Kowloon Walled City Revisited: Photography and Postcoloniality in the City of Darkness

Between 1987 and 1992, Canadian photographer Greg Girard and British publisher Ian Lambot took hundreds of photographs of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, once the most densely populated neighborhood in the world. The Walled City was infamous as a symbol of unruliness, an ever-expanding megalopolis within a megalopolis encompassing every dark alley of noir Hong Kong: drug dens, black market commerce, unlicensed medical practices, sweatshops, gang operations, and murders. In 1987, an administrative decision to demolish the city was made, undergoing a multiphase process to its completion in 1993. Tens of thousands of residents and workers in the Walled City were relocated and laid off, some with enough compensation to restart their lives but most without. With everybody gone and the structures razed—and the public’s attention now on the 1997 return of the former British colony to the People’s Republic of China—the city passed into the arena of reminiscence.

The twentieth anniversary of the city’s destruction brought with it a desire to revisit these dark alleys of a bygone era. Yet that impulse seems rooted in something much deeper than the formality of the anniversary. By examining works on the Walled City by Girard and Lambot, this article explores this renewed—and for some, on-going—interest in reliving and revisiting Kowloon Walled City, as made possible by the retelling of its stories and reviewing of its images in relation to Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity in the making.

In 1993, Girard and Lambot published a photography book, City of Darkness, about the then newly demolished Walled City, which was reprinted in 1999. In 2014, they excavated their original photographs, interviews, and records and, in collaboration with historians, former city officials, writers, and former residents and city workers, published extensive studies of Kowloon Walled City titled City of Darkness Revisited (the Cantonese name for the city, Hak Nam, translates to “city of darkness”).[1] The Walled City, although completely erased from its physical location, has been reborn through the book and other cultural productions, becoming a symbol of the colonial Hong Kong that harbored its organic, rhizomatic growth—a prime example of Hong Kong’s “guerrilla capitalism[,] establishing the form of flexible manufacturing” vital to the livelihood of most of the city’s residents.[2] By virtue of this new context, however, the Walled City is now not merely a symbol of an era that cannot return, but a contested site of remembrance in which Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity is re-imagined and re-constructed.

The origins of the Walled City go back more than a millennium. Kowloon was an important salt field during the Song dynasty (960-1297), and a small fort was built to house imperial soldiers, who controlled the salt trade.[3] By 1668, a watch post was established on the site with a small garrison of 30 guards. In 1847, six years after the British occupation of Hong Kong, this fort was improved with a stone wall, from which the city’s name comes—“a visible and psychological symbol of imperial control to the barbarians in Hong Kong.”[4] The Walled City’s more recent notoriety traces back to the 1890s, when the area became infamous for its gambling dens. As the world outside the Walled City was undergoing rapid transformation in the twentieth century, the city itself began to grow, a living creature adding layer upon layer to itself. According to James Saywell, the Walled City had almost surpassed its maximum capacity by the 1970s, with buildings stacked up on top of one another, up to 14 stories high and blocking the daylight from the interiors (fig. 1) .[5] Demographically, more than 70 per cent of the residents were Chiu Chow, a people who, though part of the Canton region, spoke a dialect different from the Cantonese and had a distinct culture.[6] By the early twentieth century, thousands of Chiu Chow were squatting outside the Walled City, raising pigs and poultry.[7] The area soon became the hub for the influx of Chiu Chow refugees from the mainland.[8]

Fig. 1. Ian Lambot, Aerial View, Kowloon Walled City, 1990 © Ian Lambot.

The Walled City was thus both physically and psychologically isolated from mainstream Hong Kong. This is what makes the revisiting of the city through postcolonial memories salient: while it stood, the city was viewed as “Other” by those outside of it; in postcolonial memories, the city emerges as a symbol of a bygone Hong Kong, although colonial Hong Kong was never such, an organically grown self-governing entity. Indeed, the latter view is emphasized by, for example, Lambot and Girard, and by almost all of the other contributors to the 2014 volume (with the exception of Cathie Breslin, whose essay is on her missionary/social work in the city’s drug dens).

