Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here as well, and this is stuff you should know. So well, it's get started talking about some stuff that you should know. And I guess we should do our semi annual explanation Chuck that the title of our podcast is never intended to make you feel bad because you don't know something. It's not that we think you should know this already. We're saying we find this really interesting and we want to share it with you.
Hence we want you to know about it. You should know about this because it's interesting and we want to tell you about it, not that you should already know about it.
Yeah, that's the second one. We just did that listener to mail like two weeks ago.
I think we should do it every week. I'm going to start every podcast with that from now on.
Okay, that's a great way to retain listeners, I think for sure.
Man, you should see the match I'm drinking right now. It's like mash mash brown green. It's disgusting. I don't know what's wrong with it, but I got a drink in any way.
Oh is it not taste good either?
Not really, it's pretty bitter.
Maybe that much is turned bro, But does.
It it was powder? Does maucha turn? Because if so, I'm drinking turn macha for sure.
All right, well we'll do a short stuff can of powder turn. But no, we're not going to do that today because we're talking about the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, which is the most well, at one time was the most densely populated place on planet Earth.
And just to give you if you've.
Ever been to New York City, if you've ever traveled to the East Village, yeah, one of my favorite villages.
That's where I got engaged.
Yeah, right there at the museum. Which museum, not the Waitty That is the most and it doesn't feel like it when you're there. But the East Village is the most densely neighborhood in New York City and they have about forty three thousand people living in the East Village. The Kowloon Walled City is about the size of the East Village geographically, but there are one point yeah, that's why they use the East Village and all the comps.
One point two five million people living there as opposed to forty three thousand.
Okay, yes, exactly, but there were really only thirty three thousand people. But if you spread it all out over a square kilometer, you would have that many people to equal that density.
Right, That's right.
So that's I wanted to make sure to take that and just screw it up. The reason I did this is because it's not the same size. Kowloon Walld City is like a fraction of the size of the square kilometer.
Yeah, it's I think like a little over three football fields.
I saw that. I also saw four. I also saw four rugby fields or large soccer pitches. So all of those put together.
Uh huh.
Imagine twenty three thousand people standing on there like they'd literally have to be standing on one an other shoulders. Who knows how many people deep it would be. And so this incredibly compact area of a few football fields or rugby or soccer pitches held buildings right up against each other that went all the way up to fourteen stories tall. And if you went into this place, you would be like, I, I this is like nowhere I've
ever been in the world. And you would be right because there was nowhere in the world like the Kowloon Walled City from about nineteen seventy to nineteen ninety ish.
Yeah, like, if you have a if you have a fairly smallish lot that your house is on, let's say, have a single family house and it's on like maybe a half an acre.
If you're lucky, like you're doing pretty great, that's a great life.
Yeah, this is a little more than six and a half acres and there were five hundred buildings packed in there.
That nuts. Even with those mind blowing stats, it's like, go and look, there's a very famous photograph from i think a nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety National Geographic overhead that just gets it all across perfectly. You just look at it and you're like, that doesn't even look like a village or a city. It looks like a
single thing. And a lot of people have made that point that these buildings were so close together, they were so interconnected, people just built haphazard bridges between one building and another so they didn't have to go down fourteen stories and then back up that it essentially created one single organism. That that's kind of how Kowloon Walled City came to be seen when it reached its fully developed peak.
Yeah, it had to be the inspiration behind the Living Quarters and Ready Player One if you've ever seen that movie or read the book. When I saw pictures of kowloon Wald City for the first time, I was like, Oh, looks like Ready Player One, really, except it was real. This was an actual, real place. So we encourage you, at some point when it's safe to do so, to look it up because the pictures worth a thousand words and we spent probably a couple of thousand trying to describe it.
The thing that really rings home, I guess to me, okay, comparing it to Blade Runner, like especially in Blade Runner when Harrison Ford is eating noodles and Edward James almost comes up to take them away, Uh huh, Like just that kind of look like the fluorescent light, everything's packed together, is people everywhere, Like that's what it looked like.
