The-Cat

Cat

@The-Cat

log inask
The-Cat
@The-Cat
belarius
@belarius
belarius
@belarius

Architectural Cross-Section of Kowloon Walled City

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)

The-Cat
@The-Cat

This is incredible illustration work.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @belarius's post:

belarius
@belarius

You're very welcome! Seeing the same increasingly crispy scan of just the left half of the panorama over the years was a trigger for one of my "Oh, maybe everything isn't on the Internet yet" epiphanies, and getting things at least to the point that the captions were legible has been a long-time goal of mine. Having a city-themed month was the kick in the pants I needed to finally start taking steps to do something about it.

login to reply
vikxin
@vikxin

Oh hell yes. If it weren't for the fact that the IA is already in deep enough shit with publishers I'd recommend sticking the highest resolution version of this you have, as well as the un-stitched images on archive.org

login to reply
belarius
@belarius

Definitely something I'm considering. The book is vexingly out of print, and it's hard to see how doing so would impact anyone's balance sheet. That said, the raw images are rough, so it's going to take some additional work to compile. Hopefully I'll have some time in the coming months to do so.

login to reply
illuminesce
@illuminesce

Reading some of the Japanese, it’s a mix of observations:

  • 土がなくとも木は育つ - a tree grows without soil here; from the East rooftop

And daily conversations:

  • いい子にしないと、太い注射をプスリですよ - “If you’re not a good boy, I’ll use the thick needle to inject you.”; from a doctor’s office

I’m not sure if these are translated direct quotes or what the researchers thought at the time; though the way it’s documented is even more of an ethnography snapshot into the City.

login to reply
belarius
@belarius

Thanks for pointing this out! I don't speak Japanese myself, and didn't feel it would be appropriate to use Google Translate or somesuch since I can't vouch for whether any important subtext is being lost when doing so. I figured the best move was to make it available and let the community take it from there.

I suspect that one of the inspiration for this format may have been Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections (1992), which made a huge international splash right around the time the team who worked on this would have been collecting data. As meticulous as the illustration is, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that it's meant to be taken as a literal map (there's no way the rooms would all show such convenient and consistent alignment over the full diameter, given the slight differences in wall angles as structures contour to the surrounding road), so I agree that this makes most sense as an ethnographic snapshot.

login to reply
Espiox
@Espiox

I finally read my copy of City of Darkness Revisited a few months ago, which also includes a fold-out print of this drawing. The book is fantastic, but having this drawing in print is maybe the best part, it’s so cool to just pore over it and examine all the details.

login to reply
belarius
@belarius

That's really good to know! I was unaware that CoDR reproduces this panorama. Is that version identical to this one? I can't find any actual images of the newly reprinted version, and I'm curious whether your copy has the same annotations as the original 1997 "grand panorama."

login to reply