How the Kowloon Walled City Lived. Photo from the most densely populated place in the world

Kowloon - In cramped, but not offended, not seeing the white light. Mega homeless person in Hong Kong, photos and videos.

Guess in one try, in which of the countries the largest and dirtiest communal apartment on Earth could appear?

Apparently, this, namely Hong Kong - those "backgrounds" of a huge city that for a long time remained unnecessary for either Britain or China. Where there is no government, friendship decides everything, and the Chinese know how to be close friends with families, piling up their households, like figures in a “buggy” Tetris, which keep falling and falling, leaving no voids and not collapsing. But only 130 by 200 meters of space ...

Remember the sci-fi movie Bladerunner? Or the fairy tale "Batman Begins"? Or any other movie where all the intrigue is played in the hopeless darkness of wet streets? The image of the city of darkness is not the creativity of the scriptwriters. Until 1993, it had a real-life prototype known as the "Kowloon Walled City". For those who lived in it, worked, traded, made children, it was possible to get a portion of sunlight with a side dish of all the "flavors" from tens of thousands of neighbors, only by climbing onto the roof. Complementing the pleasure was the roar of the nearby airport and the screams of children riding bicycles on the roof or playing Chinese mafia.

The history of Kowloon Fortress began a thousand years ago with the construction of a small fortified village to protect local salt works from pirates. It is known that in the middle of the 19th century a fort was already rising here, from which the emperor's soldiers vigilantly monitored the observance of the ban on the import of Indian opium by English merchants. Didn't spot...

In 1842, as a result of the First Opium War, the British chopped off the island of Hong Kong from the empire, and in 1898, several more mainland territories. And since Hong Kong was not given to Britain forever, it was decided to leave the Kowloon fortress to China. However, it was only an unspoken agreement, therefore, a year later, the British invaded the fortress, but did not find anything interesting there and left the 700 inhabitants of the fort alone.

The delicate non-intervention of the British gave China a reason to consider the area its own. Only in 1940, the colonists demolished all the dilapidated houses in the fortress and half a thousand ragamuffins received new apartments. Then the Japanese warriors came and dismantled the fortress wall. In 1947, refugees from communist China poured into the disputed territory, many of whom were various kinds of rabble, such as thieves or drug addicts. It was not possible to expel them, and by the end of the 1950s, sinister Chinese triads ruled the ball in Kowloon. Mafiosi founded many brothels, casinos and drug laboratories here, which the majority of the local population, quiet Chinese hard workers, had to put up with. When the mafia was pressed down and there was no one to be afraid of, the population of hard workers grew significantly and became more cheerful. Here is a photo from 1973. At that time, "only" 10,000 people lived in these houses.

By the early 1980s, the population of Kowloon had tripled. In a limited area, they continued to build new high-rise buildings and complete the old ones - until the microdistrict turned into a gloomy monolithic labyrinth. Yards disappeared. The streets, which became corridors, were illuminated around the clock with humanitarian aid lamps (as you know, one lamp replaces two policemen). Electricity for other needs was stolen from city networks. Slop flowed through open channels, garbage was thrown out of windows, literally on the heads of neighbors. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the labyrinth, its height could not exceed 14 floors, because there is an airport nearby. And then they would not have built it like that.

In that nightmare more than 500 sanitary doctors and fire inspectors worked there, where they made bags, shoes and food. Fish croquettes were especially good for cooks from the city of darkness, the whole of Hong Kong crunched them with pleasure, knowing full well what kind of dirt and stench is in the Kowloon Fortress. Moreover, even from wealthy areas of Hong Kong people came here to get their teeth treated. almost every tenth slum dweller was a good dentist and worked for a pittance.

Now, on the site of the city of darkness, a beautiful park has been laid out, where residents and guests of the now completely Chinese Hong Kong are very fond of walking in the sun and fresh air.

Video report about the biggest slum in the world.

