I have already seen this photo many times and even had a rough idea of where this place is and why it is. However, everywhere I read completely scattered information. Let's collect everything in one place and find out the detailed history of this unusual place.
Not a single photograph of Kowloon Walled City taken by tourists in due time can convey the true appearance of this "city". Most of all, Kowloon resembled a communal apartment, in which at the end of the 90s of the last century … more than 30 thousand people lived simultaneously!
The history of this strange structure began many hundreds of years ago, when one of the Chinese emperors decided to build a small fortress on a coastal piece of land to protect it from robbers. The site for the fortress was chosen not far from one of the nine mountains that dominated the peninsula. (Actually, the word "kowloon" is translated as "nine dragons" and, most likely, this name referred precisely to the nine mountains).
The fortress received a similar name.
So, 1841. Great Britain is waging a successful war against the Chinese Qing Empire. At the heart of the conflict is the desire of the British crown to sell more and more opium to the local people on the one hand and the audacious decision of some Chinese officials to ban the import of Bengal drugs into the Middle Kingdom on the other.
One of the episodes of that long history, which naturally ended in favor of the white man carrying his burden with fire and sword, was the landing of the British troops on the island of Hong Kong and the neighboring Kowloon Peninsula. On the peninsula, the British found only a small town of the same name, Kowloon (translated as "Nine Dragons") and a fortified fort that served as the residence of the local Mandarin. As a result of this First Opium War in 1842, the British ceded the island of Hong Kong, and in 1898 a new convention was concluded, expanding the jurisdiction of the empire, over which the sun never sets, to the peninsula (the so-called "New Territories"). Under the terms of the agreement, which, as practice showed, was rigorously observed, Hong Kong and Kowloon were leased by the UK for the next 99 years under one small circumstance that had big consequences.
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This circumstance is marked on the map above as Chinese Town ("Chinese city", upper right corner). According to the 1898 convention, the fortified fort where the Chinese officials lived was excluded from the lease. It continued to be the territory of the Qing Empire, forming a kind of enclave in the British colony. In those years, of course, no one could have imagined that a few decades later this fact would lead to the formation in Hong Kong of a quarter that has no equal on the third planet from the Sun in terms of population density.
The extraterritoriality of the walled city of Kowloon was only nominal. In fact, control over the fort, surrounded by powerful walls, was exercised by the British. During World War II, the Japanese occupied the peninsula, dismantling the walls of the fortress and using stone from them to expand the military airfield, which later turned into Kai Tak for many years, the main airport in Hong Kong, one of the most dangerous in the world.
It all started after the end of World War II. De jure, the fortress city of Kowloon, albeit without fortress walls, continued to remain the territory of China, surrounded on all sides by the British colony. In fact, the laws and the administration of Hong Kong did not operate here, its residents did not pay taxes to anyone. Kowloon became a real black hole, a promised land for refugees from the "mainland" fleeing the civil war in China, where in the second half of the 1940s the Communist People's Liberation Army was driving Kuomintang puppets away from the future territory of the People's Republic of China.
First hundreds, then thousands, began to flock to the territory of the former fort, eventually turning into tens of thousands of squatters who took advantage of Kowloon's status to start a new life formally still in China, but in fact, in the same Hong Kong, taking advantage of all its benefits. but at the same time it exists almost completely independently. Any attempts by the British administration to prevent spontaneous construction on a small speck 210 meters long and 120 meters wide met with resistance not only by local residents, but also by the PRC government, which threatened a diplomatic conflict in the event of any actions by the Hong Kong authorities in the territory they considered theirs.
