The City of Darkness: Kowloon Walled City
A real-life Dystopian town
Kowloon city was a slum-like city in Hong Kong. At its peak, it had around 33,000 people in 8,800 homes. The city had around 1000 businesses, all in an area as small as 2.8 hectares. It was 119 times as dense as New York City.
The city was famous for drugs, prostitution, and dentists. Hundreds of dentists had clinics inside the city. All of Kowloon city’s dentists had studied in China, and their license wasn’t valid in Hong Kong, so they opened clinics in Kowloon because there were no rules and regulations.
The structure that had evolved into Kowloon walled city was once a fort. In 1898, when the Qing Dynasty ceded territories to the British Empire following its defeat in the first opium war. Kowloon stayed under Chinese control. It was the only remaining place in Hong Kong that was controlled by the Qing Dynasty. The British feared it could be used, as a resistance ground for Chinese nationalists against the British. So they forcefully took control of it.
The Chinese Civil War
Over the years, China laid claim to the fort without any significant improvements. In the next two to three decades, Kowloon was just an old fort without any significance to it. In 1927, when the Chinese civil war broke out between the…
