The Kowloon Walled City

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/photos/Kowloon-Cross-section-low.jpg

'Bout time it got its own thread

http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro

Obviously lots of discussion previously itt good places to set up a colony of noise dudes

http://live.wsj.com/#!36585ADF-5AEA-438F-8C4A-4C90D25B545A

German language documentary from 1989 (before it was torn down):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lby9P3ms11w

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

This has fascinated me ever since I first heard about it. It just emphasised how weird the continued existence of Hong Kong as a British colony was between 1949 and 1997.

I just finished this book and highly recommend it if you can find a copy

http://www.amazon.com/City-Darkness-Life-Kowloon-Walled/dp/1873200137

Googling fortuitously brings me to this

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1060791749/city-of-darkness-revisited

emphatic yes way sna

$2500 is a little steep but Melbourne uni library have a copy

I was in Guangzhou earlier this year and there are parts of the city that have a very claustrophobic feel, just tons of little three story buildings constructed very, very close to each other (like can't fit a body between buildings close)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipai_Village

Fucking love this place. Seen that doco too.

'Bout time it got its own thread

http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro

― 龜, Monday, April 28, 2014 6:18 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. Thanks for starting.

http://i.imgur.com/NyWTM7t.jpg

From after the fall but what an amazing airport

Also the fact that the height of the buildings in the Walled City were limited by how low planes landing at Kai Tak were flying

friend and former bandmate band
http://kowloonwalledcity.bandcamp.com/

it's the best city

can't believe this thread's so new

http://i.imgur.com/5SlpTtR.png

Ha I tweeted that yesterday.

http://weburbanist.com/2014/07/29/5000-residents-being-evicted-from-worlds-tallest-vertical-slum/

Kinda blowing my mind that a guy from the KWC did a Reddit AMA

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13muo9/i_grew_up_in_the_cyberpunkesque_dystopia_called

http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/13ns5y/

thx dayo for keeping this thread up to date. what an amazing place.

kowloon walled city themed game centre in yokohama

http://randomwire.com/kowloon-walled-city-rebuilt-in-japan/

you can barely see it in these photos but it has a sit-down outrun cab!

kawasaki, even

I can't believe I never knew about this until yesterday!!!!! I spent most of last night looking up anything I could on it and watching that German doc mentioned upthread. This is blowing my mind. How was there never some major scale electrical fire or something what with the DIY wiring and all the water and I just . . . this is unbelievable and I need to know more.

ENBB if you can, get a copy of City of Darkness through yr library (I doubt they have it tho)

You can also buy one right now (it's a rerelease) but it's like one hundred bux

Also if you open the image in the first post in its own tab it's like a gazillion pixels

trees were growing on top? :o

Yeah there is frustratingly not a richness of online info about the kwc in which to wallow.

Dayo I saw how $$ it was online but I'm gonna try the library. So fascinating.

Even though HK is really different from China this sort of thing could only happen in Chinese community. Chinese are really good at working and living together.

:)

there was a playstation 1 game called kowloon's gate that i always wanted to play but i heard mixed things

basically, there needs to be an insanely detailed, total 3-D reconstruction with a serial story structure that you could play, like a combo detective/adventure game

^^^shenmue 2

This is the best thing I have learned about in a long time!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Kowloon_Walled_City.jpg/350px-Kowloon_Walled_City.jpg

looks like its made of dozens of

http://www.eyebytes.com/port/portimages/il.sc1.gif

https://hk-devblog.com/2016/05/14/alley-graphic-test/

https://i.imgur.com/ZrRele7.jpg

ENBB if you can, get a copy of City of Darkness through yr library (I doubt they have it tho)

You can also buy one right now (it's a rerelease) but it's like one hundred bux

― 龜, Thursday, December 4, 2014 4:57 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did end up getting a copy of this as a gift and it’s one of the best things.

https://d2u3kfwd92fzu7.cloudfront.net/catalog/artwork/gallery/1448/photo/RM_KWC_027_350dpi.jpg

http://www.imagebam.com/image/43f4151068785224

BIG NEWS: with the help of dayo and (possible ILXor?) justinetlai, I've put together what I believe to be the FIRST full image of the infamous internet classic Kowloon Walled City Cross Section image.

https://i.imgur.com/n7x7y7p.jpg

I wrote quite a bit about the process here:

http://www.zachscott.org/2018/12/23/compositing-kowloon/

nice work & interesting blog post, thank you!

