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Hong Kong's Dirty Little Secret : Clearing the Walled City of Kowloon Seth Harter Journal of Urban History 2000 27: 92 DOI: 10.1177/009614420002700106 The online version of this article can be found at: http://juh.sagepub.com/content/27/1/92.citation

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JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2000 Harter / HONG KONG’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

HONG KONG’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET Clearing the Walled City of Kowloon SETH HARTER University of Michigan

The walls are crashing down in the 2.7-hectare warren of squatter shacks, rat-infested factories, vice dens, gambling joints and unregistered dental clinics that were piled, over the years, more than a dozen stories on top of each other to 1 form one of the world’s most notorious slums.

With these words and many others like them, observers hailed the recent destruction of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. Built as a fort by the Chinese government in 1846, the Walled City was originally designed to check 2 British expansion beyond the island of Hong Kong (see Figure 1). By 1898, however, the enlarged colony engulfed the fort, and in the ensuing diplomatic struggle, the Walled City found itself in political limbo, under the jurisdiction of neither the colonial authorities in Hong Kong nor any of the successive mainland Chinese governments of the twentieth century. As a result, the 3 Walled City became “a world unto its own,” an enclave. Unlike more conventional enclaves, the Walled City’s distinction was predicated on diplomacy rather than ethnicity, but this case can nevertheless shed light on the mutually constitutive relationship between enclaves and their framing societies. Throughout the twentieth century, as Chinese settlers filled the six-acre space within the walls with an increasingly dense web of housing, commerce, and small industry, the Hong Kong government repeatedly tried to redevelop the area as a park but backed down in the face of mainland-supported protests by residents. Walled City dwellers pitched their appeals to mainland governments by claiming that the area was an enclave exempt from British authority. In 1966, a resident of the Walled City declared, “Peking knows it’s their duty to protect us. They will look after us. This is part of China. The Walled City will AUTHOR’S NOTE: The research for this article was funded by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds from the Ford Foundation, the Committee on Scholarly Communications with China, and the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. The article benefited from careful readings from Ernest Young, John Carroll, Kate Jellema, and three anonymous readers for the Journal of Urban History, as well as discussion with Kenneth George, Thomas Gibson, Carolyn Cartier, James Scott, and the audience at the “Blind Spots: Illegible Enclaves and Modern States in Asia” roundtable held at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in Boston, March 28, 1999. My thanks to all of them. JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 27 No. 1, November 2000 92-113 © 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

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Figure 1: Hong Kong in Its Regional Setting SOURCE: The map is reproduced with permission of the Director of Lands, 速Government of Hong Kong SAR, License No. 10/2000. 93

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never become part of Hong Kong. One day Hong Kong will become part of us— 4 mainland China.” As a pocket of China in the middle of colonial Kowloon, the Walled City served as a reminder of the limits of British sovereignty in Hong Kong. At the same time, pro-British factions also portrayed the Walled City as a Chinese enclave, independent from the remainder of the colony, to cast it in the role of the dark antithesis of colonial order. This article explains the reasons for this two-sided representation of the Walled City as an independent enclave while tracing the complex, interactive relationship between the Walled City and its most significant others. In so doing, it reveals the ways in which British Hong Kong slandered the Walled City in an effort to legitimate the colonial enterprise. The Walled City case challenges the conventional understanding of an enclave as “a special relationship between a distinctive group of people and a 5 place.” Because they share a trait in common, a trait unusual outside of the enclave, the group of people within an enclave exhibits a high degree of self-sufficiency and ventures only sporadically into the surrounding community. The spatial character of the relationship between an enclave, its residents, and the framing society is the subject of much discussion in enclave scholarship, but the temporal character of the ways in which this relationship is depicted often goes unanalyzed. Authors writing about ethnic enclaves in the United States have underscored the preexisting nature of the framing society onto which the enclave is added, seemingly without altering the host environ6 ment. In colonial situations, on the other hand, it is frequently the indigene rather than the immigrant who is cast as enclaved. Here the indigenous society 7 is seen either by expansive neighbors or colonists as “already in place,” fixed in its cultural ways and undisturbed by proximity to new forces. In either case, the idea that enclaves and their surroundings are not coeval but rather sequential in their production and thereafter static in their culture reinforces belief in 8 their independence from one another. Only in the recent postcolonial context, as Nicholas Dirks has pointed out, have scholars begun to see the shortcomings of the static conceptions of culture that this notion of enclaving has encouraged: “We are beginning to acknowledge that colonialism has played a profound role in the constitution of the very anthropological cultures that we saw 9 as maintaining a kind of pre-colonial authenticity.” In the same fashion, noncolonial framing societies have helped to constitute enclaves and vice versa. A similar sequentiality characterizes depictions of the relationship between enclaves and the people who inhabit them. Conventional wisdom holds that an enclave is created when a critical mass of people with a specific trait cluster together and develop the institutions necessary to support themselves. Thereafter, the enclave grows when new members, already imbued with the essential trait, move to the enclave, as was putatively the case with African Americans moving to Harlem in the 1920s or homosexual men moving to the Castro in the 1970s. The defining trait is generally felt to inhere in people prior to and provide the motivation for their move to the enclave. This understanding,

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however, disguises the ongoing role that both the framing society and enclave residents play in defining the significance of the trait, as well as the ability of members of the enclave to redefine themselves, after their arrival, in dimensions beyond the trait. The case of the Kowloon Walled City shows the limitations of these assumptions and encourages a more time-sensitive analysis of enclave production and development. Like many other colonial enclaves, the Walled City was built prior to its envelopment by British Hong Kong, but its meaning as an enclave in the decades after World War II had almost nothing to do with its nineteenth-century martial character. It was instead redefined by its new inhabitants, who were predominantly postwar immigrants, and by legal changes in the surrounding colony. Furthermore, the postwar inhabitants were not self-selected according to a dominant trait. They were representative of the working-class migrants who settled the rest of northern Kowloon in the late 1940s. The dominant trait that made the Walled City an enclave, its freedom from government oversight, was vested in the territory itself rather than in its 10 inhabitants. That a diplomatic anomaly could serve as the basis for an enclave reveals little about either the nature of the Walled City or the nature of enclaves more generally. That the city’s critics managed to translate this diplomatic difference into a moral polarization that pitted clean, dynamic, orderly, colonial Hong Kong against the dirty, stagnant, lawless, and above all noncolonial and hence Chinese Walled City, however, challenges enclave scholarship that assumes the prior and immutable existence of difference. The pejorative attributes above echo those that framing societies often use to isolate and denigrate enclaves based on ethnicity. Compare the quotation at the beginning of this article with a characterization of San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1934: it is composed of “rat-infested . . . narrow alleys and underground cellars and secret passages, more like a warren of burrowing animals than a human city. . . . And Chinatown was accounted vicious because it was the haunt of gambling . . . and 11 prostitution.” Fifty years later, outsiders saw Hong Kong’s Walled City in similar terms: an “enclave of teeming, squalid slums and reputation as a den of 12 vice.” At the simplest level, this type of rhetorical translation from diplomatic difference to moral polarization serves to degrade the Walled City and, by con13 trast, to legitimate colonial Hong Kong. At a more subtle level, however, the translation also works to mask the mutual constitution of Hong Kong and the Walled City. The diplomatic status of the Walled City is unmistakably the product of a historical disagreement between Britain and China. That is, it is clearly temporal, manufactured, and bilateral. The moral status of the Walled City, on the other hand, is depicted as the product of culture, seen here as timeless, natural, and unilateral. Thus, the conversion of the Walled City’s dominant trait from diplomatic oddity to cultural monstrosity aids in the task of denying its interdependence with the rest of Hong Kong.

