A rare book on an even stranger reality, City Of Darkness is an in-depth study of the extraterritorial miracle experienced by the tens of thousands of people inhabiting a 2.5 square hectares of no mans land originated by the colonial feud between at the time British-ruled Hong Kong and China. From a tortuous historical trajectory set from the XIX century, all way down the Chinese Civil War, the gruesome Japanese invasion and the waves of migrants from the Cultural Revolution, the unimaginable rose, slowly and spontaneously: an ungoverned monstrosity of concrete, stained walls, illegal installations of water pipes and stolen electricity on endless-expanding piled store buildings without pillars. An immense society ruled without police, licenses or safety services, harboring refugees, illegal immigrants, downright criminals and humble, regular Hong Kong people short of resources, mainly from Chiu Chow origin. Schools, neighbor associations and unlicensed businesses such as restaurants or dentists were set on top of opium and heroin dens, brothels and gambling spots. The dank and light-deprived alleys and streets of the City, patrolled by the Triads and home to countless drug addicts were also the venues of people living at the edge of survival and running honest, even if out of the law, activities: children were born, studied and married inside here, along with elderly people with nowhere to go, very much in the self-organized way of running things in rural and traditional China. An environment as extremely complex and frightening as fascinating and even beautiful came to an end just before Hong Kong returned back to China in 1997, and now is forever lost: the Walled City came down in 1993, authorizing scarce Japanese investigators to record and preserve data before the demolition began; only the central yamen building was spared.
City of Darkness (1993) constitutes a rare document: on one hand, it comprises four essays written by specialists; on the other (and most valuable for sure) offers plenty of interviews and photographic material of both the inhabitants before the clearance and the buildings themselves. Personal recollections, worries and routines of people of all walks of life: doctors, restaurant-owners, renters, sweet-makers, heroin addicts, ex-Triad members, and many more. Testimonial to its enticingness is its prize: this very uncatalogued book can reach more than 1000 USD online, with used exemplars around 400USD too; one can only wholeheartedly greet the few leakers able to scan and post online pirate versions for the sake of curious people. The academic spirit of the essays is equally interesting as well; you get an alluring and fair Introduction by Peter Popham, describing both the shortcomings and the vantages of the real life conditions of life inside the City, balancing with realism the black legend the whole place inevitably earned. Julia Wilkinson takes care of the intensive historical approach with her essay A Chinese Magistrate's Fort, including material from the very beginning of the fortress, a peripheral location set by the Qing Empire in order to defend from sea attacks with cannons and a permanent militar capability. Later evens are also recorded, such as the Japanese WWII forces tearing up the walls in order to build an airport (which still remains) and the Triads takeover of the place (favored by the fleeing forces of the Kuomintang), initially populated by refugees. Later in the book Hong Kongese Leung Ping Kwan, poet and writer, reflects about the demolition in Kowloon Walled City: Our Place; one of the few locals to argue in favor of the inhabitants of the City, who indeed faced discrimination outside its walls and were considered no-good pariahs. Makes indeed good arguments in considering the exceptional City as in many ways not so different from the whole of Hong Kong itself, also filled by drug, prostitution and an incredible wage gap, where work is exhausting, future hopeless and people dream of the foreign and the far away. Finally, there is The Clearance by Charles Goddard's pen: a farewell to the City in which he summarizes the procedures and compensations during the census and relocation of the inhabitants, and their sadness and farewells in facing the prospect of leaving not only the people they knew but a place mercifully lawless, where they could afford living and working by and for themselves.
Perhaps the most notorious descriptions of Hak Nam was set by Jan Morris as vividly recalled on his book 'Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire':
Nevertheless [The Walled City] still feels like an enclave within a city, extra-territorial and even slightly unreal. It is a frightful slum. No vehicle can enter it -there are no streets wide enough- and its buildings, rising sometimes to 10 or 12 storeys, are so inextricably packed together that they seem to form one congealed mass of masonry, sealed together by overlapping structures, ladders, walkways, pipes and cables, and ventilated only by fetid air-shafts. A maze of dank alleys pierces the mass from one side to the other. Virtually no daylight reaches them. Looped electric cables festoon their ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture. It is like a bunker. Sometimes you seem to be all alone, with every door locked around you. Sometimes the lane is suddenly bright with the lights of a laundry or a sweatshop factory, and loud with Chinese music.
Girard provides multiple shots of the City's interior: alleys, stores, temples and installations, while discussing topics such as the water supply (located in four leaking mains, with few people who could afford a pipe), the prevalence of pests or the terrifying risk of fires and electrocution. From the early stages, construction took place without planning of any kind, but rather as a result of the bargains between both soliciters and affected neighbors. In this regard, the Walled City was steady through its long history: it grew everywhere by the hands of skilled yet unlicensed workers exercising experimental techniques and dubious adjustments which in fact worked good enough. Popham states:
What fascinates about the Walled City is that, for all its horrible shortcomings, its builders and residents succeeded in creating what modern architects, with all their resources of money and expertise, have failed to: the city as 'organic megastructure', not set rigidly for a lifetime but continually responsive to the changing requirements of its users, fulfilling every need from water supply to religion, yet providing also the warmth and intimacy of a single huge household.
