Near downtown Hong Kong, about a kilometer away from where Prince Edward Road East crosses the Kai Tak River, lies a historical artifact in the form of a lush and serene public space: Kowloon Walled City Park. A wandering tourist might find its name a bit strange. Kowloon — sure. Park — makes sense. But a walled city it is clearly not. In fact, much of the area’s current state is completely antithetical to its landmark predecessor. The space occupied by cleanly cobbled paths, fresh air, and pruned plants was once a maze of claustrophobic alleys filled with clamoring voices and factory machinery. While this version of the site only survives in the park’s isolated exhibits and generational memory, a scenic stroll through the past can reveal a unique underbelly of society. Further, it can explain why the carefully made open-air rebrand of the Walled City still falls short of its infamous predecessor’s tourism and accolades.
The Rise of No Man’s Land
The area that Kowloon Walled City Park occupies was once a standard military fort, but it became much more after the re-establishment of British Hong Kong in 1898. While both Britain and China claimed the territory at this time, legal scuffles and general uncertainty subsequently led the area to be governed by neither. In this context, fugitives of the Chinese Civil War first found refuge in the 6.5-acre area, followed by an increasing number of people from various backgrounds. If not due to conflict, many residents were on the run from poverty or other legal disputes. Eventually, population estimates ballooned to anywhere from 35,000 to 60,000 people by the late 1980s. It had a population density of more than 3 million inhabitants per square mile, making Kowloon the most densely populated place on Earth by several orders of magnitude.
While the density and demographics of the Walled City established a fascinating outlier by themselves, the consequences of its legal status arguably contributed the most to the city’s identity. With Britain adopting a “hands-off” governance policy starting in 1948 and the Hong Kong Police rarely intervening in subsequent years, the city was left to develop almost entirely autonomously. The result was a mixed bag of humanity’s best and worst, on display in its most mundane and extreme forms.
The latter side is what continues to capture the attention of history buffs and scholars alike. The sporadic and unsuccessful raids of the Hong Kong Police quickly enabled five Triad gangs to set up shop, bringing with them a burgeoning opium and heroin industry. Various other illicit trades also flocked to the city, including brothels, gambling dens, unlicensed doctors, and restaurants featuring dog and snake meat specials. In the background, a lack of building codes and safety regulations led to alleys only a few feet wide and chaotic chains of electrical wires weaving such an impenetrable net that they lent Kowloon the nickname “the City of Darkness.” As Paterson News described it in 1960, this form of Kowloon was “a tiny enclave of sin and filth.”
Nevertheless, this is not the only side of the Walled City that remains in contemporary memory. In the later years of the city’s peak, it seemed to find somewhat of a structural equilibrium, almost resembling a usual society. Although buildings were stacked like Jenga blocks and erected on such hasty foundations that they leaned against each other, they contained homes, shops, factories, and even a school system. Although the city lacked government officials and taxes, it somehow had a postman. Although doctors were unlicensed and cuisine was exotic, tourists still flocked to the city to fulfill their cravings and curiosities. At one point, the Walled City produced the majority of fish balls eaten in wider Hong Kong. This little microcosmic anarchy became almost a funhouse mirror to its surroundings — an imitation that curiously warped around the edges. One Canadian photographer who visited in 1986, Greg Girard, said, “You quickly realize that it’s just a place where folks are trying to get by, like any other working-class part of Hong Kong.”
In part, a significant increase in police raids during the 1970s likely contributed to this pseudo-equilibrium the city reached as Triad power waned. Nevertheless, the amount of development and sheer survival that the Walled City’s community scraped together is a stunning feat. Academically, Kowloon demonstrates a puzzling disputation of the “tragedy of the commons,” a problem of common resource depletion occurring when people act in their own self-interest that even successful and established governments struggle with.
Conceptions of Anarchy
The contemporary and academic definitions of “anarchy” tend to depart from each other. Formally, the term “anarchy” referred solely to the lack of a central, overarching authority that enforces rules in a system like a government. In more informal usage, this base assumption is often accessorized with mental images of fire and general chaos. Admittedly, that is the concept of anarchy we are often exposed to. In high school English classes, a worn copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies spins tales of civilized British choir boys devolving into impulse-driven factions littered with loose hierarchies and gleeful violence. Theories from across the social sciences support this idea of devolving into chaos at the individual level — just see Freud’s theory of the id, ego, and superego. Even at the microscopic level of our world, persistent devolution is present. Thermodynamics coined the term “entropy” to describe energy unavailable for doing work, which was then co-opted and expanded to reference a system’s tendency to gradually decline into disorder.
This conception of anarchy is the one that seems to captivate our attention the most. Especially in cases like Kowloon’s, the very concept of society’s hidden realities at our fingertips has dominated both contemporary consciousness and various forms of media in recent decades. For example, consider dystopian-future plots that pit relatable teen characters against mortally threatening challenges and crime-riddled backgrounds that examine fantasy drugs, organized crime, and the shady corners of back alleyways.
Naturally, these depictions of anarchy may result from its informal definition rather than contributing to it. In addition, engaging with content about these settings does not necessarily demonstrate people’s behavior and favor toward real-life places like Kowloon Walled City. Still, the very concept of the Walled City tourists demonstrates the extended curiosity that we have with unconventional societies. It begs the question: Though the city’s visitors were unlikely to ever want to live there, what would their approach be if they did? What would ours be? Could our presuppositions about what anarchy looks like doom us to follow a path of entropy, or could we truly overcome chaos in the way that much of Kowloon did?
The End of Entropy
Although it may be one of the closest cases we see to true anarchy, it is clear that Kowloon Walled City was not completely without rules. From Hong Kong Police raids to the informal governance of the Triad gangs, and the continuously developing society just outside of the city’s borders, Kowloon Walled City was never entirely free from the outside world’s influences.
Even then, Kowloon Walled City may be more than just an artifact of the time period it took place in. Now, in the steadily matured Anthropocene, it feels impossible for the world to truly see a new, naturally forming, and relatively long-lasting anarchic enclave like Kowloon. Various facets of anarchy have been visible in some far reaches of the world. For instance, take the abandoned Centro Financiero Confianzas in Caracas, Venezuela, which operated as a relatively autonomous 45-story slum for around seven years, or Dharavi, a residential area near Mumbai with one of the world’s largest informal economies. Nevertheless, it seems that no recent case has formed or developed as extensively as Kowloon. The Walled City is also unique in that its formation was not consistently defined by an ultimate goal of demolition, potentially contributing to the direction of its expansion. Even so, every city has its origins, and Kowloon’s surprising success may most directly rely on its definition of success. The Walled City was largely built and populated by refugees, criminals, and outcasts who undoubtedly took what they could get. While the eventual creation of schools and postal systems is fascinating, the city was still unsafe, unpleasant, and uncivilized by many accounts.
This nuanced identity of the Kowloon Walled City may be its biggest legacy. After its bulldozing in 1989 to build the park now in place, the world around the ghost of the settlement has continued to develop. Now, innovations in technology and shifts in geopolitical dynamics may increasingly demolish any potential for another Kowloon to happen ever again. On the other hand, it may be entrenched in human nature to repeat the case and reinvent societal living. Who is to say?
Featured Image Source: Atlas Obscura