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The remainder of this article will trace the parallel evolution of the actual interdependence between Hong Kong and the Walled City and procolonial efforts to deny it. This article will focus on the last fifty years, during which time the Walled City passed through three distinct phases: first, the three vices stage, when Hong Kong’s prostitution, gambling, and drug industries took refuge in the city; second, the demolition stage, when China and Britain finally agreed to evacuate and redevelop the city; and finally, the garden stage, when the Hong Kong government, having razed the city, built a classical Chinese garden in its place. The progression of these stages reveals the diminishing tension and increasing cooperation between China and Britain. Nonetheless, during each of these phases, procolonial factions used temporalized and moralized discourse to proclaim the independence of the Walled City from the rest of Hong Kong.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND, 1840-1948

Although a customs station had stood on the location of the Walled City since the Song dynasty (960-1279), it was not until the loss of Hong Kong island to the British following the First Opium War that local Chinese officials viewed the military defense of Kowloon as a high priority. In 1846, Qing dynasty (1644-1912) officials launched a fund-raising campaign to pay for a fort to house a small garrison of civil and military officers. Though relations between these officers and their British counterparts in Hong Kong were generally cooperative, the Chinese and British had different perspectives on the Walled City from the outset. The Chinese involved in the city’s construction looked on the fort as part of a progressive movement to shore up coastal 14 defenses using the latest military technology. To the British, newly established on Hong Kong island, however, the fort was a destination for a day’s outing in the country, a place of antiquarian interest. The wall itself may have been the subject of some wonderment, but the cannons atop it elicited more 15 scorn than respect from European visitors. When, in 1860, China granted the Kowloon Peninsula to the British, the new Anglo-Chinese boundary was fixed a few hundreds yards south of the fort to leave it squarely within Chinese 16 domain, but with the lease of Hong Kong’s New Territories in 1898, the Walled City was no longer near the British colony but was engulfed by it. The Chinese delegation that negotiated the extension insisted that the Walled City not be considered a part of the New Territories leased to Britain but that it remain in Chinese hands. The British side acquiesced to this condition but one year later, on the pretext of military security, ousted the Chinese officials from the city and declared the fort a part of the colony. In the face of official Chinese protest, however, the Hong Kong authorities never established full control over the city. The loss of the city and the hopes for military equality that it represented were a bitter blow for the Chinese. The removal of the Chinese

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custodians from the city, leading to its physical decay, simultaneous with the gradual development of the surrounding areas in Kowloon, however, only led 17 the British to view the Walled City as more anachronistic than ever. Between 1933 and 1948, the British staged a number of efforts to raze the Walled City, but their efforts to evict the civilians who had taken up residence in the former fort were met with concerted resistance first by the residents 18 alone and then in alliance with the Nationalist government in China. The Japanese, during their brief tenure in Hong Kong, had greater success, tearing down the wall around the city in 1942 to use the stone for an extension to the neighboring airport. After World War II, the restored British regime turned to a modernist discourse predicated on concerns for the health and hygiene of Kowloon at large in seeking to destroy the Walled City and build a park in its 19 place. Chinese patriotic resistance to this plan, based on the principle that sovereignty over the area still rested with China, culminated in the torching of 20 the British consulate in Guangzhou in January 1948.

THE FIRST STAGE: THREE VICES, 1948-1987

By 1948, accounts of the Walled City had largely abandoned the theme of hygiene in favor of the theme of vice. The longstanding prohibition of gambling in Hong Kong proper led to the establishment of gambling halls in Kowloon City as early as the 1870s and inside the Walled City in the years 21 before the Japanese occupation (1941-1945). It was only after World War II, however, that the colonial authorities in Hong Kong prohibited the operation of brothels and the smoking of opium in the territory. These sanctions quickly drove the prostitution and drug industries into the Walled City, where they 22 were beyond the reach of colonial law. Just as the Kowloon City gambling halls of the nineteenth century relied on the patronage of British wagerers, 23 whom they brought across the harbor on a free motor launch, the vice industries of the Walled City in the 1950s relied on the patronage of Hong Kong residents outside the city. One outfit that ran a daily striptease show hired drivers to prowl the neighborhoods of Kowloon, offering free rides to men who were interested. Such an establishment could advertise outside of the city without much fear of legal entanglements. Once the customers arrived, they paid an entrance fee to watch the show and then found themselves surrounded by opium dens, gambling halls, dog meat stalls, and other establishments that could not tout their services so openly beyond the city’s confines.24 This practice shows the permeability of the city’s border when it came to people, if not laws. It also demonstrates the mutual constitution of the city and the surrounding region: thus, it was the application of laws in Hong Kong that created lawlessness in the Walled City. All of this traffic in and out of the city notwithstanding, descriptions of the city during this period emphasized the concentration of vice services, rather