(daydreams of ultra-hi-res deep-zoomable version - until checking the price tag of that book, anyway... also I don't know how you "deep zoom" anything, obv)

yeah, my hope is that someone will just buy the book and scan the living daylights out of it. i know what you mean by deep zoom! someone just needs to scan it as ultra hi-res.

Cool sh1t KM!
Greg is on insta fwiw. . .

i'm not sure who Greg is! (sorry if it's someone on this thread whose irl name i don't know)

lol, Greg Girard, one of the authors of City of Darkness. Though apparently at least some of the photos in the book are by Ian Lambot. . .

this is astonishing, incredible work

haha, it wasn't that big of a deal, i was kinda being tongue in cheek with announcing it as something big and new. :) but still, it may be, temporarily at least, the best version of it that's accessible online! i'm guessing that at some point pretty soon we'll get a better, full scan that will render all previous versions obsolete.

BIG NEWS: with the help of dayo and (possible ILXor?) justinetlai, I've put together what I believe to be the FIRST full image of the infamous internet classic Kowloon Walled City Cross Section image.

🖼

I wrote quite a bit about the process here:

http://www.zachscott.org/2018/12/23/compositing-kowloon🕸/

mad props to Karl! I hadn't even seen the original cross section until just now

this owns

amazing work, karl.

karl u are a goddamn hero

holy moly km

https://www.greggirardpictures.com/product/pre-order-tokyo-yokosuka-1976-1983-signed-available-april-1-2019

Not Kowloon but this looks cool in a somewhat similar way

or even -

https://www.greggirardpictures.com/product/newly-released-book-city-of-darkness-revisited

I just got a softcover copy of this (Japanese text), pretty stoked

how has it not burned down?? dumb luck?

(did)

did you ever see? Kawasaki warehouse - 5 story themed arcade outside tokyo based on Kowloon walled city - unfortunately just closed down this month :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYA_0-X7kLg

Would have loved to have gotten in there to take photos

Why is KWC so haunting and intriguing and fascinating? I've spent hours reading about it, looking at pictures, watching documentaries

At this point I can just casually drop the fact that I visited the Kowloon walled city park last month! I spent the morning looking at what remains of Kai Tak airport, then I visited a place called Bleak House Books, which is on the 27th floor of an office building - Hong Kong is like that - then I walked along to the park. I remember the walled city from Bloodsport. Here's a view of where it used to be:
https://i.imgur.com/kGpKOhC.jpg

Here's a view as it was when Jean Claude Van Damme visited it:
https://i.imgur.com/cJC03r9.jpg

The park itself has a baseball court, a pond, some bonsai trees, and a little display area with a model of the walled city just inside the entrance:
https://i.imgur.com/CD0MeRm.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/lmhGiXu.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/XBRYizT.jpg

There's an exhibition about the walled city, although it was surprisingly small. Is it a cultural thing? Europeans tend to fetishise the recent past but I had the impression that Hong Kong wasn't all that interested. I don't know how residents of the walled city felt about it, or residents of Hong Kong. But then again no-one memorialises all those Victorian terraces that were torn down to make way for Ronan Point.
https://i.imgur.com/UnYP0Ta.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/rvbWwU8.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/8H8ZcWO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/8H8ZcWO.jpg

In the local area there was a big flyover, and a gold Range Rover:
https://i.imgur.com/TCnPxUa.jpg

That street had a bunch of posh cars double-parked, so either there were some top bargains or someone was being tortured to death in the back room of a shop. I don't know. It struck me that photographing golden Range Rovers in Hong Kong was a bad idea.

Now I'm trying to psyche myself up for the Arctic circle trail, which is an eighty-mile trek from Greenland's main airport to another airport also in Greenland. On the one hand it's apparently not as hard as it sounds - it's mostly flat grassland, there are huts along the way, the temperature from May-September is generally above 0c - but on the other hand it's staggeringly expensive to get there and involves walking ten miles a day in Greenland for eight days and sleeping outdoors.

How many blog posts can I squeeze out of a bunch of similar images of rolling hills? One blog post about the kit; another about cooking; a third about the trip. That's not a good return for the outlay involved. Hong Kong on the other hand is an endless source of amusement. The irony is that I used to detest the kind of internet people who casually boasted about their travel adventures - they seemed to compete with each other to say as little as possible about Japan and Iceland etc, as if they visited all the time and felt nothing of it - and now I am turning into one of them, but on a minuscule budget, and twenty years after the novelty of blogging about non-US countries lost its novelty.

Nice photos Ash, are you on Insta?

