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Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance (2013)

Essay by Matthew Hung with photography by Greg Girard.

This architectural phenomenon was born out of a rich nineteenth century political environment where the conflicts of the Opium Wars and the subsequent Unequal Treaties led to Hong Kong being ceded to Britain and in doing so turning the Walled City into a Chinese enclave. Following the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on 19 December 1984, when it was agreed that Hong Kong’s sovereignty would be returned to China on 1 July 1997, the political ambiguity that had protected the extralegal community and allowed the illegal structures of the Kowloon Walled City to be sustained disappeared. Within three years the residents and business owners were compensated for their loss and the decision was made to conserve only the old deputy magistrate’s office from when the Walled City was a Chinese fort, the rest was reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand cubic meters of rubble.

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