The first time you come across the place, it's it's overwhelming you.

Nothing really prepares you for it.

And the noise, the smells, the fluidity and pace of life inside it. The human side of the place kind of ran
completely against its physical presence.

It started life as a squatter settlement. The individual footprint of the buildings, that sort of building block
was a small little hot size that you had these very one room wide buildings going up 14 storeys. I trained
as an architect and everything I'd been told was you couldn't possibly squeeze this many people into this
smaller space. Imagine a vertical urban village, a lawless labyrinth where crime, commerce and
community coexisted for generations. At its peak, it was the densest place on earth, that place in Hong
Kong was known as the Kowloon Walled City.

It teetered in limbo for nearly a century. And then. But it's memory and reputation live on even 20 years
later. Why is it etched so indelibly into the minds of so many?

Cannonball City is known in Chinese as sings, I sometimes go dancing actually means a walled area
where there was an official and sometimes some soldiers as well. So really is an administrative and
military term.

It was sheerly by accident that the Kowloon walled city came to be a donut hole of Chinese sovereignty in
the crown colony of Hong Kong and 1898 agreements ceded what was then an old military fought to
China so long as it didn't interfere with Britain's rule of Hong Kong colony. Britain had twice defeated
China on land and by sea. It was a superior military power. But hundreds of millions of Chinese were just
across the border while British reinforcements were far away.

This was a way to beef up the Chinese presence, both in the administrative and the military, says one
thing after another. The British decided that was not a good idea to let the Collinwood city remain under
Chinese jurisdiction. So despite the fact that the British force, the Chinese officials and the soldiers to
leave, as far as the Beijing government was concerned, it had never agreed to this arrangement. But in
fact, it sort of kept their hands off the place.

After Mao Zedong's communists took control of mainland China in 1949, violent political movements
became the norm. Hundreds of thousands of refugees poured across the border in the first three decades
of communist rule. Their first stop was often the Kowloon walled city. Many saw just a roof over their
heads. Others, though, brought their professions. No Samdhong yet, though, they're going to die. Yes. I.
Making that. Something I don't know. Bye bye bye.

Top look, I know chin ho ho. Good bye now. Hey, sorry, I didn't mean yet my idea. Come on. Michael
Banega was saying, hey, zo. So the a couple of bad. Yeah. So let's set the weather yet. And I know you
are as your eyes. Why don't you. I'm Bill.
No cheating, and he said, you got you go. I don't know. He said not having any jail time is about finding
that balance. Joe the Global Fund. So. Don't let him now get 90 Little Italy. Form. You put the loan. I'm not
oh, good, you're coming on a panda. Call me uncle. They what? They did not know a whole.

Move, move. That means that say it'll be revealed, he thought he was a little.

What the Gaylard Oldham's a fun game, I was into Kong. That's a serious thing, all whites hum among
them want to go to, say, eagle once again, go eat eating my body. I'm Ceyhan Porter. Guptill hurt your
leg. I mean, you know, Sentido, you know what? Or how you run the game. I remember sneaking into one
of these doors and I saw a very old woman sitting inside in the 60s, 70s and 80s, there were a lot of older
men who were very poor.

The only women they could afford would be these very old prostitute.

For some, the walled city was a haven for vice. For others, it was simply a home or a chance to carry out
their trade. To make money, to start a business.

To begin living out their Hong Kong dream. My father was a Chinese from Thailand. He moved to Hong
Kong to work and then he went to China to marry my mom. I was born in the Cultural Revolution. And
after that, poverty was the norm in mainland China. So everybody who could they would come to Hong
Kong because for those of us who live in mainland China. At that time, Hong Kong was the heaven. The
current was it was not a slum.

It was a fully functioning community. It's not a slum because, you know, the people have hope. But there
were a lot of doctors, qualified doctors and dentists and half a million China. And because, you know,
after the prison system and that they were not able to practice in Hong Kong. In the 1970s, Hong Kong's
economy was starting to boom. That had a knock on effect in the walled city.

The whole site of the city was built like a buffet cake in or south, rising cake. And up to the limit of the
safety limit of the fruit poppy, because it's closer to the beginning of the runway. I don't know. But it only
went so far. There were daily reminders to residents of just how cut off from the colony's success they
were for a city of 33000 people. There was only one water pump located inside its boundaries on a daily
basis.

My mom will carry the dirty laundry downstairs to one of those water stations.