Kowloon is an area of ​​Hong Kong that clearly shows how monstrous the degree of compaction can reach. Hundreds of high-rise buildings huddled together, narrow aisles between them, lack of sunlight, children playing on rooftops, opium dens and brothels. In 1987, about 33 thousand people lived here on a small plot of 2.6 hectares.

The story began in 1841, when Great Britain was on fire with the desire to sell more and more opium. British troops landed on Hong Kong Island and the adjacent Kowloon Peninsula. On the peninsula, the British found only a small city of the same name, Kowloon (translated as “Nine Dragons”) and a fortified fort that served as the residence of a local mandarin.

As a result of hostilities in 1842, Hong Kong Island was ceded to the British, and in 1898 a new convention was concluded, according to which Hong Kong and Kowloon were leased by Great Britain for the next 99 years, with one small circumstance that had big consequences.

This circumstance is marked on the map above in the right corner as Chinese Town (“Chinese Town”). According to the new convention, this fortified fort was excluded from the lease agreement. It continued to be Chinese territory, forming a kind of enclave in the British colony.

Then, of course, no one could have thought that after a few decades this formation would develop into a quarter that has no equal in terms of population density.

This enclave was somewhat nominal. In fact, the control of the fort was carried out by the British. During the Second World War, the peninsula was occupied by the Japanese, who dismantled the walls of the fortress and used the stone from them to expand the military airfield, which later turned into Kai Tak, the main airport of Hong Kong for many years.

After the end of the Second World War, the walled city of Kowloon continued to be a territory of China, surrounded on all sides by the British colony. The laws and administration of Hong Kong did not apply here, its inhabitants did not pay taxes to anyone. Kowloon has become a haven for refugees with " mainland" who were fleeing civil war in China.

Tens of thousands of squatters began to flock to the territory of the former fort, taking advantage of the status of Kowloon. The main goal was to start new life formally still in China, but in fact, in the same Hong Kong, taking advantage of all its benefits.

Any attempts by the British administration to prevent spontaneous construction on a small spot ran into resistance from local residents and the PRC government, which threatened a diplomatic conflict in the event of any actions by the Hong Kong authorities on the territory that they considered their own.

According to some estimates, by the end of the 1960s, up to 20 thousand people lived on an area of ​​​​2.6 hectares. Of course, these figures are inaccurate, because it was impossible to keep a centralized record of the residents of the fortress city.

The squatters showed miracles of survival and adaptation in an essentially anarchic society. In the absence of a central water supply, 70 wells were dug, from which water was delivered by electric pumps to the roofs of buildings, and from there it was sent through a labyrinth of countless pipes to consumers' apartments. The lack of electricity was solved by illegal connection to the Hong Kong power grid.

The inhabitants of Kowloon also built themselves. As the population of the area increased, one-, two- and three-story houses were overgrown with new floors. The building density also increased. This is how Kowloon has changed over the decades.

Only a small spot in the center of the quarter remained relatively free, where the yamen, the residence of the mandarin, still reminiscent of the former history of Kowloon, has been preserved.

Around it, by 1980, about 350 high-rise buildings were built, located so densely that from panoramic shots, Kowloon looked more like one huge and monstrously ugly building.

In fact, there were no streets within the quarter. There were passages that formed such a confusing network for the uninitiated that a stranger who got here quickly lost orientation in space.

The building was so dense that high-rise buildings often hung over the aisles, blocking sunlight from entering.

The block was a maze of narrow lanes for miles, and there were no cars at all.

The passageways were illuminated only by sparse lanterns and neon signs of countless shops, shops, hairdressers, doctors' offices that occupied all the first floors of the buildings.

About a hundred dentists alone worked here, and they had no end to clients.

The absence of the need to obtain a medical license and pay taxes to anyone made it possible to keep prices for services at a level inaccessible to their colleagues from Hong Kong, working on a neighboring, but already “civilized” street.

Kowloon had its own industry: food, haberdashery, light industry. In fact, it was a city within a city, in many ways able to exist autonomously.

There were even several kindergartens and schools in the quarter, although basically, of course, the older members of the families looked after the young children, and the older children somehow managed to be placed in Hong Kong schools. In fact, the roofs, where one could find at least some free space, became a space for socialization and recreation of the inhabitants of the area.