Girard and Lambot’s photographs show their encounters with some of the last residents of the Walled City. Girard’s photographs take us to the private quarters of residents he met in factories, food shops, and, most often, while walking through the maze-like, completely covered alleyways that dominate the city (figs. 2-6). Many of these photographs were republished in City of Darkness Revisited and also exhibited in Hong Kong. Crucially, in sifting through more than 600 photographs originally considered for the 1993 publication, Girard and Lambot, and the seven contributors to the photo book, went in search of the city’s retrospective identity: not as a lingering colonial ghost, but as a site of Hong Kong’s postcoloniality, despite its physical structure having been completely erased from the face of the earth by 1993. According to Lambot, the new essays included for the 2014 publication “explore how perceptions of the Walled City have changed over time, from being shunned by most Hong Kong residents during its lifetime to now being seen, almost with pride, as part of the territory’s rich cultural heritage.”[9] Some provide in-depth historical context of the Walled City, along with numerous interviews of residents, emphasizing that “the reality” of the city was very different from its unruly, crime-ridden stereotype—part of a continuing effort to demystify the place since the publication of the first edition.

Fig. 2. Greg Girard, Rubber Factory, Kowloon Walled City, 1989-1991 © Greg Girard.

Fig. 3. Greg Girard, BBQ Meat Factory, Kowloon Walled City, 1989-1991 © Greg Girard.

Fig. 4. Greg Girard, Convenience Store, Kowloon Walled City, 1989-1991 © Greg Girard.

Fig. 5. Greg Girard, Alley I, Kowloon Walled City, 1989-1991 © Greg Girard.

Fig. 6. Greg Girard, Lau’s Home, Kowloon Walled City, 1989-1991 © Greg Girard.

The launch of the book was celebrated in September 2014 with an exhibition of Girard and Lambot’s photographs at The Space on Hollywood Road in Hong Kong. Moreover, Lambot’s newly printed, archival-quality aerial photograph of the city became part of the permanent collection at M+, Hong Kong’s newest multidisciplinary museum,[10] dedicated to visual culture and located in the West Kowloon Cultural District (fig. 7). With the publication of both the English and Chinese editions and exhibitions in Hong Kong, the revised photo book was clearly intended not only for English-speaking readers familiar with the history of the Walled City or Hong Kong’s recent past, but also for Hong Kongers and transnational Chinese readers. Indeed, its readership extended beyond a closed group from its inception, as its publication was financed through a successful Kickstarter campaign involving international and transnational supporters, many of them Hong Kongers and expatriates.[11]

Fig. 7. Ian Lambot, Installation View at M+, Hong Kong, 2014 © Ian Lambot.

The Kickstarter campaign evinces a will for a collective memory making. The significance of this memory making does not come from the fact that memories resemble each other but that “the same group is interested in them and is able to call them to mind at the same time that they resemble each other.”[12] Memories of a certain event thus may vary according to each person, but what is shared among people’s memories is the temporality of will—the will to conjure up memories of the event at the same time, so they can have similarities that affirm the interests they hold in common in the present. City of Darkness Revisited is a product of this collective—and transnational—desire to memorialize the Walled City, even as the country itself undergoes political and cultural crises of postcolonial identity.

Indeed, Kowloon Walled City and Hong Kong have several parallels. Both existed in a state of in-betweenness. The Walled City was oriented distinctly from its neighbors, not quite under British or Chinese scrutiny yet within a local polity.[13] The Hong Kong government wanted to avoid intervening in the Walled City’s activities, for doing so would likely results in local uprisings that would, in turn, provoke China and thus lead to long-term Chinese intervention; the British “avoided any action that might raise China’s interest, lest it yield less British influence instead of more.” [14] Meanwhile, for all that Hong Kong itself is understood as an “island off of the mainland and longi temporis possessio of a Western hegemony,”[15] it was nonetheless a native populace colonized by a foreign power. Hong Kong likewise was, as Leo Ou-Fan Lee puts it, “caught in a limbo, the result of political maneuvering by its old [British] and new [Chinese] masters.”[16] If the Walled City, operating on a certain level of independence from national oversight, was a local force unto itself, Hong Kongers too have an identity merging and yet somewhat independent from local and global contexts. Its sovereignty is explicitly in-between, transnational.[17] This “transnationality” arises not only between Britain and China but also within and between China and its transnational polities. According to Howard Y. F. Choy, “What makes Hong Kong unique [is] its at once diasporic mentality within the Chinese cultural world and eccentric ‘Chineseness’ without the modern nation-state known as China—be it the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China, but no longer the Qing empire.”[18] Then Hong Kong’s transnational (and China-less) Chineseness is possible precisely because it is situated in “a limbo.”