Like.
There's no way that the designers of Blade Runner did not were not inspired by kowloon Wald City. I refuse to believe it.
Well, and as we'll see, or I guess I could say it now. There have been lots of video games and movies that were based either on or very much patterned after this look one of the black Ops games. This movie about a straight cat or sorry video game about a straight cat. That maybe a movie at some point, but yeah, I think it was. This is all to say it was densely packed. Have we gotten that across?
What was that movie that I told you to watch about the cat? The animated movie about the cat, And then you said, oh, I already saw it in theaters. Was it called Flow?
I think that was Flow. That was so so great.
That was such a good movie. I encourage everybody to go watch it. It's like almost sixteen or eight bit graphic looking. It's very bit mapped on purpose, and it really does a great job of making it otherworldly.
Yeah, it won the Oscar and it looks that way because a dude made it in his apartment.
Oh man, that makes it even better. That is such an amazing movie.
Yeah, it's really great.
The other movie that sticks out for me when I think of Kowloon Walld City is the merchant Ivory movie Howard's.
End Right or Far and Away with Nicole Kidman right Tom Cruse.
That one I saw that in the theater for some reason, really that's weird. I also saw eyes I'd shut in the theater and I knew all about it going into it, and so it was my birthday, so I made my whole family go watch it.
Uh that's that very fun end of that story. Yeah, all right.
So we need to go back in history, though, if we want to talk about how this city came to be, and in order to do that, we need to go back to the First Opium War, which was a few years between eighteen thirty nine and forty two where there was a trade dispute between Imperial China and Britain, where in Britain was like, hey, we loves shipping in this opium from India to your addicted citizens, and China was like, no, we like selling them opium ourselves, and.
So let's go to war over that.
I think actually China was executing addicts in the street. They were on a huge campaign to eradicate opium addiction from their population, and Britain was like, uh, uh, we're going to keep them addicted because we're making tons of cash off of that, oh for sure.
And this is after China had made a ton of money shipping tea, so there were trade relations already, you know, sort of ensconced.
Yeah, and Britain couldn't get enough of China's tea. But China was like, we don't really want too much of your stuff, except our population wants the opium you're smuggling in. So imagine if like the war as cartel, like Mexico is like, nope, we don't want you you supplying our population with drugs, and the Wars Cartel's like, oh yeah, we're going to war with you and we're gonna win. And now we have a treaty saying that we can sell your population drugs and you can't do anything about it.
That was essentially the First Opium War. Yeah, and there was even a second Opium War, the sequel.
That's right.
But another important thing come out of the First Opium War, which was China was forced to seed some land on Hong Kong, which you know wasn't a big bustling place at that point, not much of anything at that point, And in order to sort of you know, be close to them and sort of keep an eye on what's going over there, the Qing dynasty said, all right, we have a military installation just across the water from Hong Kong on the Kowloon Peninsula and over the Kowloon Bay,
and let's build a big wall there and just like fortify this little military installation. So they built a wall fifteen feet thick, thirteen feet high. It housed about one hundred and fifty soldiers, and that's where the name Kowloon Walled City came from from that wall.
Yeah, and today's modern Hong Kong is populated mostly on the Kowloon Peninsula, but at the time it was the opposite Hong Kong Island was the population and this Kowloon place was just a little Nowhere's Ville essentially, And so China was like, yeah, we're going to keep this, We're going to keep it. An eye on the Brits like this.
And after, I guess the Second Opium War led to the Second Convention of Peking where both the First Opium War and the second one found China just giving into tons of demands from the Brits, from the Americans, from I think the wrench who were all like, you have to open your market's dust because we want money from
you guys. And one of the things that came out of it was the very famous ninety nine year lease that the Brits had on Hong Kong from China, which is why the UK administered Hong Kong for almost one hundred years essentially throughout the twentieth century.