By the end of the 1960s, according to some estimates, up to 20 thousand people lived on an area of 2.6 hectares. Of course, no one can name the exact figure: it was impossible to keep any records of the residents of the fortified city. These tens of thousands of people demonstrated miracles of survival and adaptation in an essentially anarchic society. No central water supply? No problem. 70 wells were dug, water from which was delivered by electric pumps to the roofs of buildings, and from there it was sent through a labyrinth of countless pipes to consumers' apartments. Out of electricity? Among the residents of the quarter, there were many employees of the Hong Kong Electric company, who perfectly knew how to illegally connect to the Hong Kong power grid and helped their neighbors in this.
The inhabitants of Kowloon also built themselves. First, one-, two- and three-story houses appeared on the territory of the fortress city, successfully cleared of pre-war buildings by bombing by Allied aircraft. Then, as the population of the district increased, the number of storeys began to grow rapidly. The building density also grew. This is how Kowloon has changed over the decades.
1949 year.
1956 year.
1974 year.
1992 year.
In fact, any vacant plot within the boundaries approved by the 1898 convention received its own high-rise building. Only a small spot in the center of the quarter remained relatively vacant, where the yamen, the residence of the mandarin, is one of the rare relics that still remind of the previous history of Kowloon.
Around it, by 1980, about 350 high-rise buildings were built, located so densely that from panoramic photographs Kowloon looked rather like one huge and monstrously ugly building.
Meanwhile, in Kowloon itself, life was in full swing. Hundreds of basement factories made whatever your heart desires: clothes and shoes, household appliances and drugs. Food was fried in dirty kitchens, mostly dog meat. In dozens of shops, you could buy almost anything your heart desires - from a "Japanese" tape recorder to a woman or a batch of heroin - there would be money. One and a half hundred doctors (there are 87 of them dentists) with and without licenses, were ready to cure any diseases for a solid reward (of which, of course, there were enough in such a place), or - to send to the next world.
Kowloon attracted tourists who dared to get inside - the inhabitants of neat, tidy European cities with its "dirty" exoticism: children playing among years of garbage that had not been taken out, apartments not much different from public sorts, balconies more reminiscent of cages for birds of prey. (Almost all the windows in Kowloon were barred from thieves, making the living quarters even more like prison cells.)
In fact, there were no streets inside the block. There were passages that form a network so confused for the uninitiated that a stranger who got here quickly lost orientation in space. The buildings were so dense, and the space of the Klondike of anarchism so valuable that high-rise buildings often hung over the aisles, not letting in sunlight.
In "Idoru" by William Gibson there is a stunning image - the Fortress - a city of hackers on the net, a digital haven of freedom-loving marginals, an amazing virtual Eldorado. Outwardly, the Fortress looks like a wild and chaotic heap of pieces of code, scripts, some unfinished images - like a monolithic lump of all sorts of rubbish. Already in the introduction, Gibson says that his imagination was influenced by photographs of the real Kowloon "fortress" (or rather Kowloon Walled City).
On the other hand, there were no cars inside the block, only hundreds of meters, kilometers of a labyrinth of narrow alleys.
The aisles were lit only by rare lanterns and glowing neon signs of countless shops, shops, hairdressers, doctors' offices, which occupied all the first floors of buildings. There were about a hundred dentists alone, and they had no end of clients. The absence of the need to obtain a medical license and pay taxes to anyone made it possible to keep prices for services at a level inaccessible to their colleagues from Hong Kong working on a neighboring, but already "civilized" street.
There were also various small handicraft industries. Kowloon had its own industry: food, haberdashery, light. In fact, it was a city within a city, in many ways able to exist autonomously.
The quarter even had several of its own kindergartens and schools, although mostly, of course, older family members looked after small children, and somehow they managed to get older children to go to Hong Kong schools. There were no sports grounds, clubs, cinemas. In fact, roofs became the space for socialization and recreation of the inhabitants of the area, where one could find at least some free space. Children played and grew up here, their parents met and talked, the older generation sat at a game of mahjong.