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than the dispersion of vice clients. Lurid accounts of the city during the period of the three vices focused on the prostitutes who lived in the city, rather than their clients and pimps who usually came in from outside; they focused on the addicts who slept in the city’s alleys, while masking the suppliers who brought drugs into the city; and they focused on the employees who ran the gambling operations in the city rather than on the punters who brought their stakes in from the surrounding neighborhoods or the triad bosses who took the profits 25 back out of the city. Immoral behavior was taken to be emblematic of residents of the Walled City but only incidental in the lives of the interlopers. In short, authors writing about the city engaged in moral polarization, suggesting that while the city was defined by “crime,” the rest of Hong Kong was charac26 terized by law and order. By 1983, however, the regional police commander noted that crime rates in the Walled City were no higher than in the surround27 ing area. So strong was the inclination of outsiders to reimagine the city’s destroyed wall and to render it impermeable not only to law but also to morality, people, and goods that some writers have confused the city’s anarchy with self-suffi28 ciency. The most elementary calculations would immediately reveal that 30,000 people living on a six-acre plot of ground could not possibly be self29 sufficient. Actually, the majority of the city’s residents in the three vices phase 30 worked outside of the city’s confines. Many others lived outside the city but 31 worked inside. Others lived and worked inside but shopped and ate outside. Most of the goods sold at the shops in the city were manufactured or grown outside of it. Similarly, the great majority of the industrial output from the work32 shops in the city was sold outside its boundaries. Rooftop coops in the city provided a large percentage of the treasured pigeon population that sustained 33 many Hong Kong restaurants. Although moving goods within the city was made difficult in this phase by the density of construction, communications with other parts of Hong Kong were well developed due to the proximity of the railroad, the subway (after 1979), and many bus lines. In fact, the convenience of transportation to and from the city was frequently mentioned by residents 34 who were reluctant to move elsewhere. Through such proclamations and through their commuter practices, the residents of the city continued to reinforce their interdependence with the rest of Hong Kong, while colonial apologists during this phase continued to claim the boundedness of the city. It was, in 35 the words of one Time magazine reporter, “a universe apart.” The problem of the Walled City’s water supply during this phase captures succinctly the entangled issues of interdependence, difference, and representation. In its incarnation as a fort, the Walled City relied on two wells dug 36 within its walls for water. As the population of the city soared in the postwar period, however, additional wells were unable to keep pace with demand, and tensions between Britain and China over control of the city prevented the colonial government from extending water mains into the city. The needs of Walled City residents were met through a distinctive mix of ad hoc and extralegal

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measures. Hong Kong Urban Services workers ventured inside the city several 37 times per day to treat the wells with chlorine. Organized crime rings ventured outside the city and tapped into Hong Kong water mains to pipe water to paying residents through countless hoses that snaked along the alleys and exterior walls of the city’s buildings. Other residents made their living hauling buckets of water from public standpipes on the edge of the city to residents living in the 38 upper reaches of the city’s new twelve-story buildings. While from the residents’ perspective, the problem may have been too little water, in the eyes of visitors, the problem was often too much. Walking through the narrow alleys that traversed the Walled City was typically a soggy affair, regardless of the weather, as the makeshift pipes running along the buildings 39 frequently dripped on pedestrians below. Guidebooks to Hong Kong, which often included a paragraph on the Walled City for its exotic rather than its aesthetic (or even historic) value, never failed to mention this curse and advised 40 the adventurer to bring a hat. The density of the city and the poor drainage system made flooding a constant hazard, particularly on the southern, downhill edge of the city. Thus, while the water in the Walled City may ultimately have come from the same source as the water in the surrounding neighborhoods, its treatment—as a hydrological challenge and an economic good— reveals the complex ways in which the Walled City’s anomalous diplomatic status gave rise to its dubious character. Along with new challenges in water provision, the rise in the city’s population during this phase both contributed to and was caused by three changes that aided the city residents in their efforts to counter charges originating in the surrounding colony of immorality and backwardness: the establishment of the Kaifong (neighborhood welfare association), the increased presence of the Hong Kong police in the city during this period, and the rise in property prices elsewhere in Hong Kong. Each of these changes contributed to the development of a collective identity among the city residents. The Kaifong grew out of an ad hoc Anti-Demolition Committee, itself formed to protest a brief revival of colonial plans to clear the city in 1963. For the next thirty years, the Kaifong worked to clean up the Walled City, paid for lighting and signs for the city’s alleys, served as an advocate for the interests of city residents before Hong Kong government departments, and sponsored social events and produced 41 publications to foster a sense of community among residents. The Kaifong, through its direct appeals to government bureaus for the provision of urban services in the city, undermined any notion that the Walled City was isolated from or stuck in a developmental stage prior to the rest of Hong Kong. Furthermore, the Kaifong nurtured a microcosmic version of patriotism or loyalty toward the city among residents by publishing accounts of the city’s importance in local 42 history. Without a formal government to serve as a promoter of and focus for communal loyalty, the city’s history was all the more important in this role. Through it, the Kaifong sponsored a discourse that challenged the image of residents as immoral or backward by promoting a collective identity resting on

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the same conditions of self-respect operative among the British petty bourgeoisie: hard work, pride in the accomplishments and bravery of previous generations, home ownership, and charitable service. In 1984, the community even organized a fund drive to aid famine victims in Ethiopia, evidence of both cosmopolitanism and an awareness of the social capital that inheres in providing rather than receiving welfare. Although in the years shortly after the war, the Hong Kong police virtually never entered the Walled City, by the 1950s, that was already beginning to change. Until 1959, criminals captured in the city would be deported to China since the Hong Kong authorities figured that subjecting them to a trial in the territory would raise the ire of the mainland government. But a landmark case in 1959 led a Hong Kong judge to proclaim that criminals caught in the Walled 43 City were subject to Hong Kong law. Despite this assertion of juridical power, the Hong Kong authorities remained wary of staging police raids into the city. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, patrols increased in frequency, but the police force was so corrupt at the time that officers in the Walled City were more likely to compete with triad bosses for protection money than they were to arrest syndicate leaders. Only after the establishment of the Independent Commission against Corruption in 1974 and a regular patrol squad assigned to the city in 1980 did the police presence in the city have a restraining impact on the vice industries, and even then patrols were too large and too conspicuous to be of much more than symbolic value. The most indirect of the three changes during this phase may have been the one with the greatest impact: the rise in housing costs in Hong Kong during the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the early twentieth century, housing in Hong Kong took up a disproportionate share of working-class wages and left work44 ers living in cramped or shared apartments. By the late 1960s, however, increasing prosperity and a soaring population fueled a rash of property development across the territory. By virtue of their status outside the reach of Hong Kong law, buildings in the Walled City were not required to meet standard building code for the territory, and owners were not required to pay property 45 taxes. As a result, the old one- and two-story stone and wood buildings that had dominated the city up until the 1960s gave way to cement towers of seven to fifteen stories. By constructing a building that covered the entire plot of land, eliminating ventilation shafts, and by avoiding property taxes, a landlord in the Walled City could profit from an apartment rented at one-third to 46 one-half below the market rate in neighborhoods nearby. These three phenomenaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the establishment of the Kaifong, the increased police presence, and the rise in property values throughout Hong Kongâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; transformed the Walled City from a haven for drug addicts in the 1950s to a haven for the working poor in the 1970s and encouraged the more than tenfold increase in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population between the late 1940s and the late 1980s. As a result of the proliferation of cheap housing units in the city, a community

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developed that valued the city for the protection it offered them, not from the 47 law but from inflation and economic competition. This transformation was more than economic and social; it was also physical. Before the housing boom, the Walled City from the outside looked like a cross between a squatter settlement and a village of low stone houses. After the housing boom, the city looked like a concrete monolith, presenting the street-side spectator with a virtually unbroken facade of concrete apartments. This new image of impenetrability reinvigorated the three vices trope in outsiders’ descriptions of the Walled City long after it ceased to describe the area with any accuracy. By the mid-1980s, however, when evidence of the city’s increasing respectability was unavoidable, it suffered at the hands of outside writers not so much from misrepresentation as from neglect. With the announcement of the clearance plan in 1987, all of that changed.