Yeah, So the other thing landwise that came out of that Second Opium War was they seated all of Hong Kong Island, the entire Kowloon Peninsula to the Britz. But keep in mind, they still have this walled city kind of right there, you know, nearest to the coast, within
that territory. And so there was a little, I guess, a little loophole that they I don't know if they snuck it in there, but it was, you know, clearly written, but there was a clause in there basically that said it's so confusing, I'm not even going to read it. But the result was this weird, small walled city within this territory that Britain now controls was to stay there and to stay that way.
And to stay Chinese territory. So this little tiny, six acre, three rugby pitch patch of land would be Chinese sovereign land in this British territory. Essentially, is what just got set up from the eighteen ninety eight Treaty.
All right, so it's a weird situation, hmm. But that's what they're left with. Right after the British takeover there, some Christian missionaries went in. It started to get populated. The walled city did they built a church, Some pig farmers came in. They started squatting. People started squatting because, you know, it was protected by this great you know, I'm sorry, not the great wall.
A great wall that was.
When we were in Belize on vacation, we went up a Rio Grand. Emily kept saying, you go up the Rio grand to get to the ocean, and I was like, I don't think it's the Rio grand And it was Rio Grande.
So the joke for the rest of the trip was we're going up a Rio Grand.
Very cute.
So there was a great wall, so that attracted squatters.
It did, and one of the reasons why is because there was this idea that, okay, this is Chinese territory. So that was already kind of a thought in people's head that there weren't enough people there in this Christian missionary church kind of we're almost keeping an eye on things as far as the Brits administering Hong Kong were concerned,
so they weren't paying much attention to it. And then World War II came along and Japan occupied big swaths of China, as we talked about in our Unit seven thirty one episode, and one of those swaths was the peninsula, the Kowloon Peninsula, and they tore down those thick, thick granite walls and they used it to build out Kai Tak Airport. And I think it was already there was kind of like an airfield or laying strip, and they
turned it into like an actual airport. And for many, many years, for decades, Kai Tak Airport was the airport that you flew into when you flew to Hong Kong.
Yeah, and it's uh, you know, they needed building. I love repurposing building materials. Sure, so when I heard that part, I was like, that's great. They don't need that wall there anyway, because it looks like it had a wall build around it when you.
Looked at it, right, you know. That was kind of the funny thing.
Yeah, which is ironic because it looks like they populated that city with a wall and then took the wall down. Yeah, but it was just so I mean, everyone knew how far out you could build, so it just kind of ended up looking that way.
Right. It was, it was, and it was very densely.
Populated, that's what I've heard.
So after World War Two a couple of things happened geopolitically that kind of gave rise to the Kowloon Walled City. The name stuck, even though it didn't have the walls. Yeah, but a lot of the people who were refugees during the war made their way down to the Kowloon Peninsula and they were like, we're not Brits, We're Chinese, so we're gonna start squatting here. And the Brits were like, no, you know you're not squatting here. This is not Chinese,
it's ours. It's part of Hong Kong. We basically own Hong Kong right now, so get out. And they evicted all the squatters in nineteen forty eight. By this time it had been there were like thousands of them, so it was a really big deal. And then the squatters just came back next week.
That's right, they came back. The next week.
They tried to kick them out again, and there was a riot this time, and I feel like, that's a pretty good time for our first break. Okay, sure, all right, we'll be right back. All right, So we're back Cawloon Walled city without the wall. Yeah, is being populated. They're
getting kicked out, they keep coming back. There was a Chinese Civil war following World War Two, so that was one reason that people, you know, between the communists and the Nationalist Party, and that was one reason people were starting, you know, to get the.
Heck out of you know, in there, I guess, yeah.
And in nineteen forty nine, you know, the communist one they declared the People's Republic of China, and so that's when in the nineteen fifties things really kicked off with refugees trying to get in there and build up up up.