And huge planes were flying over the roofs, which were at hand. The specific approach to landing at the Kai Tak airport, the same one that the Kowloon fortress walls were used for, required the pilots to make both a dangerous and spectacular U-turn just before landing.

It started at an altitude of 200 meters, and ended already at 40, and somewhere in the middle of this most difficult maneuver for pilots was Kowloon high-rise buildings bristling, like with rotten teeth.

It was because of this neighborhood that the height of the quarter's buildings was limited to 14 floors - almost the only requirement of the Hong Kong administration that the inhabitants of the walled city complied with. In return, they received an amazing and completely free spectacle right above their heads.

In the first decades of the transformation of the old Chinese fortress into a sleeping area with its own special flavor, the only real power there were triads - secret criminal organizations, common in pre-war China.

They turned the area, which had just begun to grow, into a nest of various vices. Gambling establishments, brothels, and opium dens literally flourished in Kowloon.

In the book “City of Darkness”, Kowloon of those years was described as follows: “Here on one side of the street there are prostitutes, and on the other side the priest distributes powdered milk to the poor, while social workers give instructions, drug addicts sit with a dose under the stairs in the entrances, and children's playgrounds at night turn into a dance floor for strippers."

Only in the mid-1970s, the Hong Kong authorities, having secured the approval of the PRC government, carried out a grandiose series of police raids that ended in the actual expulsion of all organized crime groups from Kowloon.

Despite his brutal appearance, the area in terms of the criminal situation was a fairly calm place.

Updated: April 20, 2019 by: Evgenia Sokolova

The Chinese writer Leung Ping Kwan wrote the following about Kowloon in his book City of Darkness: “Here, on one side of the street, there are prostitutes, and on the other, a priest distributes powdered milk to the poor, while social workers give instructions, drug addicts sit with a dose under the stairs in the entrances, and children's playgrounds turn into a dance floor for strippers at night." Kowloon- an autonomous region in Hong Kong, where 33 thousand inhabitants lived in an area of ​​210 m by 120 m. main feature settlements in that all 350 houses were interconnected and formed a kind of giant wall.

Today, Kowloon is already among the dead cities, in the 1990s it was decided to evacuate all residents. Its history is extraordinary and tragic: a military fort on this territory was founded during the reign of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), in 1898 the city was transferred to the possession of Great Britain, during World War II it was occupied by Japanese troops. The fortress city was demolished in 1993-1994, at that time it was the most densely populated place on the planet.

The buildings were ordinary slums, where there were neither communal amenities, nor even normal lighting. On the lower floors, neon lights burned around the clock, because the sunlight simply could not get there. There was not enough space, because the skyscrapers "grew" up. Additional floors were constantly being completed, the houses were overgrown with lattice balconies. The rooftops were also bustling with life: in addition to television antennas, there were clothes lines, water tanks and garbage containers. Here adults often rested and children played. It looked like the city was about to collapse under its own weight.

The population of Kowloon has always been diverse: after the surrender of the Japanese troops, many illegal immigrants came here, the city became a haven for criminals and drug dealers. In the 1980s in Kowloon, there were a huge number of brothels, casinos, dens where they sold opium and cocaine. Neither Britain nor China wanted to take responsibility for what happened inside this walled city.

In spite of the highest level crime, ordinary law-abiding residents remained in the city. As a rule, they had to huddle on the upper floors in order to somehow protect themselves from criminals. Violation of all possible sanitary and hygienic standards has led to the fact that the quality of life in Kowloon has become worse than in any other area. The government, realizing that the situation must be addressed radically, allocated $ 2.7 billion Hong Kong dollars to develop a plan to evacuate people and demolish buildings. Absolutely all residents were forcibly evicted from Kowloon, having received monetary compensation.

Now, on the site of the walled city, the Kowloon Walled City Park is laid out, gardens in the style of the early Qing Dynasty are blooming. The territory of the park is 31 thousand square meters. The alleys are named after the streets located in the historical center of the city. Five name stones and three old wells remain in memory of Kowloon, as well as a bronze medal received by the townspeople before it was destroyed.

