). The squatter complex to the south hasn't been cleared out yet either, and I'm guessing that the clearing of those shacks either caused or greatly enhanced KWC's incredible growth in the '70's and '80's.

In this photo, it appears to still be a relatively reasonable place to live, before massive internal development made it into the beast of later years.

I've spent more time on this today than I should have :D, but I will post more again later as I find interesting things to share!

[MolsonExport]

Fantastic shot. Never seen that angle before...I posted something from the same era c. 1973 back on the first page.

[YoMattD]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the photo is from within a year or two of the aerial shot from 1973. You can see the apartment complex across the street being built in 1973, where in the earlier photo the land has just been cleared.

I've had fun looking at these shots and then comparing them with later exterior shots, trying to find the same buildings again!

[YoMattD]

I found some more interesting stuff for everybody.

I found the web site for the KWC Kai Fong Welfare Advancement Association and they have a few photo galleries. One has several group photos from over the years, and even includes a scan of an eviction notice from the end.

(Click thumbnails for links)
http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/table/intro_history/intro_history_figure13.jpg (http://www.klnwcity.org/intro/intro_history.html)

I also found some kind of Chinese aggregate site, which turned out to be a little gold mine. http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/tags/listing.php?tid=189
None of the online translators made much sense of the articles, so I will just link to the them directly and post summaries of what made sense from the translators.

First, a link to a story of the guy that drew the map we see most often online - Mr. Chan Cheung. He was a mechanical engineer and drew several maps of KWC. He and his wife even lived in KWC for awhile to save money. When asked if had been worried about living there, he said that he had played there as a kid with a friend and was already familiar with life there and liked it. He was a volunteer for the KWC Kaifong Welfare Association and they used one of his maps as part of their work. His map was so well made that the fire department even used it (at least once).

http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/uploads/th_12390731064525.jpg (http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/missionX/hintsinfo.php?id=503)

On another page, there's a video where somebody talks about the map for some length, again all in Chinese. It may be the same guy, but I really have no idea. However, there are some interesting maps on the same page. One is the map from above, but another is a map from 1981 that I haven't seen elsewhere yet. There is also some kind of line plan of a building, I think.

http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/uploads/th_12387555169012.jpg (http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/missionX/hintsinfo.php?id=496)

One really interesting page with another video talks about the census data collected in 1987 for the KWC. From what I can tell from the online translators, only aggregate statistical census data is kept long term in Hong Kong. The author (or speaker) believes that due to the unique situation and place that was the KWC, the individual census records from it should be kept as well as a matter of history. He goes on to say that future generations should know more about the KWC than just "subjective images and photos of the dark side".

http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/uploads/th_12387555544372.jpg (http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/missionX/hintsinfo.php?id=498)

Also on that page is this amazing image, a sample of the census data collected.

http://hkfilex.rthk.org.hk/uploads/12389287529488.jpg

There are three pages of articles at the link above to the aggregate site. Some of them are articles or videos that have already been posted here, but some of it is new, too.

Enjoy!

[MolsonExport]

^these are outstanding finds. Great archival material for WCK fanatics.