Kowloon Walled City: Hong Kong's City of Darkness

Imagine, if you will, a city of eternal night. A place so intensely crowded that sunlight never penetrates its alleyways. Overhead, wires dangle from the ceilings. Neon signs fizz in doorways. All around you, 33,000 people are crammed into self-built apartments barely 10m square, while overhead great airships rumble through sky. Is this a vision from the future? The setting, perhaps, for some dystopian sci-fi novel?

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Credits:
Host - Simon Whistler
Author - Morris M.
Producer - Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer - Shell Harris

Source/Further reading:

[geographicstravel]

Have you checked out my latest channel Business Blaze? It's interesting business stories with a dose of ridiculousness thrown in. Check it out here: 

[alivation]

I walked around inside the walled city once in 1986 with a friend. The taxi driver who dropped us off told us it was dangerous and not to go in there but we went anyway. For fear of getting lost in there we walked one block in and travelled along that street which was no more than a metre wide. I remember passing a noodle business with the cook smoking a ciggy while pulling masses of noodles from a huge cooker. No work, health and safety to worry about. Same for the multiple dentist shops we passed all with old, slow speed drills. The sewerage, electricity and water supply were all in pipes suspended by wire just above our heads. There were electric lights, just bare bulbs, strung along above the street too as there was no daylight. When I looked up the sky was just a blue slit, at what looked like miles above. Waste water flowed out of the city from a big pipe at the far end of this street into an open culvert that I assumed emptied into the Kowloon sewerage system. We tried to find a way further in but were deterred by the darkness, leaking water from overhead and a complete lack of orientation to any landmarks with which to navigate our way back out. It was a great experience. No one hassled us or even took much notice of us. It seemed pretty safe to me. It was a scary environment though.

[LeeviHokka]

It's fascinating to read the comments of people's first-hand experience with the KWC. Around late 1993, a friend and I, both architecture students at the time, sneaked into the KWC while it was being demolished. Long story short, the place was like a giant 3D ant farm! We went through connecting buildings, explored rooms, looked at photos and stuff left behind (we didn't take anything, and made sure to leave things in their original places), and got a glimpse of how people could maintain normal lives in an abnormal environment. Our adventure ended when we unexpectedly reached the exposed face of a demolished wall of buildings, and got spotted by the site security guards. They ordered us down and frogmarched us to the site office, where we met with the boss in charge. He turned out to be the demolition project's Chief Engineer, who, after learning that we were architecture students, very kindly gave us a lecture on the (lack of) structural enginnering of the KWC and how the demolition was being carried out. He even handed out photocopied engineering notes for our learning benefits before shooing us away and telling us not to come back. 😅

[aaronseet]

Mind-boggling how they managed to organically stack apartment blocks vertically without the whole thing collapsing.

[StonedtotheBones]

The fact that the architecture grew organically and on top of each other reminds me of that prehistoric village they found where you had to walk on top of different height roofs to get to the houses in the middle.

[iczerone]

I use to live about 15 blocks away from the Walled City when I was a kid and would always run around with my cousins and friends in that area. But my mom wouldn't allow me to cross the street onto the walled city side because she said it was a bad place. I would just look at it from across the street and never thought anything about it. Now that it's gone and turned into a public park. I wish I had taken a picture of it! I'll aways remember that place and the planes over head that were arriving into Kai Tak Airport. Every time a plane that had to abort the landing, they would power up the engines with a huge rumbling sound and my house would start shaking like it was a big earthquake! I will never forget it! Ahh... The memories of Kowloon City!

[gammosiuwong]

I was the Royal Hong Kong Police Inspector briefly in charge of the Walled City around 1986. This is a very good portrayal of what it was ; a place I'll never forget. 
We once saw an opium den through a crack in the wall and it took days to find our way into it. Acceptable public pathways went through peoples living spaces, lounges, toilets, small windows etc. Electricity was abstracted and often dangerous. There was a cannon beside the primary school right in the centre ; above which there was netting to catch all the discarded rubbish - often filled nappy's. The rats were the biggest I've ever seen. The dim sum was the best. The dentists used real teeth for dentures. The triads knew us and we them - there was a level of mutual understanding. The only other white faces were American Jehovahs witnesses. We used to watch drug dealers through binoculars operate in the nearby public housing estates from the roof while 747's flew into Kai Tak overhead so close that you could see the passengers faces quite clearly. 
The people were extraordinary - but then the Hong Kong Chinese are. I still miss them.

[coyotearmory]

Personally, if love to talk to a kowloon mailman, I bet those guys have some stories to tell.