Hundreds of high-rise buildings pressed close to each other, narrow passages between them that did not know sunlight, children who, for lack of an alternative, played on the roofs of buildings, the realm of secret triads, opium dens and brothels. In 1987, about 33 thousand people lived here on a small plot of 2.6 hectares. This area of ​​Hong Kong has already become history, but at the same time it has also remained a model of how monstrously compaction can reach. The amazing fate of the Kowloon walled city in our review.

1. 1841. Great Britain wages a successful war against the Chinese Qing Empire. At the heart of the conflict is the desire of the British crown to sell more and more opium for the local people, on the one hand, and the bold decision of individual Chinese officials to ban the import of Bengali drug into the Celestial Empire, on the other.

2. One of the episodes of that long history, which naturally ended in favor of the white man who carried his burden with fire and sword, was the landing of British troops on Hong Kong Island and the neighboring Kowloon Peninsula. On the peninsula, the British found only a small city of the same name, Kowloon (translated as “Nine Dragons”) and a fortified fort that served as the residence of a local mandarin. As a result of this First Opium War, in 1842, the island of Hong Kong went to the British, and in 1898 a new convention was concluded that expanded the jurisdiction of the empire, over which the sun never sets, also to the peninsula (the so-called "New Territories"). Under the terms of the agreement, which, as practice has shown, was strictly observed, Hong Kong and Kowloon were leased by Great Britain for the next 99 years, with one small circumstance that had big consequences.

3. This circumstance is marked on the map above as Chinese Town (“Chinese City”, upper right corner). According to the convention of 1898, the very fortified fort where Chinese officials lived was excluded from the lease agreement. It continued to be the territory of the Qing Empire, forming a kind of enclave in the British colony. In those years, of course, no one could have imagined that this fact, a few decades later, would lead to the formation in Hong Kong of a quarter that has no equal on the third planet from the Sun in terms of population density.

5. The extraterritoriality of the Kowloon Walled City was only nominal. In fact, the control over the fort, surrounded by powerful walls, was carried out by the British. During the Second World War, the peninsula was occupied by the Japanese, who dismantled the walls of the fortress and used the stone from them to expand the military airfield, which later turned into Kai Tak, Hong Kong's main airport, one of the most dangerous in the world.

7. It all started after the end of World War II. De jure, the walled city of Kowloon, albeit without fortified walls, continued to be the territory of China, surrounded on all sides by the British colony. In fact, the laws and administration of Hong Kong did not apply here, its inhabitants did not pay taxes to anyone.

Kowloon became a real black hole, a promised land for refugees from the "mainland" fleeing the civil war in China, where in the second half of the 1940s the communist People's Liberation Army drove the Kuomintang puppets away from the future territory of the People's Republic of China with might and main.

8. First hundreds, then thousands, began to flock to the territory of the former fort, eventually turning into tens of thousands of squatters who took advantage of the Kowloon status to start a new life, formally still in China, but in fact, in the same Hong Kong, using all its goods, but at the same time existing almost completely independently.

Any attempts by the British administration to prevent spontaneous construction on a small spot 210 meters long and 120 meters wide ran into resistance not only from local residents, but also from the PRC government, which threatened a diplomatic conflict in case of any actions of the Hong Kong authorities on the territory that they considered theirs.

9. By the end of the 1960s, according to some estimates, up to 20 thousand people lived on an area of ​​2.6 hectares. Of course, no one can give an exact figure: it was impossible to keep any records of the residents of the fortress city.

10. These tens of thousands of people demonstrated miracles of survival and adaptation in an essentially anarchist society. No central water supply? No problem. 70 wells were dug, from which water was delivered by electric pumps to the roofs of buildings, and from there it was sent through a labyrinth of countless pipes to the apartments of consumers. No electricity? Among the residents of the quarter there were many employees of the Hong Kong Electric company, who perfectly knew how to illegally connect to the Hong Kong power grid and helped their neighbors in this.

