Pardon any grammar and diction issues. I wrote this essay when I was a lot less competent in English. Since it was handed over to Britain in 1912, Kowloon Walled City has stood out from the rest of Hong Kong with its offbeat community and bulging population. Considered to have the highest population density in the world at its height in the 1980s, the Walled City was an example of a community dictated by crime for much of its existence, and yet thousands of people immigrated there willingly and created lives within the miniature and autonomous city. The Walled City grew into a community filled with nefarious activity, yet also full of everyday people working against the tides of Hong Kong’s unforgiving job market. Despite its crime-driven climate after the Second World War and its horrific labor conditions, the City created a strong society of people brought together in collective struggles, and impressively managed to sustain itself in the modern world as the densest city on Earth.
The history of the once Chinese fort spans one thousand years. The Walled City was originally a fort built during the Song dynasty (960-1279) by the Chinese to guard the Hong Kong harbor. The fort stood tall at the beginning of the 20th century until the British were given control of the fort at the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, and Kowloon became barren, existing only to fascinate visiting British in Hong Kong and entertain visiting foreigners. By 1933, the first wave of squatters started living in the City and the Hong Kong government began pushing for the demolition of squatter occupied buildings. Fundamental change came in World War II, during a brief occupation of the fort by the Japanese when they destroyed the outer wall of the City. Eventually, the wall was replaced by a row of shacks with unstable infrastructure. The new city created in the wake of the war turned into a squatters paradise: shambles atop of shambles as people gradually built up and up only to stop before they blocked the flight path to the nearby airport. Intricate alleys lay inside and an aura of musk surrounded the homes of up to 50,000 people in the late 1980s. In a photograph taken by Greg Girard at the Walled City’s architectural peak in the late 80s, the City resembled tin cans, crushed and mashed together in a pile of scrap metal. In 1947, the new Chinese government began a campaign to reclaim the Walled City from the now idle British; this sparked the City’s legal dark zone. Immigrants from mainland China poured into the city looking for better lives. With the area now neglected by the British and Chinese, a second wave of squatters started to build atop the ruins left by the Japanese. When the prohibition of opium and brothels commenced in Hong Kong after World War II, the City, under its legal vagueness, became the host to many wishing to profit off of the cheap labor available. While the rest of Hong Kong adopted policies of law and order, becoming a very clean society, Kowloon remained a pocket for lascivious activities and drugs. Mainland Chinese continued to move to the City, some under the guidance of the Communist Party of China, others escaping the Hong Kong job market and they were accompanied by Hong Kong natives trying to delve into the criminal aspect of Kowloon, and even manage crime in Hong Kong under the relative safety of the City’s confines. From the 1940s onward, the City became a sanctuary for crime. While there was strife between the colony of the City and the rest of Hong Kong, mainland China supported and controlled it as an outpost. Thus, the Walled City remained standing through the 1960s and beyond despite increasing pressure from Hong Kong authorities to shut it down. With the continued growth of its community, the Walled City approached its understood peak capacity in terms of then built buildings in the late 1950s and remained unsubjugated by British and Hong Kong authorities to end it. With the rise in population, the Walled City took the most recognizable form of its legacy, a slum filled with criminals and unlawful workers, but also with people previously deterred by their situations and wanting to start anew in Hong Kong society. Hong Kong’s strict professional regulations and requirements for licenses drove many to the Walled City where they could charge lower rates than if they worked in the main city, bringing regular Hong Kong citizens to the Walled City and creating a unique economy no longer based on crime, as it had been for the preceding twenty years. Seemingly ordinary workers lived and died in the Walled City and were held there due to their illegal status outside the walls. These unfortunate denizens relied on jobs in the City for their small apartments and would often be trapped by unfair contracts with extreme conditions with horrible hours, forced to live their lives and often raise their families there, adding future Walled City workers. In the 1988 documentary titled Hong Kong's Secret City, a team of videographers delve into the Walled City and experience the everyday life of the city but also the accepted gangs, brothels and other sections which would be considered illegal outside. Those criminal operations were allowed to operate due to the lack of authority within since