Yeah. And if you were a refugee from China, that meant you were probably a nationalist or at the very least weren't a communist, and you just needed to get out of there. But you were, as far as you were concerned, better off living on this tiny patch of Chinese land because you still consider yourself a Chinese national.
Then you were trying to assimilate into this British administered polony that was really Chinese, but the Brits didn't treat it like that, right, And so these people, these refugees became like this, they almost like freedom fighters. And even the CCP, the Chinese Communist government, they would they were they were promoting them. They would give them supplies. Sometimes they would give them food. Sometimes they would send emissaries down that would talk them up and be like, keep
fighting the good fight. You know, we've got your back. And essentially, anytime the Brits tried to make a move on these residents of Kowloon Walled City, China would step in and be like, ah, that is Chinese territory. So no matter what these people did, the BRIT's hands were tied. And the whole reason why was not that China cared about them, but it was a thorn in Great britain side.
There was this crazy, weird area that they did not have control over in the middle of this colony that they had taken from China, and China took every opportunity to basically twist that thorn in their side, and they used every every time that the people of Kowloon were put upon as a chance to step in and flex their whatever authority they did have in the area. Still.
Yeah, So as a result of all this, the Brits were like, I don't even care anymore, Like this.
Is such a pain. In the fifties and sixties, they.
Took a real hands off approach and just kind of let what happened there happen there, and that led to a real influx of people and then that housing boom they didn't have. It looks like the only building code they have was you can't build anything over fourteen stories tall because it's right there next to the airport and you don't want to get a wing through your living room one day. So that was the only building code around, certainly the only one honored, because it was kind of
anything goes inside there. And what we ended up with, you know, you mentioned an organic structure. It was ended up called by architects on organic megastructure, sure, because these buildings would sink down into their founday and start to tip, but they would tip over into the next one, and that one was tipping toward it. So they ended up calling like lovers buildings because at the top they were all kind of angled in and touching one another, and it's sort of sweet if you.
Think about it, it is.
It is kind of sweet. It was also at the same time, weirdly, architects in like the fifties and sixties there was kind of like an avant garde school of thought about just incredibly dense like community building and this
is essentially a natural experiment. And it kind of showed that a lot of those theories held up kind of like the buildings held one another up, that people could just build out what they needed in ways that they needed in that spaces that were livable without having to be you know, spread out, without having to have government
oversight and all that kind of stuff. Too. Those buildings, especially when they were lovers buildings pressed up against one another, they became so dense that sunlight would not penetrate the street level in a lot of cases. In most cases actually, like one of the premiums for a flat in the Kowloon Walld City was one that was outward facing or faced on the internal courtyard because they had sun exposure.
Most of the apartments, businesses, dwellings, streets alleys in klouon Wald City were not exposed to sunlight at any point in the day.
Yeah, and that you sent in this pretty good little YouTube. It was like fifteen twenty minutes long about this walled city that breaks it down. And at one point I paused it because they had I was wondering what these things cost. And I don't know what year this was that they gave us these numbers from. But a two hundred and eighty square foot flat cost twenty eight thousand
American dollars. And if you're thinking, all right, that two hundred and eighty twenty eight thousand, that kind of makes sense.
But that was without sunlight.
I think the exterior facing four hundred and fifty square foot flat was sixty thousand dollars.
Yeah, and I think that was in the sixties or seventies from a paper I saw, okay, But still one of the things I saw is that a reason that this was attractive to a lot of people, because over time the place didn't just attract Chinese nationalists and refugees from China. It attracted people who are like, oh, there's
these really cheap living in here. You could get a flat that was about double the square footage of a like a government flat, like a council flat, public housing essentially, you'd call it, and it had a kitchen and a bathroom, and those were not guaranteed in the public housing flats that you would maybe even pay the same or more for.
So there was like real incentive to move into this place if you didn't care about living cheek to jowl with your neighbors amid trash and abandoned appliances and all sorts of other crazy stuff.