11. The inhabitants of Kowloon also built themselves. First, one-, two- and three-story houses appeared on the territory of the fortified city, successfully cleared from pre-war buildings by bombardment by Allied aircraft. Then, as the population of the district increased, the number of storeys began to grow rapidly. The building density also increased. This is how Kowloon has changed over the decades.

16. In fact, any free site within the boundaries approved by the 1898 convention received its high-rise building. Relatively free there is only a small spot in the center of the quarter, where a yamen has been preserved - the residence of a mandarin, one of the rare relics that still reminds of the former history of Kowloon.

18. Around him, by 1980, about 350 high-rise buildings were built, located so densely that from panoramic shots Kowloon looked more like one huge and monstrously ugly building.

21. There were, in fact, no streets inside the quarter. There were passages that formed such a confusing network for the uninitiated that a stranger who got here quickly lost orientation in space. The building was so dense, and the space of the Klondike of anarchism so valuable, that high-rise buildings often hung over the aisles, blocking out the sunlight.

23. On the other hand, there were no cars inside the block, only hundreds of meters, kilometers of a labyrinth of narrow lanes.

24. Passages were illuminated only by rare lanterns and burning neon signs of countless shops, shops, hairdressers, medical offices that occupied all the first floors of buildings.

25. About a hundred dentists alone worked here, and they had no end to clients. The absence of the need to obtain a medical license and pay taxes to anyone made it possible to keep prices for services at a level inaccessible to their colleagues from Hong Kong, working on a neighboring, but already “civilized” street.

27. A variety of small handicraft industries were also located here. Kowloon had its own industry: food, haberdashery, light industry. In fact, it was a city within a city, in many ways able to exist autonomously.

29. There were even several kindergartens and schools in the quarter, although basically, of course, older family members looked after small children, and somehow older children managed to be placed in Hong Kong schools. There were no sports grounds, clubs, cinemas. In fact, the roofs, where one could find at least some free space, became a space for socialization and recreation of the inhabitants of the area.

30. Children played and grew up here, their parents met and talked, the older generation sat at a game of mahjong.

31. And huge planes flew over the roofs, which were within reach. The specific approach to landing at the Kai Tak airport, the one that the Kowloon fortress walls went to build, required the pilots to make both a dangerous and effective U-turn just before landing.

32. It began at an altitude of 200 meters, and ended already at 40, and somewhere in the middle of this most difficult maneuver for pilots was Kowloon high-rise buildings bristling, like with rotten teeth. It was because of this neighborhood that the height of the quarter's buildings was limited to 14 floors - almost the only requirement of the Hong Kong administration that the inhabitants of the walled city complied with. In return, they received an amazing and completely free spectacle right above their heads.

34. In the first decades of the transformation of the old Chinese fortress into a sleeping area with its own special flavor, the only real force here were the triads - secret criminal organizations that were widespread in pre-war China.

35. Taking advantage of the lack of interest in the area on the part of the Hong Kong administration and its law enforcement agencies, they turned the just beginning to grow area into a nest of various vices. Gambling establishments, brothels, and opium dens literally flourished in Kowloon.

36. One of the Chinese writers described Kowloon of those years in his book “City of Darkness” in this way: “Here on one side of the street there are prostitutes, and on the other side the priest distributes milk powder to the poor, while social workers give out instructions, drug addicts sit with a dose under the stairs in entrances, and children's playgrounds at night turn into a dance floor for strippers.

39. Only in the mid-1970s, the Hong Kong authorities, finally deciding that it was enough to endure this and having secured the approval of the PRC government, carried out a grandiose series of police raids that ended in the virtual expulsion of all organized crime groups from Kowloon.

40. Despite its brutal appearance, the area from the point of view of the criminal situation was a rather calm place.

41. In the same years, centralized water and electricity supply and sewerage finally appeared here, mail began to be delivered to Kowloon.