She will wash all the dirty clothes. She will clean it up. And then she will wash her own hair. And then on
her one hand, she will carry a bucket full of clean clothes. And on the other hand, she would carry a
bucket of clean water and she will walk home. Well, what you look at, let me say, I got to know Pheto
whole law, but I'll get Dogen let AIG. Heidi did Saiful and Glanzelius.
What they mean for long. All I know you guys seen this happening. I had not been to hell job and begged
me this. Who did that? Well what do you. Fine man. Come and go find the lay down and let it go. Oh I
didn't say fine. Hire 7c. Come quick. There you go. Are you sick by this.

Crisis in 1991. So in who came to the walled city on a Fulbright scholarship from New York? Her goal?
Document how the unplanned city worked.

When I first came to Warsaw there, I had no idea where I'm going go.

It's like a beehive thought the best way to do is actually to record the experience.

And and so I mock all the trails and then I follow my markings by horseback.

How you get. And then just recorded all the way.

How one can traverse up and down and across and I'm on the roof. It's like a big kid.

The jungle gym there, you just discovered different things. As you twist and turn. And then someone was
saying hello to you.

In 1984, the political landscape changed.

Hong Kong would be returned to China and the colonial government decided to deal with the Kowloon
walled city once and for all.

I think it was a good idea. One of those ideals, a bit of housekeeping. Well, why not try to do something?
It was the background to the presumption of sovereignty. On January 14th, 1987, at nine a.m., Hong
Kong's colonial government announced its decision to clear and demolish the Kowloon walled city.

On the night before the first people were to leave the walled city, so Enho spent the night with a family.

I was there with a family of four generations, had the dinner at the last evening when the grandma was
mopping the floor, cleaning the dishes, and her daughters were very bitter and did not want to clean up.
And then the mom said, it has always been my home. And even though it's going to be taken the way I
wanted to be taken away as the way I always liked it, to be clean and neat.

Even before the city was raised, the nostalgia began in Hong Kong. There was something quintessentially
exotic, something. Hong Kong. About the Kowloon walled city. A random piece of no man's land.

A blood sport is the typical example of foreign inches. Foreign eyes looking at the Wall City.

USA, what sports, of course, is about MMD.

Before MMD was cool kind of situation. Very brutal fight. So where else can this very brutal, lawless fight
take place?

But the Wall City. But there was a little bit of introduction with a handheld camera bringing people through
the net, the alleyway out of the Wall City, and there was a precious footage to. There are more and more
interest about the column, was it here? And when I do my online research, I find out that there is a group
of Japanese who recreate that part of the kallu. Was it in Japan?

A three story Japanese theme park outside Tokyo, Re-created Kowloon Walled City. Details of the walled
city were reproduced with months of research. Even the garbage was imported from Hong Kong to scatter
on tin roofs. It Chouteau Yoshida found cheap rent in the walled city as an exchange student from Japan.
He lived there for four months in 1985. He visits the Carlton City Theme Park for the first time.

What is once again the victim? Put it there on the right. This man does not kid each other than the.
Abarbanel identified that that I've got. And that's it. So the hope is that on their minds, it doesn't seem
obvious that my Zululand, without my out being the coalface, get into this. Almost as well. Yes, I do. Well,
they might get it done. While those outside of Hong Kong still celebrate the high rise urban villages
mystique its legacy.

Here in Hong Kong is less clear where building walls once rose 14 stories high. There is now a manicured
park.

Only the original Yamen, the Chinese courthouse at the walled city center was preserved. For many in
Hong Kong, the world's city was a shameful problem. The historical quirk. Many would choose to forget.
Some lament the near absolute erasure of the Kowloon walled city.

So not only is it a piece of architecture that is representative or archetypal of its genre, it is also a
symbolic place of resistance.

In my dream, I always dream about coming back to the Wall City. That was very strange in the dream. I
will always find myself walking through the alleys, go into nights and guy turn left into the second guy and
then walk up to the buildings where I lived. I still remember the families on different floors. I don't know
why. In my dreams I always come back.

In many ways, the Kowloon walled cities, enterprising laissez faire society formed a cornerstone for the
modern, prosperous Hong Kong you see today. But what will happen to its stories of survival,
resourcefulness and hard work? Will they live on through the generations or will they be sanitized and
raced as completely as the walled city itself? This is where we were yesterday. Yeah. Moving up there
already.