Yeah. Well, there were some benefits though.
If you lived in the Koloun walled city, you didn't pay an electric bill almost certainly because you probably just like literally ran the electric yourself from the public utilities. There was all manner of plumbing and wiring routed from the outside coming in into the walled city, so these buildings were wrapped in water pipes and sewage lines and conduit running electricity. If you were a business, you weren't paying any kind of business taxes, so that was a
big plus. But you didn't have stuff like trash pickup, and you had to deal with things like heroin dealers and brothels and the Triad gang kind of running the show, which you know, it was mostly bad, but they also did some things to keep the place up.
Yeah, A good example that I saw of what life was like in this that made it like people just got used to this stuff and it was every day, was that you would when you were walking on street level, you would carry an umbrella because of those exposed pipes, it would be leaking on you. But some of those pipes were also sewage pipes, so those would be dripping and leaking too. Because there was no code that was
being followed. It was like, I need a sewage outlet coming out of my house here, so I'm just going to run this pipe right here, and that's that some people just walked around with umbrellas on street level. Another one that I saw that people just got used to is that a lot of the street level areas were tunnels. And the reason that they were tunnels is because overhead there was a mesh net that had been laid between buildings to catch the trash that people just threw out
of their windows. And the reason that they put the mesh netting was because if they didn't, then you wouldn't be able to get into the ground floor of any of the buildings because they would be so covered up with trash. And so these impromptu alleys developed as trash built overhead and the walls of the first floor of these buildings were exposed on either side. People just got used to this, like this was just what life was like in Kowloon, and in some ways it wasn't that
much war if at all. Then some of the other poverty stricken areas of Hong Kong at the time.
Yeah, Like if you're wondering, like why did people even live there or stay there, it's for exactly that reason.
You know.
It wasn't so different from other poor places that it would have been a big, like life improvement to move and this was their home. It may look kind of kind of crazy from the outside, but people really made a life there. There were hundreds of legit businesses that operated there. There there were machine shops. There were a lot of machine shops as far as industry goes in metal fabrication, and then food was a big one. There
were lots of food factories. And in that documentary they said, you know, there was always a feeling that like some of the food that was made there was in on the plates and in the bowls of some really high class restaurants surrounding them.
Yeah, the fishballs, so they were unregulated fishballs made in highly unsanitary conditions that just made it out of the Kowlouon Walled City. Because that's another thing too. A lot of people look at this from the outside and think like this is completely isolated from the rest of Hong Kong. Absolutely untrue. Those businesses were exporting out of the city
into the rest of Hong Kong. People were coming from outside of the city into the city for things like dentists and doctors who were all unlicensed, unregulated, which at first blush, You're just like, oh my god, why would
you go to an unlicensed dentist. Well, they were already trained and licensed in China, but when they went to Hong Kong, those credentials didn't transfer over, and so rather than pay and become a licensed dentist in Hong Kong under British rule, they just set up in Kowloon Walled City and set up practice without needing a license.
Yeah, and it was cheaper, way cheaper. There were schools.
If you're like, you know, did d even function as like a regular society, they actually, for sure did. There were kindergartens, there were schools. A lot of times it was like the Salvation Army or somebody kind of running these things. If you were like, what about a playground or something like that, some of these rooftops had you know,
playground equipment where kids could go. Pigeon racing was a big thing, so there were gardens on the roofs, the ones that didn't have trash on them, and they were also keeping these racing pigeons up there.
And you know, there was actually some order.
It wasn't just like you might picture like constant chaos or something like that. It was more like something you see out a blade Runner, just a really densely populated city like actually functioning. They had volunteer fire brigades. They did you know, they didn't have municipal trash collection, and there was trash all over the place, but they tried, you know, they had volunteer trash collection teams, they had night watch teams. There was a single mail delivery person
delivering to the entire city. So they were functioning.