44. But these important changes for the better, which turned the walled city into a more or less comfortable place to live, were not reflected in the external appearance of Kowloon. Anarchy continued here, squatters grew, there was no question of any major overhaul of buildings or at least cosmetic renovation of facades. This is how the quarter went down in history.

48. Most residents huddled in small apartments with an average area of ​​23 square meters. m. Various extensions to the external and internal facades of buildings have become widespread. Those finally grew together, in the area even a second, parallel to the ground, system of transitions was formed already at a certain height from the ground. Kowloon was turning into a single whole organism, a huge “communal apartment”, a building-city, as if it had come to the present from a post-apocalyptic future.

51. In 1987, the governments of Great Britain and the People's Republic of China entered into an agreement that settled the status of Kowloon in the light of the impending return of Hong Kong to Chinese jurisdiction in 10 years. The administration of the British colony received the right to finally demolish the quarter that disfigured its face.

53. Demolition began in 1992-1993. All residents received either monetary compensation for the move, or apartments in Hong Kong's rapidly growing modern new buildings. And still, the process of destruction of this anarchic relic, born almost a century ago, was accompanied by violent protests of the natives, who did not want to lose their habitual freemen and way of life.

56. Nevertheless, Kowloon was doomed. It was demolished quickly, but the deserted area, and so regularly caught in the lens of filmmakers, managed to “light up” in the 1993 film Crime Story (“Crime Story”), in which the hero of Jackie Chan fights against the kidnappers of a Hong Kong businessman.

57. One of the key episodes of the picture was filmed in Kowloon, and its impending liquidation allowed the creators of the action movie to shoot several spectacular scenes with explosions of residential buildings in the walled city.

60. After the demolition, a picturesque park of the same name appeared on the site of Kowloon, repeating its outlines. Now this is a favorite vacation spot for local residents, and only a memorial with a layout of the quarter, which has become another landmark of Hong Kong, reminds of its phantasmagoric past.

62. In 1987, when the Hong Kong administration and the PRC government entered into an agreement dooming the area to destruction, a study was carried out that made it possible to more or less accurately determine the number of its inhabitants. It turned out that about 33 thousand people lived here on 2.6 hectares. It was an absolute record of population density on Earth.

64. For comparison: if Kowloon were an area of ​​1 sq. km, 1.27 million people were supposed to live here. And if Moscow became Kowloon with its area of ​​approximately 2500 sq. km, then almost 3.2 billion people would live in the Russian capital, that is, the entire population of China, India, the United States and Indonesia combined.

The Kowloon Walled City District in Hong Kong was the freest place in the world. Until it was taken down. So goodness and order again defeated chaos, and since then the world has become a slightly more boring place.

Text: Matvey Vologzhanin
Photo: Greg Girard

When Britain and China agreed to lease Hong Kong in 1898, there was one seemingly insignificant clause in the multi-page agreement. The old Kowloon Fort on the peninsula of the same name was to remain Chinese. This small, one hundred by two hundred meters, fortress, surrounded by a low wall, was supposed to be a kind of embassy from which China could keep an eye on how the British were in charge in Hong Kong.

The British undertook to provide the fortress with everything necessary for life: water, provisions, fuel and others, as well as sacredly honor the inviolability of its borders. True, they soon brought a group of military men there, found out that there was nothing interesting inside the fortress except for several hundred alarmed officials, apologized to China and since then have tried to more or less gentlemanly comply with the terms of the contract.

During World War II, the Japanese who invaded Hong Kong tore down the wall and dispersed the remaining officials. Nevertheless, after the war, the Kowloon Fortress, even though it lost the wall and Chinese observers, was still formally listed as Chinese territory, because no one was going to change the whole agreement because of such trifles.

That is, in fact, in the middle of an overpopulated and busy Hong Kong, a piece of free territory has formed. Of course, such charm could not lie idle for a long time.

Nine dragons invite guests

The first to arrive there were the Chinese - refugees from revolutionary China. Not being Hong Kongers protected by the British protectorate, they huddled in Hong Kong on bird's rights, and it seemed quite logical for them to settle in "China". Moreover, not a single policeman, not a single civil servant had the right to access this land.