THE SECOND STAGE: DEMOLITION, 1987-1994

The 1984 Joint Declaration, which paved the way for Hong Kong’s retrocession to China in 1997, marked the culmination of the warming trend in SinoBritish relations that had begun twelve years earlier with the establishment of formal, ambassadorial relations. With the signing of the Joint Declaration, it was clear that the Chinese would not protest if the British exercised jurisdiction over the city before 1997, and it was even clearer that China would exercise full sovereignty over the region after 1997. Equally clear, if unspoken, was the understanding that China had found it embarrassing to have come to the defense of the Walled City in the name of patriotism and would be happy if the 48 colonial authorities were able to eradicate it before the retrocession. With this turn of events, the political tension between Britain and China that had driven the discursive derision of the Walled City eased and with it died the notion that the Walled City existed in a pocket of the past, removed from the modern age. The planning undertaken by the British and Chinese governments reveals a keen awareness not only of the city’s coevalness with the rest of the colony but of the porousness of the borders between the two. Following two years of secret talks on the subject, a surprise announcement was made at 9:00 on the morning of January 14, 1987, by the Hong Kong government, declaring that the Walled City would be torn down and the area turned into a park before 1997. At exactly the same moment, the New China News Agency’s Hong Kong branch, which operates in the territory as a mouthpiece for the Communist government, made a similar announcement and expressed full support for the clearance plan. Fifteen minutes later, the Foreign Office in Beijing echoed the New China News Agency’s statement and added its support for the demolition. 4 9 Simultaneously, members of the Hong Kong government’s 1,200-strong survey and mapping department, accompanied by plainclothes

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policemen, swept across the Walled City to determine the occupancy, owner50 ship, and size of all the property in the area. All of this meticulous choreography reflected the Hong Kong government’s realization that any leakage of the news of the agreement to clear the city or any staggering of the announcements would have led to a flurry of land speculation inside the city and would probably have increased the amount the Hong Kong government would have had to pay out in compensation to landholders who would be evicted and whose property would be confiscated as part of the clearance. Such concerns do not appear to have been unwarranted. One policeman who patrolled the city at the time said that a number of moving vans arrived at the city that same evening bearing furniture belonging to those who were trying to establish residency in the city before the government survey was complete, in the hopes of laying claim to a portion of the compensation fund, 51 valued at HK$2.3 billion. To prevent such opportunism, guards manned all eighty-three entrances to the city, which had been carefully scouted, enumer52 ated, and mapped beforehand, while surveyors measured the city’s interior. Here the government’s efforts to discursively seal the city from the rest of the colony gave way to efforts to physically isolate it. Ironically, the announcement of the demolition plans led the residents of the Walled City to abandon their “politics of respectability” campaign, which had emphasized commonalities between Hong Kong and the city in favor of a nostalgic discourse that highlighted the unique values of the city. One longtime resident summed up life in the Walled City: “It is a bit like back home in the vil53 lages in China—a harmonious state of anarchy.” The former vice president of the Kaifong echoed this sentiment: “The community of the Walled City is like that of a farming village. We want residents to feel that there are still people around who will look after their concerns and help them with their new homes 54 [after the clearance].” Given the precarious position of the Walled City in this stage, such comments reflect both the emotional value of anything familiar and threatened and the financial value of the residents’ property in the city. The Kaifong and smaller groups of residents loudly proclaimed their sentimental attachment to the city in efforts to ensure that the government provided full restitution for their lost houses and businesses. Outsiders too, having won the battle to demolish the city, no longer felt the need to condemn it in such bitter terms. A new wave of studies, both popular and academic, exposed the interdependence of the Walled City and the rest of Hong Kong, corrected the prejudices about the crime rate in the city, and highlighted the valuable services provided by a handful of religious and social 55 organizations there over the years. Some even went so far as to celebrate the 56 city for its sense of “organic community” and its “successful anarchy.” Other enclaves, most notably Vietnamese refugee camps, assumed the role of the despised other in contrast to Hong Kong’s increasingly self-satisfied modernity. Furthermore, with increasing traffic between Hong Kong and Guangdong province in the 1980s, the Walled City was soon superseded as a symbol of

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China. The newly developing towns of the Pearl River Delta, which received the bulk of Hong Kong travelers, may not have suffered from the same crowding as the Walled City, but their vice industries would soon rival those in the former fort. Nevertheless, the demolition phase also witnessed a resurgence in the conservative press of the vice and hygiene tropes. Some accounts even went so far as to blame the Chinese for the anomalous political condition of the city: “The Walled City site has been controversial since 1898, when it was the only part of Hong Kong which the imperial Chinese government refused to hand over to 57 the British.” Such an abbreviated account of the history of the Walled City’s origins suggests that British Hong Kong itself was a timeless concept rather than a historically produced amalgam. Such fixity works to conceal important political questions about the expansion of the colony and its developing rela58 tionship with China, which I will discuss further in the final section.

THE THIRD STAGE: THE GARDEN, 1994-

By the end of 1987, the Hong Kong government had approved the funds necessary to resettle the Walled City’s inhabitants and to redevelop the area. A prolonged dispute over the terms of compensation offered the residents was brought near to a conclusion in July 1992, when the last twenty residents were evicted from the city. In April of the following year, government officials and spectators cheered the first swing of the wrecking ball. In 1994, the Hong Kong government began to build a garden on the site of the old fort. If the demolition phase was marked by a diminution of the tensions between China and Hong Kong, the shift to the garden phase was marked by a reduction in the tensions between Hong Kong and the Walled City. One might argue that the resettlement of the city’s inhabitants meant its utter demise as a historical actor, but even though the city lacks permanent residents in its garden phase, it continues to serve as a stage for statements about the relationship between Hong Kong and China. Just as earlier observers held the Walled City’s diplomatic status responsible for the cultural shortcomings of its residents, so too did proponents of the garden’s construction subscribe to a form of environmental determinism: urban parks were crucial for discouraging vice and fostering a moral urban citizenry. Mingzheng Shi has shown how the municipal council in Beijing in the early twentieth century arrived at a remarkably similar solution to the prevalence of vice in that city. In Beijing, the council noted, “There is still not a decent place for recreation and entertainment, and [consequently] many men are driven to seek pleasure in alcohol, gambling and prostitution. . . . Creating public parks is one good way to help reform our unhealthy 59 society.” The council goes on to note that Europeans have devoted precious urban space to public parks “because they realized that by creating public