The fin-de-siècle angst involved in coming to terms with wuiguai, a Cantonese transliteration referring to “handover, transition, decolonization,”[19] is part of Hong Kong’s struggle to define its postcolonial identity. Although the decision to demolish the Walled City was brought forth by the hazardous conditions of the megalopolis, highlighted by its negative public image, the city eventually came to be remembered as harmonious, self-reliant, resilient, heterogeneous, organic, adaptive—an outlook many desired for postcolonial Hong Kong.[20] For example, Peter Popham, who wrote an introduction to both the original edition of City of Darkness and 2014’s City of Darkness Revisited, describes that the Walled City as a place of “the fierce work ethic, the strength and centrality of the extended family, the love of mahjong and cards, the devotion to festivals such as the Mid-Autumn (moon cake) Festival, the respect for learning and religion.”[21] Thus, even as the imagery of dark and damp alleyways has become the most widely used representation of the Walled City, Girard’s photographs allow for different interpretations (figs. 5, 8).

Fig. 8. Greg Girard, Alley II, Kowloon Walled City, 1989-1991 © Greg Girard.

Revisiting the Walled City in 2014 through these photographs was necessitated by a heightened desire for a revisualization of Hong Kong and its postcolonial identity. Prior to that, however, the Walled City was a widely used symbol of “romantic” dystopia.[22] The Hollywood film director Christopher Nolan took the Walled City as his inspiration for “the sinister, lawless and decaying enclave” in his 2005 film Batman Begins.[23] There is even a sludge metal band named Kowloon Walled City, whose members are based in San Francisco and have never been to the place or heard of its history before choosing the moniker.[24]

This archaeology of the Walled City as visualized in cultural productions entails the aforementioned paradox of in-betweenness, or “transnational locality.” Hong Kong is “not only to be influenced by the transnational but to be a specific site of the materialization of transnational processes”—for instance, that of cultural productions.[25] In other words, Hong Kong, the local, “not only is transnational, but also, there is no transnational that does not have specific and particular local enactments.”[26] This double-bind of trans-locality becomes even further “accented” in Hong Kong under the postcolonial conditions of global capitalism. According to Laikwan Pang, “Hong Kong’s postcolonization is characterized by the confrontation of the two paradigms of nationalization and global capitalism. While postcolonialism is often accompanied by the process of nation building, global capitalism tends to make national boundaries diffuse and to intensify global competition.” [27]

Likewise, cultural productions re-visualizing Kowloon Walled City involve transnational financing, depending on various channels of global capitalism. The Walled City, and Hong Kong’s colonial past in general, has become a cultural asset. Its colonial heritage has become “a key element in its collective memory and its claim for difference and separateness” in its postcolonial context. This is also why the Walled City attracts such transnational cultural productions.[28] The memorializing of the Walled City is thus symptomatic of the trans/local desire to define a postcolonial identity. Choy sees this desire as an indication of the “schizophrenic anxious return from being the United Kingdom’s ‘crown jewel’ to becoming the Middle Kingdom’s Special Administrative Region before and after the fin-de-siècle changeover[; it] characterizes a collective failure of resuming a single, clear-cut identity for a postcolonial global city.”[29] Rather than being a fixed characteristic of Hong Kong’s (and the Walled City’s) identity, the in-betweenness results in “exposing the otherness within.”[30]