Yeah, there was the officially the neighborhood Welfare Association. If you bought or sold a flat, the neighborhood Welfare Association would witness it, so it was very much legal. And then the triads you mentioned, they were running and they were manufacturing and selling heroin out of the city. They were running protection rackets and brothels and child prostitutes and all sorts of terrible stuff. And then simultaneously they were also providing the law and order that did exist. Like
it was not just chaotic anarchy. It was anarchic in the sense of like government regulation and oversight, like you know, building codes and stuff. But it's not like you just walked over your neighbor's house and killed them and took their stuff and that was that. Like, there was law and order, and it was the rule of the triads who essentially kept people from I guess descending into chaos. If that was even a possibility.
Well, they didn't want It's kind of the rule of the street. They didn't want the real authorities coming in there. And if it got so bad that would eventually happen,
it was sure. I mean, I remember when my friend bought his first house in Atlanta in the mid nineties in a pretty rough neighborhood, Like he got his house broken into and got some stuff stolen, and the guy that was the big like drug dealer dude in the neighborhood brought his stuff back, Oh wow, And like knocked on his door and said, here's your guitar, here's your amp, here's your stuff, and he was like, you know, I think the unspoken thing was like he didn't want the
cops in there. Sure, so he's trying to keep his guys from doing dumb stuff like that to attract attention.
Okay, So yeah, perfect analogy. That's exactly what the triads were doing in there. And so yeah, if you just you know, if you wanted to do Heroin or something, I think it was largely smoked, you would come from outside Kloum Wall City. Maybe if you liked Heroin so much, you'd stick around and move there. But at the same time, if you were just some elderly person looking for a cheap place to stay that was willing to live in an incredibly dense place like there was, there was room
for you there too. So it was a really I saw that it was vilified and romanticized, and it really shouldn't be either. Neither of those should be done to it. It was just like every other place, multiple shades of gray. It's just the literally the sure, It's just that the extremes on either side are so fascinating, especially when they they the whole spectrum is viewed that that that's what made Cawloon City so remarkable.
Yeah, for sure, I think that's a great time for a second break, and we're going to talk about what happened in Calvin City right after this.
Uh Chuck, we're back. And I just want to say, before I forget again, ninety nine percent Invisible of course did an amazing episode. Oh of course they did on this back in twenty twelve.
So great Roman Mars.
Yeah, and you could be like, oh, that's not what Josh and Chuck so they said something different. Just go with Roman Mars interpretation.
Yeah.
I just weirdly texted Roman the other day or yesterday for the first time in a long long time.
Like weirdly you said something weird.
No, just weird that you brought him up. That's like twice that he's been mentioned in my life twice in a couple of days and it had been a while and he didn't text me back yet, because come on, Roman.
Seriously, Roman, get your act together. So yeah, so, Kylleen, Wild City, it's going along. Most of the stuff we've just talked about, the fourteen story buildings, lovers buildings, pressed up against one another, the trash tunnels, all that stuff is really taking place from about nineteen seventy to say, nineteen ninety ninety two. Okay, that's like the peak of the notoriety and infamy and the just the way that
people think of Kowloon Wald City. It was basically between those decades, right and even before then, even before there were fourteen story buildings astonishingly going up in this in the city. The Brits were like, we really hate that Kowloon Wald City is sitting there. It's just like a thumb in our eye that the Chinese just keep rubbing over and over again. We really want to get rid
of it. But their their hands were tied, essentially. Despite that, they tried a bunch of different ideas to try to get people out of kowloon Wald City so they could tear it down.
It was a toe in their tea.
Perfect man, you are on fire today.
I mean, can you imagine anything worse?
A foot in your Brunswick stew right?
Oh wow, okay, one and everything good. Let's call back, all right, So if you don't know what that is, everybody that it's gonna be a little east egg for you. One day and deepen the stuff. You should know archives, deepen a pot of Brunswicks. Two.
All right.
In nineteen sixty two, the Brits started or I'm sorry, they completed construction on a high rise public housing complex called the Tung Tao Estate, and they're.