the Chinese were technically in control of the City, but the British refused to let Chinese officials into the city, forcing the regulations of the city to be under the control of Kowloon Walled City Kaifong Association, an association created for serving residents of the neighborhood, allowing the former city block to feel like it was lawless. The blend of legal and illegal situations are displayed as the documentarians explore the upper levels of the City. One key focus is on ordinary life within the dank chambers. Kids are shown doing homework and studying as their parents work. Labor was much cheaper in the City and is described in the film while showing adults working in sweatshop-like conditions. The products created in the City were often sold to prominent shops and restaurants in Hong Kong, establishing a reliance on the Walled City from many business owners in Hong Kong who relied on the cheap labor. Underlying the working nature of the Walled City was a mafia known as the Triad, which operated in Kowloon Walled City starting after its relinquishment from the Japanese at the end of World War II. By the 1970s, crime in the City began to fall, as a real community of hardworking residents rose. As the videographers continue through the gang-infested labyrinth, another very common occupation for Walled City residents comes into view: dentistry. Dentistry was a thriving business in the Walled City. Because of the difficulty associated with obtaining a dentistry license in Hong Kong, many made their way to the Walled City to avoid prosecution and work freely, despite the dim lights and frequent sewage dripping from the ceilings. Dentists poured into the Walled City from mainland China and many who could not find work in Hong Kong quickly took up shop there. As a result, starting around the same time as the Triad gang’s takeover, Hong Kong citizens ventured into the walled city looking for cheaper dentist rates. That cheapness drove Kowloon Walled City’s economy. Cheap labor and services enticed outsiders, yet simultaneously created harsh conditions for the people inside from predatory bosses taking advantage of limited surveillance and hard to enforce laws. The documentary visits a kindergarten in the middle of the City, run by the Salvation Army; it was the only school in the entire block by the 1970s. The demanding work of the adults shows in the education and lives of their children, as the children living in the City apartments have free time throughout the day and only a few are lucky enough to go to school outside. The lack of City infrastructure created a need for water and power that prompted the population to develop their non-municipal solutions. From the 1960s to the 90s, many gangs, as well as normal denizens, installed illegal power lines, which were connected from surrounding buildings and laced through the tunnels. It was an adequate power system, but it was also a vulnerable system that could be taken under control by anyone who owned a line cutter. The crafty nature of the power system, seen in a photo by Greg Girard in City of Darkness Revisited, helps illustrate the shared mindset in the society of the Walled City--a mindset of just trying to get by. That mindset was taken up by most who came looking for cheaper work or to escape homelessness. People worked in the City just to survive in the slum, in a lifestyle as tenuous as the clumps of electrical wires illegally pulling power from nearby buildings. While gangs like the Triad operated the bulk of criminal activities, other malpracticing individuals came to operate their criminal organizations inside of the walls. Often, food processors would deliberately move to the City to escape food inspectors, who were strict and drove these people away from operating in the main city. This picture also by Girard, a longtime documentarian of the City, catches two workers handling the carcasses of pigs and other livestock. Both do not wear gloves and are smoking, showing an unsanitary environment in a place processing a lot of food, which would later be distributed in surrounding Hong Kong. From this image, a sense of uncaring is conveyed by the laborer’s demeanors and rough setting, but they and others were responsible for the mass exportation of meats and other foods. The City served as a midpoint in the distribution chain, as food was brought there primarily just to be brought back out. In the picture, the two men are described as skinning dog carcasses, which reflects the lawlessness of the area, as the British had outlawed dog meat in Hong Kong in 1950, adding another reason for outsiders to want to come into the City. Dog meat restaurants were prominent in the years after the ban, and the City was the perfect place to establish these restaurants where nobody would stop them and they were supported by the lack of restaurants elsewhere. But because the City became known as a slum to the general public of Hong Kong, by the late 1970s, the Walled City was very unappealing for people to visit, even if to obtain or experience things normally unavailable to them. Just as it offered a market for dog meat, the Walled City also served as a useful place for outside restaurants to source ingredients, especially fishballs. These fish balls were essential