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parks the government could change people’s bad behavior and foster gentility 60 and civic virtues.” In Beijing, public parks developed along Western lines were built on the grounds of the former private altars of the Qing ruling family. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, a garden celebrating the high Qing aesthetic was built in the midst of a Western city plan. To make sense of this reversal, one must consider the choices the Hong Kong government’s Architectural Services Department (ASD), a group of mostly local civil servants, made when they designed the garden. Before making any decisions about what the garden should look like, the ASD decided what function the garden ought to serve. They arrived at three goals: to provide a place for people to relax, to use the garden to teach visitors 61 about Chinese culture, and to preserve the spirit of the Kowloon Walled City. With these goals in mind, the ASD moved from ends to means and decided to build an imitation of an early Qing dynasty garden in the lower Yangzi River style. This choice was certainly consistent with the first goal and not inconsistent with the second, but it made a mockery of the third. At no prior time had 62 the Walled City served as a garden; the city had not yet been built in the early Qing. If it could have withstood translation from military to garden architecture, it ought to have been the Lingnan style of the southern China rather than the lower Yangzi style. Why, then, did the ASD fix on an early Qing, lower Yangzi design for the Walled City garden? The answer to this mystery lies in the symbolic value of the lower Yangzi during the early Qing, not as a style of garden aesthetics but as a highpoint of pre–Opium War Chinese cultural and economic development. It was during the early Qing that Chinese territorial control reached its greatest extent. It was also in this period, following the defeat of the Three Feudatories, that imperial control over Guangdong and the region around Hong Kong reached its peak. The early Qing is also significant as the last great period of Chinese cultural development felt to be relatively free of Western influence. By turning to the early Qing, the ASD was consciously rejecting a later model that might have suggested an East-meets-West hybridity. This sense of purity is underscored by the claims, frequently repeated in press coverage of the park’s construction, 63 that it was to be “Hong Kong’s first authentic Chinese garden.” The purity of the early Qing applies not just to the field of garden design but also to the field of territorial sovereignty. Although the Portuguese had already established a trading base in nearby Macao at that point, in the early Qing, China was virtually unmolested by European colonialism. By selecting the precolonial early Qing for the garden’s model, the ASD makes reference to a happier and more peaceful time while erasing the decidedly impure history of the Walled City itself, so bound up in the anticolonial struggle of the mid-nineteenth century. By association, this precolonial period also suggests the postcolonial period, due to be inaugurated with the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. This emphasis on the pre- and postcolonial periods at the expense of the colonial interregnum calls to mind Wu Hung’s study

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of the Hong Kong countdown clock erected in Tiananmen square. This clock, standing in front of the national museum of history, counted down the days and seconds remaining until the July 1st transfer of Hong Kong from Britain to China. The clock’s witness to the extinguishing of the colonial era suggested a unification in 1997 of the pre- and postcolonial periods, when, the countdown clock having reached zero, time in Hong Kong could once again move forward rather than backward. Likewise, the construction of a “purely Chinese” garden in Hong Kong in the last days of colonial rule suggests a unification of the “purely Chinese” eras of Hong Kong history before 1840 and after 1997. Though the Chineseness of the post-1997 period may be more self-consciously cosmopolitan than that of the Qing, the garden’s association of the new era with the precolonial past provides a pedigree of classical strength to support this tolerance. Finally, the choice of the lower Yangzi style rather than the more vernacular Lingnan style served as an acknowledgment of Hong Kong’s impending return, not to nearby Guangdong but to the People’s Republic at large. Suzhou, in the lower Yangzi, is widely reputed to be the home of China’s most elegant gardens. And so it was to Suzhou that the ASD sent a delegation to study garden design before returning to Hong Kong to draft plans for the Walled City site. This gesture serves as an admission that beneath the ASD’s general stated goal of educating visitors about Chinese culture lies the more specific implied goal of educating Cantonese about central Chinese culture, a mission echoed throughout Hong Kong in the years leading up to 1997. The ASD made its most powerful statement in its basic choice of garden design, but it highlights that political message in several minor decisions regarding the park’s appearance. Of the approximately 350 buildings in the Walled City when the clearance began, the only one the ASD chose to salvage in its supposed quest to “preserve the spirit of the Walled City” was the assistant magistrate’s office or Yamen (see Figure 2). While this building certainly enjoyed pride of place at the center of the city and was the oldest remaining structure, its preservation in lieu of all others makes a very selective statement about what elements of the Walled City’s history should be remembered. The ASD chose the Yamen, a symbol of government authority, to represent the Walled City, which for nearly two-thirds of its life span was characterized by nothing so much as its freedom from government authority. Not only does the Yamen, by virtue of its historical role, symbolize authority, but in its restored 65 state, it now houses the administrative offices of the Walled City Park. The decision to salvage only the oldest building in the city makes a clear statement about which Walled City the visitor is to remember. The symbolic significance of the preservation and restoration of the Yamen building is so overt that it overshadows the parallel treatment of archaeological discoveries made during the city’s metamorphosis into a garden. The revival and transformation of water symbolism, familiar from the three vices era, however, suggest the importance of these discoveries and their manipulation. In the

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Figure 2: Diagram of the Kowloon Walled City Park SOURCE: Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region. Reprinted with permission. NOTE: The Yamen (A), the lintel (B), and the pool (C).

course of a quick archaeological survey in May 1994, which was part of the garden construction process, scholars discovered the original capstone that stood until World War II above the south gate, the main entrance to the city (see 66 Figure 2). The capstone was broken into two pieces and was lying submerged in stagnant water when it was discovered. Rather than haul the stone out of the water and mend it, the ASD elected to leave the stone in situ, as a way of letting the stone, through its position and condition, tell its own story. The exhibition 67 of objects, however, even in situ, is never a value-neutral activity. The ASD drained the water from around the stone and installed subsurface drains and pipes to prevent it from becoming immersed again. They cleaned the stone, planted grass around it, and walled it off from the rest of the garden together with a few stones remaining from the foundation of the original walls and a large, impressive chunk of a stone drainage canal found in the same 68 area. The Qing era drainage canal displayed next to the capstone and the efficient drainage system installed as part of the park construction tell the beginning and end of the story while suppressing the middle. Visitors to the park might assume, on the basis of the material evidence, that the Walled City always enjoyed good drainage. On the contrary, bad drainage and flooding were one of the preeminent issues of the three vices stage of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. A policeman who worked on the Walled City patrol remembered regularly pulling elderly women out of chest69 deep water after rains in the city. The Kaifong took the issue so seriously that

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Figure 3:

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Location of the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong

for several years, it concentrated its energies and staked its reputation on an effort to get the Hong Kong government to provide better drainage for the 70 city. Though they managed to oversee some improvements, flooding continued to be a serious problem up until the demolition stage. Were it not for the Hong Kong governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s obsession with questions of hygiene in the prewar efforts to first demonize and then demolish the Walled City, the issue of drainage and its representation in the park might pass unexamined. A visitor familiar with the rhetorical strategies of the government would note that here again the ASD has chosen to represent the Walled City as a creature with an idyllic infancy, a secure retirement and no childhood, adolescence, or middle age. Once again, the pre- and postcolonial periods mesh, and the troublesome colonial period fades from view, an erasure unthinkable during the three vices stage. There is one more important component, albeit an abstract one, to the transformation wrought in the Walled City by the ASD. Ever since the first concerted government efforts to purge the Walled City in 1933, the area has been beset by a heightened sense of impermanence. Residents tended to keep their planning horizons short, knowing that a new order to evacuate the city might come at any moment. Even without official intervention, the precariousness of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s construction in the 1960s and 1970s and the fire hazard posed by the