Like, all right, everybody, look what we built for you.
Residents of Kowlouon Wald City, get out of there, come on over here, we want to resettle to you.
This is much nicer. Authorities showed up.
They had notices that they posted and handed people and they were met with the Kowloon Wald City Anti Demolition and Anti Removal Committee, who said, no, thanks, we want to stay here.
Yeah. And so they said, you know what, we're going to tell China on you, essentially, and China stepped in and was like, no, guys, you're not going to do that.
These people have a right to live here. This is quote a gross violation of China's sovereignty and everybody should should protest than strike, and they did, and the cops came in and there were clashes, and it became essentially an international scandal that the Brits were picking on these poor people who were squatting in this poor area in a colony the Brits were administering. It was not a
very good look. So the Brits backed off, and it was another chance for China to be like, hah ha, we are really using Kowloon Walled City to the maximum effect. So the Brits, who still wanted to tear this down, they went back to the drawing board.
That's right.
But what they knew they had was this ninety nine year lease. Yeah, sign in eighteen ninety eight, so you do the math. Nineteen ninety seven was that year on the horizon, just sort of sitting out there.
I would have said ninety eight.
And then the Brits they knew the state was coming. China knew this date was coming, and they were like, all right do China was like we've been making him and hawing about the thing being aeign like we really want this back in nineteen ninety seven?
Do we want to inherit this thing?
And on the brit side they were like, aha, like we know what they're thinking over there. They don't want really inherit this thing either. Yeah, So they started some sort of more legitimate like agreeing with one another as far as talks go as early as like nineteen eighty six, when China was like, maybe we should actually talk this over now.
Yeah, And these were secret talks, right, So for China, the city had outlived its political usefulness and I guess just as a I mean, they wanted to tear it down so badly that the Brits were willing to do this for China shortly before the handover in nineteen ninety seven. And so what they came up with is that residents
would be offered financial compensation. Pretty good compensation too. I think about three hundred thousand dollars for a flat that again they'd spent maybe thirty thousand dollars on twenty years before they would be moved into a high rise public housing unit. They're basically all going to be resettled into a nicer life, graddess with a little spending money.
That's right.
So finally, on January fourteenth, nineteen eighty seven, they got three hundred and sixty staff members from the Clearance in squatter Control from Hong Kong and they came down to Kowloon City and they were like, hey, we need to get a we need to know how many people are here. We need to know how many people are resettling, So we need an actual census, like, no one has a clue. We've been guessing how many people live here based on
ordinary numbers, and this is an ordinary place. So they cordoned off all eighty three entrances and exits to the city, went door to door and did a census and counted people up and said, hey, this is the plan moving forward. You're going to be resettled. And there wasn't a riot this time. They were still thinking like, oh, yeah, we're going to tell China on you, because they didn't know
those secret talks had been going on. This time it was different, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry finally stepped up and in a formal statement said, in so many words, yeah, the time has come and we're giving this over to the British. They're going to rid this place of his residences. And it was nice while it lasted.
Yeah, So that was nineteen eighty seven, you said. It wasn't until ninety four that Kowloon Walled City was finally fully demolished, and it wasn't until two years before that that the last resident was finally evicted. There was a few there were a few holdouts. A lot of people were like, yeah, i'll take three hundred grand in a new place to live. There were some holdouts because I don't I probably people have guessed this, but we didn't say it overtly. There there was a tremendous amount of
pride among people living in Kowloon Walled City. They did their home, yes, and it was a very special and unique home, and they were not going to find that anywhere else on earth, and they knew it. And so a lot of them were holdouts for a very long time and did not want to go.
Yeah, and I imagine it attracted just like the initial attraction in the fifties and sixties, people that didn't want to be under like the thumb of a government was still sort of a sentiment there. Yeah, they didn't want to assimilate to the larger sort of system because they had a system that they felt worked for them in whatever way that was. So I have a lot of respect for the people that were like, no, I don't want to leave. You can't kick me out of my home.