to many cuisines in Hong Kong, so naturally, the ones from the City were purchased in great demand due to the lower price of labor inside. Keeping with the characteristics of jobs in the City, workers produced so many fish balls, not only because of unsanitary cooking methods but also because of the sheer amount of work forced upon the laborers. In an image from City of Darkness Revisited taken by Ian Lambot, a man removes raw fish balls from a large boiler. Like the workers in the other photos, the smoking man wears no protection and is inside a very hot and dirty room, and explains why he is wearing shorts and a t-shirt to a job where burns were common. The daring nature of the picture speaks to the conditions where he, like the majority of workers in the City, worked in dungeon-like conditions. These people reflect the sad truth behind the City, the realization that they are just trying to get through their lives, and are forced to work in extremely inhumane spaces with limited protection. Due to the City’s lawlessness, these people are trapped there without legal status, while the people running the operations in the shadows walk around freely in their sanctuary between the walls. That haven for malpractice only lasted for so long. As more people moved to the semi-independent city in the early 1970s, the Walled City’s collective identity began to shine. Due to rising property taxes in Hong Kong and a decrease in crime in the City, working-class people streamed into the labyrinth and propelled the Walled City to its highest population density. The Kaifong Association of the Walled City was created in the early 1960s and joined the citizens together as it worked to “clean up the Walled City,” and established a collective identity based on the history of the city. The Kaifong association, combined with the lack of property taxes, allowed people to move into a now relatively safe enclave separated from ordinary Hong Kong. The association worked to clean up the physical space by adding proper utilities, and also cleaned up the reputation of the Walled City as police took a greater presence within the walls to negate the prior domination of crime. Despite the work of the Kaifong, the Walled City was later demolished. However, an enduring image of new collectivism was created through the work to unite City residents beyond their circumstances and deep history, successfully creating a community able to survive in a very downtrodden setting. By around the end of the 1970s, the majority of visible crime had been shut down due to Hong Kong police now being stationed in the Walled City. Contrary to popular belief, Hong Kong police began cracking down on the high crime of the City when they established small stations within it. The new police activity was certainly enough to keep larger crime down, but the permanent factory conditions continued for the workers. Petty crime continued too, but at a much smaller rate than in the 1950s, and decreased while more and more people moved into the community. In 1990, an anonymous policeman described the criminal activity when he was positioned in the City in the mid-1980s, saying, “When I first took up my assignment, the City was still thriving and everything was very much out in the open. It’s become so quiet these days!... The City has never been that much different from other areas.” With the quelling of crime as described in this quote, combined with the Kaifong Association’s work to unite the community, and the influx of working-class people moving in to escape higher rents elsewhere, towards the end of its lifetime in the late 1980s to 1993, the City became a much safer and connected community, united behind the City’s history and the combined struggle of its people. Even with such a strong community, demolition of the City began in 1993. Many factors led up to this, particularly that the City was considered a visual disruption of Hong Kong’s modern skyline. And despite the new police presence, the City remained a haven for crime. After compensating the residents and businesses with 2.7 billion Hong Kong Dollars, the Hong Kong government began moving residents out, and then demolished the City in 1994. Later that year, work began on a park in the footprint of the seven-acre City to emblematize the extensive history of the deconstructed fort and the enduring squatter society that lived there. The Walled City was home to many immigrants, lots of crime, and a dense community of every-day working adults and children. Nevertheless, it surprisingly endured mainly because of the Kaifong Association’s unifying efforts and the basic will of its residents. Today, Kowloon Walled City lives on in its memorial park, in popular culture (for example, in video games, art exhibits, and movies), and in the memories of the former residents who are still alive today. Bibliography Bada, Ferdinand. "What Was the Kowloon Walled City?" WorldAtlas. Last modified January 7, 2019. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-was-the-kowloon-walled-city.html. Baddeley, Hugh. "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down." Salvation Army, 1. 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSjU4GiZ3U. Blundy, Rachel. 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