Illustration by Hitomi Terasawa (寺澤 一美), from Kowloon City: An Illustrated Guide (大図解九龍城) (1997), by the Kowloon City Exploration Team, supervised by Hiroaki Kani (可児 弘明).

Learning about the strange and extraordinary story of Kowloon Walled City feels like it was a rite of passage for my particular flavor of Internet nerd during the late oughts. It lurks in various footnotes as a trivia item, but these fail to convey its truly staggering scope. At its height, its roughly 35,000 inhabitants lived in what is almost certainly the most densely populated living arrangement that human beings have ever experienced in all our history, with about 1.3 human beings per square meter of a surveyor's map. That's over 115 times as dense as habitation in present-day New York City. That's about 29 times as dense as Manila, the world's most densely populated city at the time of this writing.

(Continued below)

Aside from being a runaway success that kept my notifications popping off for days, I gather this particular post was also shared elsewhere (in the Fediverse, at the very least). One way or another, it ended up being the subject of an article in Colossal that I was not asked about ahead of publication and do not endorse. My specific concern is that, in addition to rather lazily reworking the writing in my post (which doesn't particularly bother me, at least it wasn't outright plagiarism), the article identifies me very explicitly.

I've never made a great effort to maintain my anonymity, but I'm not sure why the author thought identifying my name and profession would be something I would approve of, with a link to the original post to boot, given that the publishing rights to the image above belongs, strictly speaking, to a Japanese publisher that's over 100 years old. The prospect, however slim, of receiving a cease & desist letter at my place of work from the original publisher (or worse, them contacting my employer directly) has given me no incentive to further publicize my digital reproduction, and I think it would be unwise for me to host it directly on my new Neocities page for the same reason.

All of which is to say: When cohost goes, this post, and the URL contained within that links to the full resolution image (also hosted as a cohost asset) will go with it. I am unwilling to take further direct action to keep this image in circulation in a way traceable to my online footprint. Greg Girard's volume republishing this illustration is of course available for sale, but that version is not identical to the image above, as it lacks the original's annotations and graphic design elements.

It would be a shame for this particular work of mine to sink beneath the waves. Here I stand, a little longer, holding the baton and curious to see if the race will become a relay.