The re-imag(in)ing of Kowloon Walled City in 2014 holds particular resonance given the enormous pro-democracy demonstrations that took place in Hong Kong in September and October of the same year. The immediate cause of the democracy movement, dubbed the “Umbrella Revolution” (or “Umbrella Movement,” referring to the protesters’ use of umbrellas to shield themselves from pepper spray and other chemical attacks), was an electoral reform deterring the democratic process. Many of the protesters, however, also believe that the current system, in which only 232,000 people (out of 3.5 million eligible voters) and corporations are functional constituencies, special interest groups involved in the electoral process, allows continued growth of economic inequality.[31] Although universal suffrage has been one of the main objectives of the movement, “the underlying causes and concerns of the protests surround the unequal distribution of wealth in the city.”[32] Especially for the participating college students, sustaining their lifestyles and livelihoods has been increasingly difficult. As Tai Wei Lim notes, “[b]read-and-butter issues are conflated with democratic agitations and expressed interchangeably in protest materials, rituals, and performances.”[33] Hence the events of 2014 were more broadly a response to the decline of Hong Kong’s middle class, perhaps what the public feared most about Hong Kong’s postcolonial direction.

As Kowloon Walled City provided homes for tens of thousands of its residents who were not able to afford housing outside of it, their relentless creation of makeshift space was key to the life of the place. Twenty years after its demolition, for a brief period of two months or so, “self-organized living, [dealing] with water and waste, creating zones of public and private space” once again became crucial to the life in Hong Kong.[34] During the Umbrella Movement, the occupation of Hong Kong’s urban infrastructure “literally transformed the city into their own vision of community living...[embodying] critique of the established urban rules of the city and a de facto demand for an urban equality of space.”[35] What the Walled City represents now, a self-sustainable city that grew organically as Hong Kong’s heterotopia, to use Michel Foucault’s concept of a parallel space that exists both physically and mentally, overlaps considerably with the space of the Umbrella Movement (figs. 9-10).[36]

Fig. 9. Eunsoo Lee, Gloucester Road, Admiralty, Hong Kong, 2014 © Eunsoo Lee.

Fig.10. Eunsoo Lee, House on Nathan Road #1, Hong Kong, 2014 © Eunsoo Lee.

The pro-democracy movement and the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the demolition of Kowloon Walled City politically and aesthetically articulate a desire and nostalgia for a Hong Kong that was burgeoning with economic and cultural prosperity, and for the independence, and space, that allowed a place like the Walled City to thrive in its own way. Indeed, nostalgia for a bygone era is powerfully associated with colonial architectural structures, as seen in, for example, the civic unrest and prolonged demonstrations against the SAR Government’s decision to demolish colonial landmarks such as the Star Ferry Pier in 2006. Such sites of nostalgia in turn come to yield what Helen Grace calls spectral monumentality, “a bringing into existence of invisible monuments—in this case, the memories of demolished structures which survive in an embodied form” through imagery, particularly digital photography and the online sharing of it.[37] In the case of Girard and Lambot’s images, they survived in an embodied form of film photography (although they are also embodied in jpegs). Nevertheless, the invisible city remains spectrally, and spectacularly, monumental in the form of photographs hanging on gallery walls and as handsomely reproduced photo books.[38]

The publication of City of Darkness Revisited not only memorialized and historicized the city in the context of postcolonial Hong Kong—as well as its context of reshaping postcolonial identity through mediums such as photography—but also gave voice to the long-silenced colonized Chinese underclass in Hong Kong. Its biggest contribution is not merely the fact that the book re-visualized the Walled City as it stood and was demolished at the brink of Hong Kong’s transition to a post-colony, but it signified the desire not to forget—and to re-identify—the Walled City today. This desire cannot be simplified as fin-de-siècle sentiment or mourning. It is also about the desire to hold on to the Walled City’s, and Hong Kong’s, imagined past, constructed and reconstructed through its body that has been gone for two decades. This desire is fundamental to the making of Hong Kong’s postcoloniality. In other words, memory making is also a process of shaping postcolonial conditions—just as the Umbrella Movement has hoped to shape them.

