A Jiangnan garden on the site of the densest settlement that has ever existed, cleared in 1993.
Until 1993 this ground held the Kowloon Walled City — an ungoverned settlement of around 350 interconnected buildings on 2.6 hectares, housing an estimated 33,000 to 50,000 people.
At its peak it was the most densely populated place on earth, at something like 1.2 million people per square kilometre.
How it happened
The site was a Qing military fort, retained by China when the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898 — the convention excluded the walled city, and Chinese officials were to remain.
Britain expelled them the following year. China never accepted that. The result was a place that Britain claimed but did not police, that China claimed but did not administer, and that fell into a jurisdictional gap for most of a century.
The Japanese demolished the walls during the occupation to extend the airport. Squatters and refugees moved in after 1945 and never left.
What it became
Buildings went up without plans, permits, engineers or setbacks, growing together into a single mass twelve to fourteen storeys high — limited only by the flight path into Kai Tak airport, which is why nothing exceeded that height.
Sunlight did not reach the lower levels. The alleys were lit by fluorescent tubes and running with water from the pipes above. Access to the upper levels was largely across the rooftops.
There were around 350 unlicensed dentists and doctors, factories, noodle makers, and a very substantial heroin and gambling trade run by triads until police raids in the 1970s.
There was also a functioning community — a post office, schools, a church, a residents’ association, and people who lived there for decades and spoke of it with affection. Both things are true and the exhibition says so.
The clearance
Britain and China agreed in 1987 to demolish it. Residents were compensated and rehoused, with disputes over the amounts, and the last left in 1992. Demolition finished in 1994.
The photographer Greg Girard and Ian Lambot documented it before it went, in City of Darkness, which is the standard record.
Its influence on film, anime and games is disproportionate — Blade Runner’s visual language, Ghost in the Shell, and a great many cyberpunk cityscapes trace back to it.
The park
Opened in 1995, in the style of a Jiangnan garden of the early Qing — pavilions, rockeries, a chess garden, zodiac sculptures.
The yamen, the Qing magistrate’s office, survived and is restored. It holds the exhibition: photographs, a large bronze model of the Walled City, and archaeological remains including two of the original stone gate plaques found during demolition.
The South Gate foundations are preserved in situ under a shelter.
Practicalities
Free, open daily. The exhibition keeps shorter hours.
There is no MTR station immediately adjacent; Lok Fu or Kowloon City and a short bus or taxi.
Kowloon City around it is worth an hour for its Thai community — the neighbourhood has the best Thai food in Hong Kong, a legacy of the airport years.
