It’s easy to romanticise Kowloon Walled City. The grimy, enigmatic megastructure inspired a legion of cyberpunk media, from Deus Ex and Blame!, to Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy. Almost ethereally dystopian, it was an architectural marvel—a massive slum growing like a cancer on the edge of Hong Kong. But, far from the vibrant neon megalopolis of the cyberpunk media it inspired, life within the Walled City was rather more mundane.
At the time of its demolition, Kowloon itself had produced no culture. While aesthetically appealing from afar, the city was ultimately little more than a slum ruled over by the Triads — a labyrinthine work camp filled with illegal factories producing everything from drugs and dog meat, to plastic bags, illegal pornography, and raw industrial materials. Inhabitants often worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to hit quotas for their mafia paymasters. They were paid a pittance, just enough to cover their rents and bar tabs. Damp walls and open-air sewers bred rats, snakes, and cockroaches. Infested with insects, the tiny apartments provided by the Triads could barely even fit a bed inside, and many inhabitants bunked with multiple roommates. And yet, many people with the means to leave never did.
In many ways, Kowloon was the last vestige of a traditional Chinese village life that was killed at the end of the 19th century—weakened first by English colonialism, and later done a death blow by the Great Leap Forward. While many of the city’s 50,000 inhabitants were refugees, criminals, and dissidents taking refuge in the lawless megastructure to avoid police, immigration authorities, or debt collectors, that could hardly be said to be the case even for the majority of inhabitants—for so many, the Walled City was simply home. The rat-warren simulacrum of a simpler, ancient way of life held a strange allure to those unable to adjust to modern ways of living.
Ironically, for something so often seen as a real-life sci-fi city, Kowloon served as a way for its inhabitants to escape into the past, sloughing off the state and social pressures of hypercapitalist Hong Kong for a strange parody of a simple peasant life that had ended decades before they were born. A consistent routine of skills-based labour in exchange for room, board, community, and just enough money to go to the local pub in the evening.
Even those who couldn’t work found a home in the slum’s network of tunnels—the mad, the sick, and the elderly, rejected by the new world, seemed to melt into the very structure of Kowloon, becoming its antibodies and fibroblasts. Roaming the tunnels in a daze, they would collect scrap metal, pull broken pipes from walls, and reclaim old scaffolding that was no longer structurally necessary; they would then deposit these raw materials on the upper levels and outer edges of the Walled City as building materials for expansion—broken bones and vestigial organs cut out and grafted to the structure’s exterior to make new rooms, new levels, and new tunnels for the rats, human and rodent, to inhabit as their populations swelled.
And swell they did. Many families in the structure were multigenerational, able to trace their lineage back to the slum’s establishment over a century prior. The only world many of its citizens had ever known, it wasn’t uncommon for children born in the city to find love and have children of their own without ever venturing beyond its concrete walls. Even from the building’s roof, it was almost impossible to see the horizon beyond the mass of TV antennas, cage homes, and makeshift chimneys. From the roof of the world, Kowloon was surrounded by endless sky, inhabited only by birds and aeroplanes—which must have seemed, at least to the children, like two extremes of the same species.
In the lower depths, faith bred as fast as the pests—and came in just as many varieties. In the film’s only interview, we meet Jackie Pullinger, an English missionary who describes how she found herself at home in Kowloon, running a cult and living among her congregation for over 20 years. Arms open to the structure’s neediest inhabitants, she spent her life within the Walled City healing the sick and curing drug addictions by laying hands and teaching trance meditation. How she achieved this is anyone’s guess, and on this point she is cagey. Not only did the Triads allow Jackie to set up and run her church without any intervention, they even allowed converts and those she helped recover from heroin addiction to leave their employ without any consequences, wiping their debts.
What’s even stranger is all available reports suggest Jackie’s faith healing was magnitudes more effective at curbing the structure’s drug dependency problem than the pills, medical professionals, and rehabilitation programs provided by the billion-dollar NGOs operating on Kowloon’s periphery. Still, only the most desperate inhabitants pledged fealty to the neocolonial messiah; for those simply seeking guidance or reassurance, more traditional spiritual practices were still available.
In one of the film’s most charming sequences, one of the city’s legion of fortune tellers lays out a series of envelopes on a table in front of a customer; the customer then asks a question and a small trained bird hops from its cage, looks up at the customer, pulls out an envelope, and then hops back into its cage. The customer is handed his envelope, sealed and secret. He is free to read his fortune at his leisure, and the bird is given a treat for its hard work.
In another sequence we see a self-taught palmist with a plastic bag on his head reading the palms of the sick, diagnosing them and advising them on which unlicensed doctor to visit. Nearby, in a shrine attached to a storm drain, a desperate group of women furiously casts reeds, pleading the gods for a favourable diagnosis.
Made by the only film crew to ever have unrestricted access to the entire structure, Hong Kong’s Secret City shows us Kowloon as it was: not a vision of the future, but a throwback, filled with magic and old-world superstition. There are no flickering CRT screens, networks of surveillance cameras, or markets selling advanced black-market computer components. Instead, there are apocaries selling illegal dried meats and the powdered scales of endangered fish.
In the years since its demolition, images of Kowloon in the 1980s and 90s have become emblematic of a cyberpunk future we chose to swerve away from at the turn of the millennium. For many, the exposed wires, tight rat-runs, and anarchic self-reliance are almost romantic compared to the stultifying end-of-history dystopia we’ve ended up with instead. But the more you learn about Kowloon the more you realise that, rather than a tragic vision of an alternate future that never came to pass, it’s a far more tragic vision of a doomed old world clinging to life against the onslaught of the new.
Toward the end of the film, there’s a sequence where ‘travelling’ (‘roaming’ might be more accurate) street opera performers play antique traditional instruments and sing old pre-colonial songs for an enraptured crowd. This is not a tourist attraction—there were no tourists in Kowloon—it was simply honest old-world entertainment, in the last place in the world where it could possibly exist.
At other points in the documentary, factory workers are shown using old pre-war looms to make luxury fabrics for the fashion industry; in illegal noodle shops, we see workers using ancient, elementary cooking techniques from a thousand years ago, their slum kitchens untouched by technology and modern convenience. At one point the filmmakers even discover a colonial cannon in a hallway—something which should be in a museum is, instead, just another part of daily life.
Kowloon Walled City was the last gasp of a China that now no longer exists. Its demolition was not a kindness—the city’s inhabitants simply moved to new slums—rather, it was a statement. Demolishing the structure did not solve a social problem or improve the lives of the millions of Hong Kongers still living in extreme poverty. Instead the act was symbolic: the ritual sacrifice of the Old World on the altar of the New.
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