[ignitionfrn]

1:20 - Chapter 1 - A building outside the law
4:30 - Chapter 2 - A home for the homeless
8:15 - Chapter 3 - Life in darkness
11:05 - Chapter 4 - Organizing anarchy
14:30 - Chapter 5 - A transfer of power
17:10 - Chapter 6 - Death of a dream

[peterka]

I remember going there a few times for the food and other "pleasures" before it got torn down. An amazing place. But I see from the comments that some people are under the impression that it functioned completely independently from Hong Kong. It didn't. A lot of the residents commuted to work outside the walled city, all were considered Hong Kong residents and Hong Kong supplied the water and electricity - some of which was actually paid for. The only thing that made it different was that there was no effective law enforcement.

Also another reason why Beijing was so happy to see it go after 1989 was that it was a safe harbor for people fleeing the purges following Tienanmen square. Anyone who made it across the border could get lost in the Walled City, untouchable by both HK and Beijing forces until it was safe to emerge

[patrickpatman]

I visited The Walled City in 1991 twice.
I remember the Temple in the first floor.
The cannons that are seen in the old pictures were still there I saw two on the side of one of these streets alley ways. When venturing down the ally’s or streets there was so much water coming down to the ground level from air conditioning or water pipes. The residents were nice enough and went about their business there were lots of noodle makers.
The only “ fear “ I had was the electric wires just everywhere and due to the amount of water coming down one had to walk close to the walls where those electrical wires were. My fear was getting electrical shocked 😳
I remember one shopkeeper who was living with his family invited us in and shared his drinks with us and we bought them drinks in return.
For me personally I feel very lucky to have visited The Walled City.

[charon]

Imagine being so disorganized that an organization of criminals feels responsible for the city.
(This was made for almost a year ago, if you have a problem with this. It will be ignored)

[tuileries]

I am from Hong Kong and feel very surprised (positively) to see this video! Hong Kong is a small place and I thought no one paid attention to things like the walled city, which no longer exists. Usually people just talk about the skyscrapers and dim sum...

[Ohfishyfishyfish]

Two very normal words put together sound terrifying: "unlicensed dentist".

[frankhaugen]

It should have been placed on UNESCO's world heritage list, because it was something that should have been preserved as a special cultural significant place

[ZBmechanical]

Well this proves the statement "What some consider hell others consider home".

[BrightGarlick]

As an Ozzy expat kid I used to walk through the lower alleyway whenever I could and as fast as I could trying not to get wet. When I eventually lost my fear it became an amazing place and my one regret is that I never went upstairs. But I used to spend hours on the nearby hill at the back of Mei Tung Estate watching the rooftops and voyeuring at people living their life in the sun and wind, as opposed to many below. When I went back to boarding school no one ever believed that such a place existed and that I'd seen and photographed the densest place on Earth. The city opened my eyes to poverty, resilience, drug addiction and adaptability and I'll never forget the dentists and their dentures or the small factories in the middle of the darkness. It's hard to believe it's become so mythical and now just a memory. It taught me about the dangers if human over population and what density can do to a human being. My photos are all that remains of a fascinating journey into the unknown and unbelievable. Thanks for the video. Just remember, only some of the city was a city if darkness! At its centre was light.

[UchihaMadara]

Kowloon, The Walled City sounds like an area in Dark Souls

[Britton_Thompson]

The multilevel ecumenopolis of Coruscant in Star Wars is also based on Kowloon City. George Lucas has always been fascinated by the historic and cultural aspects of Asian culture that oftentimes seem alien and incomprehensible to Westerners. Primarily, he loved the idea of his galaxy's capitol being an empty promise; a masquerade hiding the ugly truth beneath it.

At first glance Coruscant is the flourishing crown jewel of the Galactic Republic. In truth, the ultra technologically advanced and enlightened society on the surface is a thin veneer masking the squalor 95% of it's population lives in beneath the gleaming spires of it's surface levels. Lucas loved the symbolism of a civilization who never addressed it's fundamental flaws or considered rebuilding itself from the ground up, but one that instead fell into a neverending ideological tug of war between light(Jedi) and dark(Sith). A civilization in a repeating cycle of overthrowing the previous ruling class and erasing them from history by covering up and building over them.

The levels on Coruscant now stretch upwards for several miles above the planet's natural surface, and it's lowest levels are subarctic in temperature and choked in total blackness as a result of no sunlight reaching it.

[mattyleduc]

I was 16 years old when I first travelled to Kowloon with my good friend, Ryo Hazuki. You would not believe the amount of street fights and gambling he got into..