The hieroglyphs for "Kowloon" can be read as "Nine Dragons". And the dragons were extremely kind to the guests. No one prevented those who came to build houses there, monstrously violating any building codes. True, these houses were sometimes built on the sly by quite official and decent construction organizations in Hong Kong, which led to several high-profile cases of bribery of officials and inspectors who turned a blind eye to this business. But only those who lived outside were in trouble, and inside Kowloon everything was quiet and peaceful.

The local population with impunity pelted border violators with garbage

No one tried to demolish these illegal buildings. Nobody prevented the residents from building additional floors, terraces and making add-ons as God would put it on their souls. Nobody demanded trade licenses from the fishermen who laid out their catch on newspapers along the spontaneously formed streets. And any pickpocket running away from the law enforcement officer had only to have time to cross the line of the Kowloon "no man's land", and the policeman chasing him was forced to stop the chase. But this is theoretical. In practice, of course, law enforcement officers sometimes tried to enter Kowloon, but they ran a great risk that after this feat not a single dry cleaner would accept their uniforms, because the local population, having hidden the fugitive, usually began to throw garbage with impunity.

And the government could not do anything about it, because China stubbornly demanded to honor the inviolability of Kowloon according to the treaty. Everyone understood that China was doing this out of harm, because the Celestial Empire was not able to influence the course of events in Kowloon and simply took the opportunity to spit a little in the soup to business partners.

The soup, meanwhile, turned out to be quite picky.

Life inside

By the nineties, the population of Kowloon exceeded 50 thousand inhabitants. It was the most densely populated area on the planet. The architecture of the self-made high-rise buildings, soldered into one unkempt post-apocalyptic-looking masterpiece, was unfortunately limited in height. The only thing that the authorities managed to get from the Kowloonians was promises not to build at a mark above forty-five meters, since the planes arriving at the nearby airport were already forced to make an extremely dangerous turn so as not to hook this tower of Babel.

But no one prevented the Kowloons from condensing inside. The corridors-streets between the buildings here were rarely wider than seventy centimeters, housing ten square meters was considered royal apartments, and most of the local apartments did not have a single window: on all sides they were buried in a heap of the same add-ons and outbuildings.

Public life usually took place on rooftops, which were relatively single space. There were paths and stairs to move from level to level, children played here, young people met, fought and courted here, old people basked in the sun, and adult working people came out here to breathe real air and discuss pressing problems.

The British administration carried out the terms of the treaty as best they could. Free electricity was supplied to Kowloon, the sewage system worked, although not without incident, eight water columns were installed around the fortress, and the garbage that the locals sometimes deigned to throw out was regularly taken out (the Kowloonians did not particularly want to part with garbage as a source of all kinds of useful things). , and the fortress was always full of all sorts of rubbish). They even delivered mail here. True, the postmen who worked on the Kowloon route first underwent a long training with more experienced comrades in order to sort out the clusters of thousands mailboxes, which the Kowlooners hung with pleasant ease on the first free piece of wall they came across.

Population of Kowloon

Homeless people, beggars, drug addicts and criminals - these are the main categories of the inhabitants of Kowloon. Renting an apartment the size of several suitcases here cost about forty Hong Kong dollars a month, that is, at least ten times less than in a decent area. There were no police here, and everyone had complete freedom to do everything that was forbidden to do in Hong Kong.

Even the triads - all-powerful Chinese criminal gangs - kept Kowloon as a neutral zone: showdowns were prohibited here, they did business here, rested and hid.

Homeless people, drug addicts and criminals are the main categories of inhabitants of Kowloon

The 1996 Hong Kong film Kowloon Walled City describes Kowloon's business life: “On the ground floors there is nothing but hairdressers, shops and small handicraft shops. Outsiders will not see anything interesting here. But already at the level of the second or third floors, all the forbidden gates of the world are revealed for the admitted visitors. Shops for the production of counterfeit products. Clandestine restaurants that serve dogs and cats banned from consumption in Hong Kong, cooked according to traditional recipes. Illegal bookmakers and casinos. Lots of brothels. And, of course, drug laboratories, opium dens and dens. Agent work in Kowloon was almost impossible: here all the inhabitants knew not only each other, but everything about each other and showed amazing solidarity, protecting the secrets of their illegal existence. Even the children of Kowloon were silent and suspicious of outsiders."

