How Kowloon Walled City survived attempts to knock it down for almost a century
On the 25th anniversary of its demolition, Post Magazine recalls how, until 1993, the 'cuckoo's nest' bounced back every time an attempt was made to knock it down.
They'd tried to clear Kowloon's Walled City many times. The first attempt was, apparently, easy enough. That was in May 1899, less than a year after the June 1898 Convention Between Great Britain and China, Respecting an Extension of Hong Kong Territory - usually known as the Second Convention of Peking - which had leased the New Territories to the British.
Like a careful landlord, the Chinese had wanted to keep one room locked within the house, inaccessible to the tenant, to make sure everyone knew whose place it really was. They had a fort, which had originally been an administrative dot on the empire's southern coast. After the first opium war, however, when the British had been granted official possession of Hong Kong Island in 1842, the Chinese authorities had reassessed the significance of that tiny outpost. Among other upgrades, they'd built a wall around it.
So the 1898 convention had its famous clause, the one that stated "the Chinese officials now stationed there shall continue to exercise jurisdiction except so far as may be inconsistent with the military requirements for the defence of Hong Kong". The fact of it lasted 11 months. The impact lasted for the 99 years of the lease.
When those inhabitants of the Walled City were kicked out in 1899, and sailed off on their junks without putting up much of a fight, the colonial authorities hoped there'd be no need for further expulsions. Just to make sure, however, an Order in Council at the end of 1899 made it perfectly clear - to the British, at least - that the Walled City was now "part and parcel of Her Majesty's Colony of Hong Kong". A Colonial Office minute stated, firmly, "The matter is at an end".
Gradually, squatters filtered back into the Walled City, with their livestock, creating what the government deemed to be an unsanitary and unhygienic environment. The second clearance began on June 10, 1933, when the government issued a notice stipulating resumption of land (i.e. compulsory acquisition) by the end of 1934. By then, land reclamation meant the six-and-a-half-acre enclave no longer sat picturesquely near the sea. The residents, 436 of them, turned to China for help. But by 1940, the only private dwelling was blamelessly occupied by a Reverend Kwong, a Church of England minister. Strike two to the colonial authorities.
After that, in the world beyond the walls, much bloodier spats over land were about to begin. By 1947, refugees from China's civil war were heading for Hong Kong, and about 2,000 of them had moved into the one area where China was still insisting it had rights. These new squatters were given notice to quit. They refused.