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sheer density of the buildings in the same period meant that a single misfortune could destroy the area in a day. When the city was leveled in the early 1990s, that promise of temporariness was fulfilled, but it was replaced, in the garden phase, by an unfamiliar permanence. In its new guise as a park, the Kowloon Walled City faces the prospect of unending stasis. The ASD’s choice of an early Qing garden for the site was not even a turning back of the city’s clock to some recognizable point in the past from which it might again continue to move forward. Instead, the fantasy past of the lower Yangzi garden design serves to freeze the city outside of the timeline of its lived history, even while the park is putatively dedicated in part to a preservation of that history. Cut from its historical moorings, any progress the city-cum-park might make is 71 totally at the whim of the government body overseeing it. At the cost of this progress, however, the city has found its long-elusive security, for just as mon72 uments need governments, so too do governments need monuments. In the face of the drastic changes witnessed by the demolition and garden phases of the Walled City’s history, it is tempting to conclude that no continuity exists between the boisterous, ungoverned slum of the 1970s and the hushed, manicured park of the 1990s. From a demographic or architectural point of view, such a conclusion would be warranted. But seen as a site for the manufacture of difference and the assertion of sameness, the Walled City continues to thrive. Through a series of strategic design choices, the ASD has brought the visitor and the city into a relationship reminiscent of the nineteenth century, but this time around, the cosmetic treatment of the city-cum-park encourages observers only to admire (as the early Western travelers did the wall) and not to ridicule (as they did the cannon). The park is designed to structure the visitor’s experience as an encounter between two temporally distinct others, with the park voluntarily accepting the position of the past and granting the visitor the position of the present. It is not an undiscriminating past, however, in which the park projects itself but an imperial or precolonial one that commands respect. This harmonious encounter between the postcolonial viewer and the precolonial viewed works to erase the less respectable middle ground of the colonial period. Even with great attention to detail, this temporal operation is a delicate one, and it is perhaps with this delicacy in mind that the Hong Kong urban council decided to build a new wall to shelter the culture gar73 den of the Walled City Park. The new wall may succeed in keeping vandals out of the park, but it does not preserve the garden from its proverbial serpent: former residents disgruntled by the terms of resettlement offered by the government often return to the park that was once their home and grouse about the 74 loss of their community and their poor prospects outside the Walled City. Their presence disrupts the neat relationship between viewer and viewed and threatens to restart the historical progression of the city.

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CONCLUSION: DARK TWINS

One architect, noting that the scale of the Kowloon Walled City Park is larger than most lower Yangzi gardens and that the plan is more open, observes that the designers felt no need to make use of a famous Chinese garden-build75 ing technique, xiao zhong jian da (to see the large within the small). Taken strictly on the level of landscape design, this might be true. But if one accepts that the garden is a field for political symbols as well as for rocks, pavilions, water, and plants, then the concept of xiao zhong jian da could be said to be the guiding principle in its construction. Even before its metamorphosis in the garden phase, the Walled City and its relationship with Hong Kong provided 76 scholars with a microcosm of Hong Kong’s relationship with China. Within Hong Kong, the Walled City played the role of what James Scott calls a “dark twin”: a shadow economy that arises to fulfill the needs that a for77 mal economy cannot meet. Insofar as the Walled City met many of Hong Kong’s demands for cheap medical care and for goods and services illegal elsewhere in the colony, it functioned as a dark twin, but it simultaneously doubled in other roles. Scott’s dark twin generally operates out of the public eye. The Walled City, on the other hand, attracted a remarkable amount of attention as a foil for British colonialism in Hong Kong. Its serviceability in this role owes something to its location and much to its legal status, but the true secret of its success has to do with yet another brother, mainland China, for which Hong Kong operates as a dark twin. Just as the Walled City served as a useful spot for conducting business unpalatable, if not illegal, in the rest of Hong Kong, so did Hong Kong prove useful to officials from the People’s Republic (PRC) con78 ducting business that might appear unseemly in communist China. And much as Hong Kong sought to distance itself from the Walled City by relinquishing its responsibility for but not its claim to sovereignty over the enclave, so too did the PRC seek to distance itself from Hong Kong by renouncing responsibility for but not sovereignty over this larger enclave. The depth of the parallels between the two relationships is striking. Hong Kong and the Walled City are mutually constitutive, though unequally so; China and Hong Kong are also mutually but unequally constitutive. The decisions made in Hong Kong have more of an impact on the Walled City than decisions made in the city have on Hong Kong. Likewise, decisions made in China have more of an impact on Hong Kong than the other way around. The three vices period of the Walled City’s history shows how changes in the law in Hong Kong create lawlessness in the city. Similarly, changes in Chinese law have created comparatively lawless conditions in Hong Kong. For example, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Qing antirevolutionary laws drove Chinese revolutionaries into Hong Kong. More recently, draconian laws against drug trafficking in China have diverted a good deal of the regional and international trade through Hong Kong.

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Not only is the Walled City dynamic of asymmetrical but mutually constitutive relations mirrored in China’s relationship with Hong Kong, but the list of pejorative features that the dominant partner ascribes to the subordinate partner is virtually identical. During the three vices period, the British authorities in Hong Kong saw the Walled City as a nest of illicit behavior, home to an unstable population committed only to making money without regard to morals or means. The Walled City was seen to be an extreme example of the shortcomings of a laissez-faire society, presided over by a small group of illegitimate bosses. Furthermore, the British thought of the Walled City as a temporary phenomenon, curiously in but not of its surroundings and characterized by its territory more than its population. This entire roster of undesirable characteristics just as snugly fits the mainland understanding of Hong Kong. The purpose of pointing out these parallels is not to argue that the relationship between Hong Kong and the Walled City is precisely the same as that between China and Hong Kong. The approach of the People’s Republic to the resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong makes any such assertion untenable. The comparison does serve a purpose, however, insofar as it enables us to recognize the flexibility of the moral polarization strategy to aid rhetorical efforts at enclaving. The British colonial government’s habit of pointing to the depredations of organized crime syndicates in the Walled City as a way of demonstrating the importance of the legal system in Hong Kong was echoed by the PRC government’s habit of pointing to the prevalence of prostitution in Hong Kong as a way of demonstrating the importance of the socialist support system in China. A keen awareness of this competition, coupled with the insecurity of the British position in postwar Hong Kong, led procolonial groups to target the Walled City as a proxy for the mainland. The Walled City acted in the role of the weaker, younger sibling for a Hong Kong wary of picking fights with the city’s big brother over the border.

