The Dark Side: Opium and Lions
We go deeper into the heart of Kowloon, exploring the lawless lanes of the Walled City, the exciting potential of Kai Tak and West Kowloon, and the thoughts of an emperor
In the 1960s, the Golden Triangle (a stretch of land where Thailand, Laos and Burma meet) was already notorious for its harvest of opium, and Hong Kong was developing a reputation for being a transit point for the international drug trade. The main entry point for these narcotics was naturally Kai Tak airport. With so much trade going back and forth with Southeast Asia, the area bordering the airport, Kowloon City, became populated by Thais, who opened restaurants, groceries, and – rumor has it – collected rice bags full of drugs thrown over the nearby airport fence by crooked local officials.
While the influence of the traffickers began to wane by the late 1970s (with much credit due to the actions of the ICAC), the Thai community remained, the streets still lined with freshly stacked piles of lychees and longans, bags of ready made spices, and some of the most authentic som tum (green papaya salad) this side of Bangkok. Since the airport closed in 1997, the space has been used variously as a golf driving range, carnival, and parking lot – a far cry from the crowded, chaotic entrepot of my youth. However, a HK$100 billion redevelopment has been underway over the last quarter century (has it been that long?), with the centerpiece the exciting Kai Tak Sports Park, which promises to offer the city - and rugby sevens - the stadium home it deserves.
Just to the north of the Thai neighborhood sits a quiet, landscaped park, laid out in a classical Qing-dynasty style. While pleasant, it is on the whole unremarkable, except for a carved granite stone near the South Gate, which reads: ‘Kowloon Walled City’. From the time I started primary school (Quarry Bay, if you’re interested), I remember hearing stories about a lawless place across the harbor, of a secret city run by tattoo-adorned triad gangsters, emperors in their domain in the face of the scared authorities. For a boy growing up on a diet of superhero comics, the possibility of an impenetrable fortress populated by other worldly characters was impossible to drive from my mind.
The Walled City was one of those fantastic historical anomalies. It had – as the name suggests – been founded originally as a small stone-walled fortress in the early 19th century by Chinese imperials forces, then subsequently expanded following the British occupation of Hong Kong Island in 1841. In 1898, the New Territories were leased to the British for 99 years, including the areas surrounding the walled city, and the Qing officials were driven out of the fort a year later. However, the site itself had not been explicitly part of the lease agreement, leaving behind a self-governing population who continued to recognize Chinese, not British law. Although the wall was knocked down during the Japanese occupation in WWII (they wanted the stone to extend the airport runway, the area had retained its semi-lawless air in the post-war period, off limits to policemen and local government officials alike. The result was a collection of high-rise buildings built without permission, businesses run without a license, and a reputation for drugs, prostitution and crime. It was, naturally, fascinating for a little gweilo boy.
My parents had actually already taken me into the Walled City as a baby, with me sat in a push chair. On a Saturday afternoon excursion with friends, and much against my mother’s better instincts, they’d found an entrance, and walked right through the city to the other side, thankfully without any incident (but rather a lot of bemused faces). My mum distinctly remembers the lack of sunlight reaching the ground, and seeing a mini fire truck tucked away - it’d have to be, given the tiny lanes that predominated.
You see, when you stepped over the boundary into the Walled City, you left behind orderly, colonial Hong Kong, and entered a strange new land which made up its own rules. Wandering down darkened, rubbish-strewn passageways, you’d occasionally catch a glimpse of the sky above, but mostly it was illuminated by haphazardly hung neon lights. Every so often, a door was left open, allowing visitors to catch glimpses of residents playing mahjong or tucking into dim sum. It all seemed fairly innocuous.
The truth is, that all the illicit behavior was going on behind closed doors, off even smaller lanes than the ones visitors would cautiously walk along, and in hidden apartments up in the crudely built towers (no planning regulations here). Eventually, after 184 years, and with the blessing of Mainland China – to whom the Walled City residents still owed some kind of loose allegiance – the ‘City of Darkness’ was finally demolished in 1994, remaining only in memories. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the peninsula, a new development was about to change the face of Kowloon forever.
To accommodate the needs of the new airport on far away Lantau island, new railway and highway links needed to be constructed to link Chek Lap Kok with Hong Kong island. The government, clearly eying up the gargantuan premiums it would receive from selling plots to developers, decided that since land would have to be reclaimed anyway, they may as well go big. So big, in fact, that the reclamation would increase the size of the Kowloon peninsula by one third – the largest urban reclamation ever undertaken in the city. Work on West Kowloon began in 1994, and is still ongoing (when it comes to major infrastructure works, Hong Kong government machinations move slowly), though the rise of several venues in the West Kowloon Cultural District are tantalizing promises of the potential of this reclaimed space, and blank canvas.
The zone at the southernmost tip, just in front of the entrance to the Western Harbour Tunnel entrance and west of the high-speed train station that connects Hong Kong to cities across mainland China, is occupied by Kowloon’s tallest collection of buildings to date, an area known as Union Square – though that’s where any similarities with its New York namesake end. Rather than an imposing statue of George Washington, the Kowloon site has a much more imposing 74 story building known as Harbourside (Hong Kong’s tallest residential tower), four more monstrously large housing blocks (The Arch, The Waterfront, The Cullinan and the Sorrento), the 93,000 sqm Elements shopping mall, the International Commerce Centre (ICC), all this over a combined MTR and Airport Express station. Standing at 484 meters, the ICC was once in the top three tallest buildings in the world, but now languishes way down in 12th position.
At the top of Hong Kong’s tallest building is the Sky100, an indoor observation deck on the 100th floor. It’s a fashionable place to take in the changes Kowloon has seen over 149 years of continuous development - from a time when it was little more than rural farming villages, to a period when the British would catch boats across from the island to go on tiger hunts (really!), the construction of ‘Nathan's Folly’ in the early 20th century, redevelopment of the 1960s, and through to the present day’s urban sprawl.
However, my personal favorite looms large to the north. Even taller than the ICC (a rule brought in forbid any buildings higher than the surrounding mountains, the 495-high Lion Rock, named for its resemblance to the fierce feline, sits at the center of the Kowloon mountain range, standing guard over the eight sleeping dragons that lie slumbering beneath. Just a short hike up from the city streets, the peninsula spreads out in all its misshapen glory below. It is certainly a breathtaking view, and, taking it in, you can't help but think that a certain young emperor would have enjoyed it too.
Your two pieces on Kowloon were both extraordinarily fine. It was my own similar fascination with Kowloon that caused me to set parts of three novels in Mongkok, a neighborhood more myth than reality. Most of what we loved about it all is gone now. Perhaps it falls on people like us to try to keep it alive for yet a little longer.