And over the rooftops, huge planes flew, which were within easy reach. The specifics of the approach to landing at Kai Tak airport, the very one that the Kowloon fortress walls went to build, required the pilots to make a dangerous as well as a spectacular U-turn just before landing. It began at an altitude of 200 meters, and ended already at 40, and somewhere in the middle of this most difficult maneuver for pilots was Kowloon, bristling like rotten teeth, high-rise buildings. It is because of this neighborhood that the height of the buildings in the quarter was limited to 14 floors - almost the only requirement of the Hong Kong administration, which the residents of the fortified city fulfilled. In return, they received an amazing and completely free sight right over their heads.
In the first decades of the transformation of the old Chinese fortress into a sleeping area with its own special flavor, the only real force here were the triads - secret criminal organizations that were widespread in pre-war China. Taking advantage of the lack of interest in the quarter on the part of the Hong Kong administration and its law enforcement agencies, they turned the area that had just begun to grow into a nest of various vices. In Kowloon, gambling establishments, brothels, and opium dens literally flourished.
One of the Chinese writers described Kowloon in those years in his book City of Darkness:
Only in the mid-1970s, the Hong Kong authorities, who finally decided that they had enough to endure this, and secured the approval of the PRC government, carried out a grandiose series of police raids that ended in the actual expulsion of all organized crime groups from Kowloon.
Despite its brutal appearance, the area was quite a calm place in terms of the criminal environment.
In the same years, centralized water and electricity supply and sewerage finally appeared here, and mail began to be delivered to Kowloon.
But these important changes for the better, which turned the walled city into a more or less convenient place to live, were not reflected in the appearance of Kowloon. The anarchy continued here, unauthorized structures grew, there could be no talk of any major overhaul of buildings or at least cosmetic renovation of the facades.
This is how the quarter entered the history.
Most of the residents huddled in small apartments with an average area of 23 square meters. m. Distribution received a variety of extensions to the external and internal facades of buildings. They finally merged, in the area even a second, parallel to the ground, system of transitions was formed at a certain height from the ground. Kowloon was turning into a single whole organism, a huge "communal apartment", a building-city, as if it had come to the present from a post-apocalyptic future.
In 1987, the governments of Great Britain and the PRC entered into an agreement that settled Kowloon's status in the light of the impending return of Hong Kong to Chinese jurisdiction in 10 years. The administration of the British colony finally got the right to demolish the quarter that disfigured its face.
Demolition began in 1992-1993. All residents received either monetary compensation for the move, or apartments in Hong Kong's modern new buildings that were growing by leaps and bounds. And all the same, the process of destruction of this anarchist relic, which was born almost a century ago, was accompanied by violent protests of the aborigines, who did not want to be deprived of their habitual freedom and way of life.
However, Kowloon was doomed. They demolished it quickly, but the empty area, and so regularly caught the lens of filmmakers, managed to "light up" in the 1993 film Crime Story, in which Jackie Chan's character fights the kidnappers of a Hong Kong businessman. One of the key episodes of the film was filmed in Kowloon, and the impending liquidation allowed the creators of the action movie to shoot several spectacular scenes with the explosions of residential buildings in the fortified city.
After the demolition, a picturesque park of the same name appeared on the site of Kowloon, repeating its outlines. Now it is a favorite vacation spot for local residents, and only a memorial with a layout of the quarter, which has become another landmark of Hong Kong, reminds of its phantasmagoric past.
In 1987, when the Hong Kong administration and the PRC government entered into an agreement that doomed the area to destruction, a study was carried out that made it possible to more or less accurately determine the number of its inhabitants. It turned out that about 33 thousand people lived here on 2.6 hectares. It was an absolute record for the density of population on Earth. For comparison: if Kowloon were 1 sq. km, 1.27 million people were supposed to live here. And if Minsk became Kowloon with its area of about 350 sq. km, then almost 450 million people would live in the Belarusian capital, that is, almost the entire population of the United States and Russia combined. The leadership of the Minsk City Executive Committee, which is actively consolidating our city, still has a lot of work ahead.