1. Hideo Tanaka, “Death Throes for the ‘City of Darkness’: Former Residents Watch as Kowloon Slum Is Torn Down,” Daily Yomiuri, May 17, 1993. 2. The Chinese name for the Walled City, zhaicheng, indicates a stockade of lower status and smaller size than an actual walled city, chengshi, like Guangzhou. 3. Elizabeth Sinn, “Kowloon Walled City: Its Origin and Early History,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 27 (1987): 30. 4. Liu Kan, cited in Julia Wilkinson, “A Chinese Magistrate’s Fort,” in Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, eds., City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (Surrey, 1993), 69. 5. Mark Abrahamson, Urban Enclaves: Identity and Place in America (New York, 1996), 3. 6. William De Marco, Ethnics and Enclaves: Boston’s Italian North End (Ann Arbor, 1980) and Alejandro Portes and Jozsef Borocz, “Contemporary Immigration: Theoretical Perspectives on its Determinants and Modes of Incorporation,” International Migration Review 23, no. 3 (1989): 606-30. 7. Kenneth George, “Dark Trembling: Ethnographic Notes on Secrecy and Concealment in Highland Sulawesi,” Anthropological Quarterly 66, no. 4 (1993): 232.

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8. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), chap. 2. 9. Nicholas Dirks, “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 26. 10. Note, for example, that residents of the Walled City were required to pay income and profits taxes to the Hong Kong government, but they were not required to pay rates (property taxes) on their apartments in the city. Children living in the city were eligible for public school slots outside the city, but premises inside the city did not receive standard electrification and were not subject to the building ordinance effective throughout the rest of the colony. 11. Albert Palmer, Orientals in American Life (New York, 1934), 2, cited in Abrahamson, 72. 12. Associated Press, “Hong Kong Plans to Tear Down Walled City and Make It a Park,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, April 23, 1987, 21. 13. The parallels between the diplomatic and the ethnic traits that prefigure these enclaves suggest questions about the ways in which the study of enclaves could bring to light the historical constitution of ethnicity. 14. Liang Binghua, Chengzhai yu Zhong-Ying waijiao (The Walled City and Sino-British Foreign Relations) (Hong Kong, 1995), 11-12. 15. Sinn, 36. 16. A Deed of Lease, Enclosed in a Dispatch from Sir Hercules Robinson to Duke of Newcastle, no. 33, March 20, 1860, reproduced in George Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot: A Collection of Documents Illustrating the History of Hong Kong (London, 1964), 288. 17. R. C. Hurley, Handbook to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong and Dependencies (Hong Kong, 1920). 18. Liang, 168-72. 19. Compare this plan with similar projects in colonial Singapore. See Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur, 1996). 20. Liang, 168-72. 21. Huang Junrao, Wu Rende, and Chen Jinhua, “Jiulong chengzhai: yige teshu shequ de dili toushi” (Kowloon Walled City: A Geographical Perspective on a Special District) (Hong Kong, Chinese University Department of Geography Occasional Paper No. 114), 6. Note the distinction between Kowloon City and Kowloon Walled City. Kowloon City refers to the region outside and mainly to the south of Kowloon Walled City. Before 1898, Kowloon City was not part of the magistrate’s fortress; after 1898, it became a part of the colony of Hong Kong. 22. Lu Jin, Jiulong chengzhai shi hua (The Story of the History of the Kowloon Walled City) (Hong Kong, 1988), 103. 23. Sinn, 36. 24. Lu, 104. 25. Even sympathetic portrayals of the city’s residents such as Jackie Pullinger’s Chasing the Dragon is occasionally guilty of this Walled City exceptionalism. See Jackie Pullinger, with Andrew Quicke, Chasing the Dragon (London, 1980). 26. I put the word crime in quotation marks to draw attention to the fact that there can be no crime without law and that the city was essentially a place without law during this phase. 27. Kowloon City District Police Commander, cited in Wilkinson, 71. 28. Peter Popham, “Introduction,” in Girard and Lambot, 10. 29. The official 1971 census put the city’s population at 10,004. By 1981, it had crept up to 14,617, but a more thorough 1987 survey uncovered 33,000 residents. See Betty Ho Siu Fong, “Redevelopment of Kowloon Walled City: A Feasibilty Study” (Msc Urban Planning, Hong Kong University, 1986), 49. 30. Huang, Wu, and Chen, 23. 31. Girard and Lambot, 108. 32. Ibid., 144. 33. Martin Booth, The Dragon and the Pearl: A Hong Kong Notebook (New York, 1994), 188. 34. Li Lin, “Jiulong chengqu mianmao zai gengxin” (The New Face of Kowloon City District), Baixing, January 16, 1986, 20. 35. Time, April 22, 1991, cited in Chan Chueng Ming, Chor Fai Au, and Bing Kong Choy, A Longitudinal Study on the Kowloon Walled City Clearance: The Pattern of Service Utilization, Community Identity and Life Satisfaction of the Residents (Centre for Hong Kong Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, n.d.), 48.