Oh. I posted the same image twice. And the last chunk of images didn't appear. They were:
https://i.imgur.com/wxPFDzy.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/wDpPNFt.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/DE6FUGi.jpg

I was going to say "I'd set fire to HER consulate any day!" under the picture of the woman in a bikini, but that would be sexist so I won't.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/07/kowlooon-walled-city-illustration/

https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828/KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg

click to explore in detail (if it's not too big to work)

Oooh thank you

I really want to see this, just came out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Warriors:_Walled_In

That is incredible

"two replica sets of the Kowloon Walled City were built for filming"

"Mr. Big (大老闆): a crime lord who is solely focused on maximizing his wealth and personal interests"

Tag yrslf I'm the enormous dog (or small horse) on the bed.

Need to watch

love soi cheang, love the walled city, would love for the floundering hk film industry to get a big kick in the butt - i’m very excited for this one

more here, sounds great

https://filmexposure.ch/2024/05/17/twilight-of-the-warriors-walled-in-a-blast-of-hong-kong-kinetics/

I watched that while vacationing in Macao - really good movie, def miles ahead of the contemporary Hong Kong average. Based on a Chinese comic book and there's sequels planned. The final scene featuring (this isn't really a spoiler I don't think) random inhabitants of the Walled City going about their business I found genuinely moving.

sad lol - a few years ago a couple ilxors hooked me up with some awesome detailed scans of that illustration. i wrote about it a bit upthread:

The Kowloon Walled City

i wrote about it at length on my website (rip, though i killed it) and posted/hosted the huge illustrated scans, and tried to write interesting things about it. unfortunately all of my efforts fell into that uncomfortable middlezone between amateurish and slightly competent. i was writing about big topics but without any real knowledge, just really pretentious, and also my writing voice (and this is still true) wavered between reliable and somewhat informative vs silly and completely joking the entire time. it's confusing for readers, especially strangers who come across your website by googling for kowloon walled city. i started to get emails from very interested people who wanted to know more. i stopped answering them after a while, the trump era continued and covid happened and my world ended, i let the website expire and definitely didn't back any of it up.

it's awesome that someone did the work and shared it (https://cohost.org/belarius/post/6677850-architectural-cross)! i do regret that dayo and justine also did the work, years ago, and generously shared it with me, and i didn't really carry it through like i should have. it's an amazing image, lovely work of art

I just got a softcover copy of this (Japanese text), pretty stoked

― calstars, Thursday, January 31, 2019

curious about this too, calstars, if you see this! i love the ilxor practice of taking a good 5 years or so to resume a convo

Yup, it’s sitting on my bookshelf. I can share a few photos if I could just get off my damn couch

"then I visited a place called Bleak House Books, which is on the 27th floor of an office building"

Sadly Bleak House Books closed a couple of years later - it became increasingly difficult to run a bookshop in Hong Kong. But happily the bookshop still exists, because they moved to New York and reopened in 2023! Which is nice. They must be glad to see the end of political persecution and financial instability.

I visited Bleak House Books to buy volume one of what was then a two-volume book of photographs of old Hong Kong. I planned to return and buy volume two, but COVID intervened. Every fibre of my being wants to waltz into the new store in Honeoye Falls NY while dressed in my Douglas MacArthur costume - as I walk through the door I will say "I have returned" - except that this being the United States there's no way to actually get there. The nearest train station is in Rochester, and there appears to be no public transport to Honeoye Falls at all.

Besides which Douglas MacArthur would not take the bus.

as I walk through the door I will say "I have returned"

irl lol

no worries at all z!

i still have the original scans (altho not the composite), here they are: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BJe6md48bfkIjQncTWjAjK5rb9Lg1Olr?usp=drive_link

Those look to be higher res....

yeah it's been years since i looked at those images, but iirc the tricky part about making a single, huge composite image is that even in the book the scans come from, some of the sections of the images are split on different pages and at (very slightly) different sizes. hard to explain, but i remember bringing the images into photoshop and trying to make them fit together and running into some difficulties.

(i guess i re-upped this thread without checking if i was repeating its earlier contents: apologies for that) (i was excited!)

iirc i used the big office scanner to do the scans at the highest dpi setting xp

Twilight of the Warriors is now available to rent/buy.
Started it last night, good so far, and the sets look amazing

Yeah, we watched it last night and my husband— a martial arts film fanatic whose family is mostly Hong Kong Chinese— said halfway through, “I like this, but it’s kind of a Triads buddy film!” and I sort of agree. It was really fun and entertaining, and the sets really made it.

A lot of the “fat triad boss spin kicking across the room” stuff had me rewinding

walled in rocked

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_reCv-ix-So

Is Chungking mansions still there