Kowloon Walled City Packed 35,000 People Into Six Acres With No Government

In 1898, Britain leased the New Territories of Hong Kong from the Qing government for 99 years. The treaty's drafters — perhaps deliberately, perhaps by oversight — excluded a small Chinese fort within the leased area. The fort, Kowloon Walled City, formally remained Chinese territory inside British Hong Kong. Neither the Qing administration nor the British colonial government wanted to actually run it, and after the Chinese Civil War the question of jurisdiction became politically untouchable. So nobody governed it. For decades, the Walled City was, in legal effect, sovereign nothingness inside one of the most regulated cities in Asia.

What grew up inside the gap was extraordinary. Refugees and squatters built upward without permits or building codes. By the late 1980s, the 2.6-hectare enclave — roughly six American football fields — held about 35,000 people. The density of approximately 1.2 million inhabitants per square kilometer, or three million per square mile, was the highest documented anywhere on Earth. About 350 buildings rose to 10 to 14 stories, often without setbacks, locked together so tightly that the alleys between them never saw direct sunlight. Internal corridors connected upper floors across blocks; you could walk much of the city's interior without descending to the ground.

Unregulated dentists, unregulated noodle shops, unregulated heroin dens, and the 14K and Sun Yee On triads coexisted within. A single 1959 murder trial finally gave Hong Kong's courts limited jurisdiction. Between 1973 and 1974, Hong Kong police ran 3,500 raids and arrested 2,500 people, breaking the worst of the triad control. The British and Chinese governments jointly announced demolition in 1987. Compensation totaling HK$2.7 billion went to the residents. Demolition started on March 23, 1993, and ended in April 1994. A landscaped park sits there now.