And yet, maybe the most interesting aspect of Kowloon Walled City aside from its unique architecture was its politics and power relationships. This maze, this labyrinth of massive and windowless flats and dark, narrow and wet alleys experimented endless changes concerning its social organization. Most people today would think that lawlessness in such context would cause a bloody massacre and the dissolution of any human community in a year: that's exactly what did not happen, and the project was still going strong after a whole century. In fact, I'd distinguish between three general stages of development: (1) the influx of colonizers, (2) the influx of organized crime, and (3) the balance of regulations. Concerning colonizers, in the first mid of the XX century: the development of a refugee community of just some hundreds seem to have been peaceful and balanced; most people recall a strong sense of community in which everyone knew and saluted each other, and the children ran free. Buildings were short and, as people did not have that much, crime was almost unheard. Sanitary conditions were also better, and sunlight accessible to most. But from the time criminals took refuge in the City or located their factories inside (between the '50s and '60s), many families avoided as much as possible going to the depths of the beast. And at the same time the City grew more complex and more inhabitants started their life of hard work without safety conditions, inspection or minimum wage, the dark side of the City came to prevail. Many citizens gave 'protection money' to gangs in order for them to survey and protect both their property and families, and the mafia apparently did a good work as police: they also employed heroin addicts to keep their spaces clean or watch over properties. Life in the frontiers of the City remained quite the same for most of its inhabitants, but at the center conditions worsened.
The era of drugs, prostitution and gambling, for which the City was notorious, was confined mainly to the 1950s and '60s, two decades when, undeniably, residents lived among the most extraordinary depravation. At its climax (...) there were 27 gambling halls, 19 opium dens, 17 heroin dens, four strip-joints, more than 30 brothels, three wine smugglers, three stolen goods companies, 15 unlicensed mahong parlours, 20 dog-meat stands, five pornographic cinemas, four loan-shark companies and four drug factories
Even if most permanent residents in fact weren't involved in any crime, the arrival of people fleeing the police in a hurry and causing petty robbery in the area increased. However, it seems to be the case that most deaths of this period were the direct consequence of the abuse of heavily addictive drugs by young members of the Triads themselves. A few of them joined 'The Well', a desintoxicating open community started by the religious St.Stephen's Society, and led by Jackie Pullinger, a British charismatic missionary who became an unlikely adversary to the Triads for the loyalty of addicted members, some of them as young as 16 years old. Along with The Salvation Army, she was one of the very few people of the entire City from non-Asian origin, even if many residents were also South-Asian foreigners.
The Triads ran the entire city up until 1974, even if police had patrolled in large and coordinated groups since the late '60s to snap key detentions and checks, in an attempt to stop the most obvious drug manufacturing. Considering that the period of turning an eye blind on the problem would only worsen the area surrounding the City, subsequent police raids and confiscations effectively reduced the preponderance of Triad power over organized crime; of course, these raids did not interfere with the dozens of illegally conducted enterprises of the inhabitants of the Walled City, and their role was that of mere advisers. Some policemen had been in fact too cozy with Triad gang leaders, and a Commission Against Corruption was set inside the Police as a consequence; by 1983, active criminal activity was declared to be under control. To some degree, life came back to the peaceful yet perplexing way of the first period, but the City had grown vastly; by this period the population was around 33.000, new buildings were being erected, there was a postman service and all sorts of manufactured goods of the City were being sold to businesses all over Hong Kong, or to places as far as Vietnam.
Yet, unregulated and non-taxed entrepreneurship was not as big of a deal for colonial Hong Kong to face political turmoil against China for the uncared territory. However, 'With Hong Kong's prospective return to China, The Walled City ceased to be a sensitive issue. Almost overnight, its veneer of political protection was stripped away and the City could be seen for what it really was: an embarrassing and anachronistic slum'. Yet the space was beloved by its inhabitants, many of them having sacrificed the scarce capital they began with in order to settle in the Walled City. Unlicensed meat and herbal dealers, noodle-makers, dentists, barbers and providers of all kind of services demanded higher compensations for their lifetime locals and occupations, but in the end the Chinese Government alone decided based on the size of property, machinery and inhabiting time. Many elders were relocated to public care or housing. Charles Goddard recalls the surprise census, organized in policing fashion by governmental agents in four coordinated groups: they measured every inch and countered every man, woman and children even if they had no documentation to speak of, contacting them from that moment on until they resettled. Quite few people resisted, even if a dozen people put up with violence to avoid being expelled from their home without compensation of any kind. Yet, the clearance was declared, and, as stated, only a Japanese crew was interested enough to document the whole place (Now they hold more technical information than the Hong Kongese general public). Among their tasks, they doodled a nice cut-view of the interior, now inscribed in a memorial to the Walled City; for the legend is now nothing but a miniature steel reproduction at the center of the popular Kowloon Walled City Park, erected in the empty space left by the demolition, with the sunlight and green replacing the innermost center of something barely believable, a forgotten memory of the peripheries of the XX century.
A fascinating read, City of Darkness opens the eyes to the endless possibilities of human community and survival as really few historic cases do.
Although, in a strictly limited sense the Walled City could be called a slum, a more considered view reveals it as a fully functioning community, with its own shops, productive enterprises, water suppliers, welfare associations, nursery schools and dentists. It was fashioned by those who lived there, free from overbearing authority but with its own ground-rules and organization. The City was, in fact, the victim of an oversimplification. In Hong Kong's popular culture, the myth of Hak Nam -the City of Darkness- and all it stood for was perpetuated, even though this was a side of the City that had all but disappeared by the end of the 1970s.
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