With all this, there were extremely few murders and other violent crimes in Kowloon. Everyone understood that the independence of this territory was a rather ephemeral thing, and in the event of some very dramatic events, the authorities would do everything possible to put an end to it. Therefore, everyone kept order - both triads and ordinary residents.

Gina Chan, who grew up in Kowloon, says in an interview with China Central Television, “No matter what people on the outside feel when they get to Kowloon, it was actually a good, kind and safe place. We lived in the same room with my mother, brother, grandparents, we always had very little money, but I remember my childhood as happy and free time. During the day we sometimes went to the children's group, which was jointly organized by the neighbors - there we were taught to read, write, draw and recite poetry. But most time we rushed with friends along the stairs, corridors and rooftops, playing hundreds of different, but always exciting games. If you were hungry, you were given a few pies in any stall, you could be fed by neighbors, just any passerby could give a few coins for a hot dog. No one offended children in Kowloon, it was a safe and friendly world. Relations between neighbors were so friendly that you could turn to anyone with your problem. And you would be helped. Yes, it was dirty and cramped, but it was good there!”

End of Kowloon

No matter how good it was inside Kowloon, but outside of it there was a lot of trouble. Drugs and contraband spread from here, stolen goods flowed here, wanted criminals hid here. Another major problem was children hiding from school education and unhealthy sanitary and hygienic situation. It was suspected that the Hong Kong flu pandemic, which claimed tens of thousands of lives around the world, originated and gained strength in the fortress of freedom.

Britain and China have been discussing the Kowloon problem for twenty years, and the discussion has gradually changed in the most curious way. The closer was 1997 - the year of the end of the Hong Kong lease agreement, the more dramatically the requirements of the parties changed. Now China began to demand that the British solve the problems of Kowloon, while the cunning Anglo-Saxons rested on the fact that this territory was under the jurisdiction of China.

We would be happy to do something with this hotbed of evil and infection, but we have no right!
- You have, you have! We give it to you!
- But let me! This will defile the spirit and the letter of the treaty!
- Well, nothing, we will endure somehow ...

The resettlement of the 50,000th homeless person threatened to turn into such an expensive adventure that the British refused for a long time and surrendered only in 1987 - in exchange for some preferences from China.

For six years, the Kowloonians have been lured, whistled, and scraped from their stronghold. They built social housing. They were promised pensions and scholarships. They were frightened by the army and the police. They were given new passports, an amnesty for offenders was announced.

And, probably, all these efforts would have sunk in vain, but the day of handing over Hong Kong to China was getting closer, and even the most hard-nosed Kowlooners guessed that in such a situation it is better to quickly turn into a law-abiding citizen with a British passport than to be at the disposal of red China, which has respect to human rights was not one of the strengths.

In this diagram, you can see how Kowloon grew and grew, and then grew over time.

The Kowloon freemen began to surrender. And so, in 1993, the last Kowloon grandmother, sighing heavily, took out a bowl of family heirlooms from her hole, got into a bus provided by the authorities and left for a social apartment with hot water and air conditioning. And then bulldozers approached the ancient fortress...

The authorities did not begin to build there new area and to conduct active construction: with all the shortage of free land in Hong Kong, this would be dangerous. There was a risk that the spirit of anarchy and unsanitary conditions would return: people tend to remember for a long time where you can throw cigarette butts and tear off the helmets from the police, and where you should walk decorously, keeping cleanliness and public order.

Therefore, a large beautiful park was laid out on the site of the Kowloon Fortress - with paved paths, traditional wooden bridges and thick golden carps splashing lazily in immaculate ponds.

So neatly and uninterestingly ended the history of the freest city in the world.