This past weekend my friends and I kept ourselves pretty busy. First we went to the Chi Lin Nunnery and the adjoining Nan Lian Garden in Kowloon. The nunnery was built as a retreat for Buddhist nuns and the garden was a project of the nuns. Both the nunnery itself and the garden are beautiful and wrap you in a sense of peace as you walk around the grounds. The most amazing thing is that both are located directly in the middle of a city and are thus surrounded by highways and traffic. And yet once you enter the grounds the only reminder of the city around you are the towering buildings in the background of your photos. It creates a really fascinating juxtaposition of tranquility amidst the tumult.
Afterwards we journeyed to the old walled city of Kowloon. Here’s a brief background of the city for anyone that doesn’t know. I also suggest googling images of it in it’s former ‘glory’ to get a better idea of what it actually was. There’s also videos from before it was demolished that I recommend because it is just not possible to imagine the conditions people lived in.
Kowloon Walled City was a very dense and mostly ungoverned settlement in Kowloon City, Hong Kong. It was originally a Chinese military fort, but it became a civilian enclave after the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898. After WWII the population in the city rapidly increased until it contained over 33,000 residents within its 6.4 acres (these people largely lived in ramshackle and subdivided apartment buildings with apartments averaging 200 sq ft. Because of the dirty and cramped conditions, and the fact that most residents lived well below the poverty line and without public services, police and city officials avoided venturing into the settlement. This left it to be controlled by the Triads from the 1950s to the 1970s (probably what it’s most well known for). In 1987, the Hong Kong government announced plans to demolish the Walled City. A long drawn out process due to the difficulty of evicting the population, it was finished in 1994 and the area was turned into the Kowloon Walled City Park.
The park also serves to preserved some of the remains of the city and houses a small museum about its history. Seeing it now, you would never imagine that so many people once lived there like that.
Where in the World is Laura Holmes? 