But like you said, sadly the last person was evicted. In nineteen ninety two, there were people burning Union Jack's setting off homemade firecrackers and stuff. A few people actually physically battled the cops a little bit, but it wasn't you know, it was a pretty small resistance, and in July of ninety two the last person left.
Yes, so there's nothing really left of Kowloon Walled City. It's just the footprint. This footprint has been around for hundreds of years and it will not go away. It's an indelible print on Hong Kong as a town, as an area on the Kowloun peninsula. And even the Kaitak airport is gone now. They've moved the airport further away from the city center because, like you said, they had to be very careful descending. We've talked about it before.
I don't remember, maybe like our air traffic control episode or something. Yeah, where like you basically had to clear the fourteenth story wild City and then suddenly dropped to hit the runway. It was really not well planned because there wasn't really a plan. So they moved the airport, they got rid of kawlun Wald City, and now there's a park there in its place.
Yeah, and I think they didn't that documentary say that original religious building is still there is like the only thing that's left from the early days.
It was the office of the Administrator of and yes it's still there. They preserved it in the Kowloon Walld City. That was what that courtyard was. It was built around that, that original office from the I think the Qing dynasty.
Yeah, that was it. That's the only thing from the early days that's left. It's like you said, it's a green space and there's ponds.
It's quite lovely.
They do have a table sized scale model of what was there. But yeah, it's still that same shape, like if you do aerial shots, you know, it's the really stuck to their parameters. Yea, with the city once the walls were gone and with this parkuse it's the exact
same shape still. And you know, like we mentioned, it's been in a ton of either directly sort of been the setting for movies like in blood Sport from Jean clond Beddam, or been like heavily inspired by what the sort of the look they were going after in video games and films.
I don't care what you say. Blood Sport was a good movie.
You know what, I didn't see a single Jean Claude Bandam movie.
I saw a time I should. I'll tell you this off of off. Okay, but anyway, I finally saw blood Sport when I was not like a couple of years ago, and I was like, Wow, this movie is actually really good.
I got to check it out.
Oh, you should check it out. That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, that's my new deal. Is John Claude all the way?
Okay, okay, where's he been? Remember he had like a podcast or a TV show or something for a litle podcasts of course, yeah, I think he did.
Or it was like celebrities.
It was no, I'm sorry, it was like a TV show where it was okay, it was a mockumentary or pseudo reality where he played himself. But John Claude van dam actually was a spy in real life or something.
Oh I don't, I haven't heard of that.
I think it was short lived.
All right.
Well, since Chuck has dedicated himself to watching John Claude Van Damn movies all the time, that means obviously it's time for a listener mail.
All right.
So this is a rare re butt to a listener mail. So a listener writing in it about another listener mail, because we had our Irish friend right in and point out that we were sort.
Of engaging in Irish erasure, right. So, hey, guys.
While the emailer was correct that Sho was born in County Kildare, Shackleton himself would have considered himself British. He was born in Ireland while it was under British rule and moved to Great Britain when he was ten. He served in the British Army and was awarded many British honors. I myself am a proud Irishman, but I don't think you were wrong in calling him British.
Wow.
I'm happy to accept that he was correct if there was a quote which shows that he considered himself Irish. Ireland in nationality is always a tricky subject. I hold a UK driver's license in an Irish passport. I have one child technically born in the UK and one born in Ireland, with just eighty miles between the hospitals and them both being on the same island. I keep up
the good work. Guy's been listening for years in all of the show as from Jamie Finnegan, and we're not going to wait into this any further, Jamie, because I know that stuff is very tricky.
H So we have read the.
Original email and now the rebuttal, and we're going to leave it to you guys to work it out nice.
I think that's a great idea And that was from Jamie, right, Yes it is okay. Well, thanks a lot, Jamie, And if you want to be like Jamie, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.