Kowloon Walled City Park: Memorial to an Embarrassment

I visited Hong Kong in the 1970s and lived there for three years at the end of the 1980s, years before the Kowloon Walled City was demolished in 1993-94. However, the City was not the sort of place a tourist could just wander into and it was definitely not promoted by the Hong Kong Tourism Authority; it had a well-deserved reputation for squalor, vice and danger to life and limb.

Originally a small coastal fort, it was excluded from the New Territories land that was leased to the British in 1899. As a consequence, it remained part of China proper, although situated in urban Kowloon (all other parts of which were) administered by the Hong Kong colonial authority. The British either ignored it or treated it as a harmless curiosity; the mainland Chinese authorities did the same. When the Hong Kong colonial authorities tried to take it over in 1948 their action caused riots in mainland China, so they pursued a ‘hands off’ policy thereafter.

The consequences were that the city was completely unregulated. Buildings were constructed without planning for safety, fire or health. Hong Kong’s police, postal and other authorities could not enter while unlicensed doctors and dentists flourished – and most of Hong Kong’s fishballs were made there, in questionable sanitary conditions. There were open sewers and buildings were stacked on top of one another so that little daylight reached ground level.

The Walled City’s population grew significantly after the second world war and in the 1950s triad groups established a stranglehold on the city, controlling drugs, gambling, prostitution and other vices. The 350 or so buildings in the city were built with poor foundations, little or no utilities and the average apartment size was only 250 square feet. By the mid-1980s it had a population estimated at 33,000 with a population density of 1.25 million inhabitants per square kilometre (for comparison, Mong Kok’s current very high population density is about 130,000 persons per square kilometre…).

By the 1970s the police had had enough and staged massive, repeated raids into the city to pursue criminals. Soon, other public authorities also began to enter the city to provide services and assess the situation. By 1987 the Hong Kong and mainland Chinese governments decided to end the embarrassment of this squalid city-within-a-city by tearing it down and replacing it with a park.

The Kowloon Walled City Park, with its sanitised layout, manicured shrubbery and Disneyesque classical pagodas could hardly be further from the City it commemorates.

There was little left of the original city after the bulldozers had finished. The Japanese had already demolished the city wall to extend the Kai Tak airport runway, half a mile away, during world war two.

remains of the South Gate and granite slabs

There are two main relics from the original Walled City. First, a small portion of one of the original entrance gates with two granite slabs with characters announcing ‘South Gate’ and ‘Kowloon Walled City.’

Second, there is a yamen building used for the administration of the city by the Chinese authorities until they left in 1899.

Neither relic is particularly impressive (which is maybe why, having decided to build a park, they had to fill it with pretty but ersatz objects). I suspect few mourn the destruction of Kowloon Walled City. If I was an illegal immigrant squatter, I would have been delighted to be housed in one of Hong Kong’s nearby public housing tower blocks, comparatively spacious, safely constructed, with piped utilities and a range of excellent public services. Maybe it’s time to end commemorating the Kowloon Walled City?

model of Kowloon Walled City

(I first heard about the Walled City in the book ‘Chasing the Dragon’ by evangelist Jackie Pullinger, telling of her work there with drug addicts. I believe Jackie still lives in Hong Kong, is 70 years old now, and runs a charity called St Stephen’s Society that cares for hundreds of needy people in Hong Kong and the Philippines. I had read somewhere that there was a memorial to Jackie in the Park, but I didn’t notice it.)