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36. Jockey Club Ti-I College, ed., “Lishu cangsang zhi jiulong chengzhai” (The Ups and Downs of the Kowloon Walled City through History) (unpublished manuscript, 1990). 37. Wilkinson, 70. 38. Interview with former Walled City resident, November 1997. Two large buckets of water delivered to an upper floor cost HK$0.20 in the early 1970s. The control of water in the Walled City bears a striking resemblance to the gang-controlled water supply system described by Hanchao Lu in the Shanghai slums of the Republican period. See Hanchao Lu, “Creating Urban Outcasts: Shantytowns in Shanghai, 1920-1950,” Journal of Urban History 21, no. 5 (1995): 593, n. 34. 39. Xianggang qingnian xiehui jiulong cheng qingshaonian zhongxin, ed., Chengzhai: Jinxi hua dangnian (Walled City: Speaking of the Past and Present) (Hong Kong, 1989), 11. 40. Ibid., 11. Police patrols in the city carried tiny collapsible umbrellas to address this problem. See Booth, 181. 41. Jiulong chengzhai jiefang fuli shiye cujin weiyuanhui, ed., “Chengli ershi zhounian jinian tekan” (Special Publication on the 2Oth Anniversary of the founding [of the Walled City Benefits Association]), October 1, 1983, 13. Also see Jockey Club Ti-I College and Lu, 164. 42. Jiulong, chengqu tekan (Kowloon District special publication, n.d.), 19, and Jiulong chengzhai jiefang fuli shiye cujin weiyuanhui, ed., 16. In one instance, this comes in the form of a question-and-answer session between a grandfather and a grandson about great events in Kowloon history. This format is strikingly similar to the dialogues in Thai textbooks designed to foster both a knowledge of modern geography and Thai patriotism mentioned by Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the GeoBody of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994). 43. Xianggang qingnian xiehui jiulong cheng, qingshaonian zhongxin, ed., 10. Also, Peter Wesley-Smith, “Forlorn, Forbidden, Forgotten: Kowloon’s Walled City,” Kaleidescope 1, no. 2 (1973): 32. 44. H. R. Butters, Report by the Labour Officer Mr. H. R. Butters on Labour and Labour Conditions in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1939), 138. 45. Betty Ho, 49. 46. Ibid., 65. 47. Girard and Lambot, 51. 48. Wesley-Smith, 33. While the PRC government was not willing to renounce its claim to sovereignty over the Walled City, it was not eager to risk good relations with Britain to defend the questionable property rights of a small number of drug addicts. 49. An Dingrong, “Jiulong chengzhai qingchai daijia bufei” (The Cost of Clearing the Kowloon Walled City Won’t Be Cheap), Baixing, February 1, 1987, 39. 50. Buildings and Lands Department, Survey and Mapping Office (Hong Kong, 1989), 1. 51. Girard and Lambot, 167, and “Keru shijiejilu” (It Could Be a World Record), Huaqiao ribao, June 28, 1988. 52. Charles Goddard, “The Clearance,” in Girard and Lambot, 209. 53. Chan Pui Yin, in ibid., 80. 54. Chan Hip Ping, in ibid, 177. 55. It is interesting to note, however, that Jackie Pullinger, the British woman credited with so much success in helping heroin addicts through withdrawal on the basis of faith in Christ, has become emblematic of all charitable efforts in the city. She overshadows a number of dedicated Korean and Italian nuns, also resident in the city to the end, who, by virtue of their nationality, do not fit the broader dichotomous pattern in Hong Kong of colonized sinner and colonial savior. Pullinger herself, however, was very critical of British colonialism in Hong Kong. Girard and Lambot, 171. 56. Suenn Ho, An Architectural Study on the Kowloon Walled City: Preliminary Findings (Hong Kong, 1993), 1, and Popham, 10. 57. Steve Ball, (untitled) South China Morning Post, December 27, 1993, 5. Ball’s use of the word imperial to qualify the Chinese government but not the British speaks volumes about implied morality and modernity. 58. This ahistorical notion of fixity also surfaces in demolition era accounts that date the Walled City to the Convention of Peking, suggesting that the city had no history prior to its envelopment by the British colony. See Jonathan Braude, “Last Squatters Evicted in Kowloon,” The Times (London), July 3, 1992. 59. Mingzheng Shi, “From Imperial Gardens to Public Parks: The Transformation of Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing,” Modern China 24, no. 3 (1998): 232. 60. Ibid., 232.

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61. These goals, together with a brief history of the Walled City and the park’s construction, are inscribed in Chinese on a large rock just inside the north entrance to the park. All observations concerning the park, unless otherwise footnoted, are based on several trips made by the author between September and November 1997. Judging from the built rather than the written evidence, the Architectural Services Department (ASD) might well have had a fourth objective in mind: the cultivation of a well-mannered public. Although the efforts made in the park to this end are not as extravagant as the “maxim pavilions” Shi mentions in the Beijing parks (Shi, 246), the paths of the Kowloon Walled City Park are studded with reminders of the “5 Do Not’s” that request visitors not to spit, desecrate the park, or litter. 62. That is, as a recreational garden. There were vegetable plots on the grounds in the 1930s. 63. Michelle Chin, “Walled City Garden Nears Completion,” South China Morning Post, August 8, 1995, 5, and Debbie Chu, “Walled City Foundation Uncovered,” South China Morning Post, June 10, 1994, 8. See also the promotional material distributed in the garden, Urban Council, Public Information Unit, Kowloon Walled City Park. 64. Wu Hung, “The Hong Kong Clock—Public Time-Telling, and Political Time/Space,” Public Culture 9, no. 3 (1997): 329-54. 65. The Yamen building today houses a small visitors center complete with a security detail, an information window, the manager’s office, a snack bar, an emergency clinic, a series of panels describing the history of the city, and storage space for the grounds crew. 66. Chu, 8. The photo gallery in the front of Liang’s book shows the lintel after its discovery but before the installation of the drainage system. Xie Shunjia, “Gu yuan jin zao” (Building an Ancient Garden Today), unpublished article in the Hong Kong Antiquities Office archive on the Kowloon Walled City. Inscribed on the capstone were the four characters: Jiulong zhaicheng (Kowloon Walled City), which was the original, official name for the military installation. During the three vices phase, the city was known as Jiulong chengzhai—simply reversing the last two characters, without changing the meaning. Following the discovery of the capstone, the Hong Kong Urban Council decided that the official name for the park should be Jiulong zhaicheng, rather than Jiulong chengzhai—again favoring the precolonial phase of the city over the more recent periods. 67. Ivan Karp, “Culture and Representation,” in Ivan Karp, ed., Exhibiting Cultures (Washington, D.C., 1991), 14. 68. Visit to the Walled City of Kowloon Park, September 1997. 69. Girard and Lambot, 165. The peril posed by water in the three vices stages is overcome by a hypervigilant attention to safety in the park stage. The pool (see Figure 2) on the west side of the park, some two feet deep, is emblazoned with large signs warning of the dangers of swimming, and the walls of the pavilion overlooking the pool are equipped with bright orange lifesaving rings. 70. Chengzhai fuli hui, ed., “Chengzhai fuli hui” (Kowloon Walled City Kaifong Benefits Organization), February 1, 1981, 2. 71. It is ironic to note that in the eyes of municipal governments, shantytowns and squatter housing are often more permanent than the stone and steel towers of the bourgeoisie. The whim of the market can cut short the life of the latter, but the poor, it seems, will always be with us. For examples of this observation in Shanghai, see Hanchao Lu “Creating Urban Outcasts,” 589, and in Hong Kong, see Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Hong Kong, 1997), 9. 72. I thank John Carroll for pointing this out to me. Personal communication, March 1999. 73. Brendan Delfino, “Hurdle of $4m Faces Council,” South China Morning Post, January 25, 1996, 4. The wall is made from bricks imported from mainland China and is designed to look antiquated, but standing less than half the height of its predecessor, it does not pretend to the same military grandeur. 74. Conversation with former residents, November 1997. Shopkeepers and dentists, in particular, found it very difficult to reestablish themselves after the city was cleared. 75. Xie, n.p. 76. Huang, Wu, and Chen, 10. 77. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 261, 270. 78. Soliciting remittances and foreign investments, for example. See Wu Chun-hsi, Dollars, Dependents and Dogma: Overseas Chinese Remittances to Communist China (Stanford, 1967), and Stephen Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese: A Study of Peking’s Changing Policy, 1949-1970 (Cambridge, 1972).

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