Kowloon Walled City Park

Where it sits. Kowloon Walled City Park occupies 31,000 square metres in Kowloon City, a short walk from Lok Fu and from the old Kai Tak airport approach, hemmed by ordinary residential streets and a district famous mainly for its Thai restaurants. Nothing about the surroundings signals what stood here. The park is laid out as a Jiangnan garden of the early Qing manner — walled compounds, moon gates, water, rockery, and eight themed zones — and its design won a diploma at the international garden exposition in Stuttgart in 1993. It is quiet, well kept and heavily used by local residents for tai chi in the morning and chess in the afternoon. It is also the site of the densest human settlement ever recorded.

What was here. The Qing government built a walled enclave beside Kowloon Bay in the middle of the nineteenth century, garrisoned by soldiers and their families, and it was left as a Chinese enclave when the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898 — a jurisdictional gap that neither side resolved. The Japanese army pulled down the stone walls during the Second World War, burying much of the material where it stood. In the vacuum, the site filled: informal towers built without architects or permits, thirteen or fourteen storeys high, packed so tightly that daylight never reached the lanes and residents moved between buildings on the roofs. By the 1970s the population had reached roughly 41,000 people on about 2.6 hectares. There were 503 buildings by 1994. Unlicensed dentists and doctors practised on the fringes, noodle and candy factories operated inside, and triad control gave way to a curious internal order. After the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, both governments agreed to end it; demolition was announced on 14 January 1987, residents were resettled between 1987 and 1989, and the buildings came down through 1993 and 1994.

On screen. The Walled City had a real film career in its final years, precisely because it looked like nothing else. Jean-Claude Van Damme shot a fight sequence inside it for Bloodsport (1988), one of the few times a foreign production got cameras into the occupied city. In 1993, with the residents gone and demolition under way, Kirk Wong took Jackie Chan in to make Crime Story, using the emptied blocks as a set and blowing up part of a real building for the film — the last production to work in the structure before it disappeared. Its afterlife has been longer than its screen life: the city has been rebuilt as a set, a game level and a comic panel more times than anyone can count, most prominently in Soi Cheang's Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024), which reconstructed the alleys in painstaking detail because absolutely nothing of the original interior survives. Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's photographic and interview record of the city, made during the resettlement years, remains the definitive documentary account.

What survives in the park. Two things from the original settlement stand. The Yamen, built in 1847 at the centre of the compound, is the only Qing building left: three rows and four wings, brick walls on granite bases, a tiled roof, and six exhibition rooms inside covering the history of the enclave. It is a declared monument, and it served as an almshouse and school after 1899. The site of the Old South Gate is also a declared monument; when demolition exposed it in 1994, the flagstone paving, cornerstones and a drain were found intact, along with two granite plaques carved with the characters for South Gate and for Kowloon Walled City, which are displayed where they were unearthed. Elsewhere the park uses fragments — old cannon, foundation stones, a scale model of the city, and an outline in the paving that traces where buildings stood.

The rest of the garden. The eight zones include the Garden of Four Seasons, the Garden of the Chinese Zodiac with its twelve sculptures arranged by the traditional stems and branches, a chess garden, the Eight Floral Walks, and the Mountain View Pavilion, positioned to look north to Lion Rock. The Guibi Rock, carved from Taihu limestone, was named for veining resembling ancient jade and reads as a statement about Hong Kong's return to China. Because Kai Tak airport was next door until 1998, building heights around the park were tightly capped, which is why it still has open sky above it.

Getting there and timing. Lok Fu station on the Kwun Tong line is about ten minutes' walk, and buses along Junction Road and Tung Tau Tsuen Road stop close by; Kowloon City's restaurants are immediately south. Entry is free and the park opens early and closes late. Mornings are quietest and best for the Yamen exhibition. Paths are paved, level and largely step-free, with ramped alternatives to the few stepped sections.