Although the photographs were created in a pre-social media era, the images of the Walled City came to be embodied in a book form through the internet-based platform Kickstarter, something the photographers could not imagine when they ventured into the dark alleys of the Walled City. Such an effort, as Lee sees in “the movement to save a few remaining relics of Hong Kong’s past” helps “to keep alive a collective memory which, however vague and fragile, will continue to shape Hong Kong’s own destiny.”[39] At the same time, the yearning for an erased place and the construction of Hong Kong’s identity through that place also carries the difficulty of fixing that identity with a concrete, currently existing example.

In 20 years, Kowloon Walled City has come a long way in the collective memory, even if the nature of Hong Kong’s governance has not seen such positive developments. Today Kowloon Walled City is remembered as an ideal urban form. Rather than being remembered only as dark, dripping, and smelly, it is discussed as “highly socially integrated and hyper-efficient with space, [accommodating] all functions—from living to working to recreation to social services—within a dense, walkable area.” [40] This sounds rather like a description of an ideal real-estate property—and even more tantalizing, given the current market, an affordable location. Remembering the Walled City as self-reliant, socially integrated, and hyper-efficient becomes more poignant considering the failure so far of the Umbrella Movement to achieve electoral reform, with the SAR Government retaliating through strengthened control of the media and educational institutions instead. The photographs of Kowloon Walled City may help construct a different kind of memory in 20 years from now; and that may be because Hong Kong will have become a different place than it is now. Or maybe not. But it is this desire for a re-imagined, re-constructed postcolonial identity that will keep Kowloon Walled City as a placeholder of memories of Hong Kong.

Jung Joon Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Lee’s current research examines the visual culture of militarism in East Asia.

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• Choy, Howard Y. F. “Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures 3 (2007): 52–66.
• Clarke, David. “Contested Sites: Hong Kong’s Built Environment in the Post-Colonial Era.” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 357–77.
• Erni, John Nguyet. “Like a Postcolonial Culture: Hong Kong Re-Imagined.” Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2001): 389–418.
• Grace, Helen. “Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong.” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 467–83.
• Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• Hilgers, Lauren. “‘We’ll Be Back’.” New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2015.
• Lambot, Ian, and Greg Girard, eds. City of Darkness Revisited. Brighton, UK: Watermark Publications, 2014.
• ______. “The New Edition.” City of Darkness Revisited, 2014. http://cityofdarkness.co.uk/category/the_book/.
• ______. “City of Darkness Revisited.” Kickstarter, 2014. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1060791749/city-of-darkness-revisited.
• Lam, Jermain T. M. “Consolidation of Democracy in Hong Kong under Chinese Sovereignty.” Asian Affairs 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 19–35.
• Lee, Leo Ou-Fan. “Postscript: Hong Kong-A Reflective Overview.” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 499–509.
• Lim, Tai Wei. “The Aesthetics of Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in the First Ten Days: A Historical Anatomy of the First Phase (27 Sept 2014 to 6 October 2014) of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution.” East Asia 32 (2015): 83–98.
• Lin, John. “Umbrella Urbanism.” Architectural Review 236, no. 1413 (November 2014): 14–16.
• Pang, Laiwan. “Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema: Utilitarianism and (Trans)local.” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 413–30.
• Popham, Peter. “Kowloon Walled City—the Reality.” In City of Darkness Revisited, 6–32. Brighton, UK: Watermark Publications, 2014.
• Resnick, Jon. “Popular Culture and the Walled City.” In City of Darkness Revisited, 190–214. Brighton, UK: Watermark Publications, 2014.
• Saywell, James. “The Architecture of a Mini City.” In City of Darkness Revisited, 118–38. Brighton, UK: Watermark Publications, 2014.
• Schiller, Nina Glick. “Introduction: What Can Transnational Studies Offer the Analysis of Localised Conflict and Protest?” Focaal, no. 47 (2006): 3–17.
• Wilkinson, Julia. “A Chinese Magistrate’s Fort.” In City of Darkness Revisited, 62–73. Brighton, UK: Watermark Publications, 2014.
• Wong, Edward, and Alan Wong. “Seeking Identity, ‘Hong Kong People’ Look to City, Not State.” New York Times, October 8, 2014, Late edition, sec. A.

Notes:

1. The revised edition was in print by October 2014, followed by a Chinese language edition in 2015.

2. Helen Grace, “Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 471.

3. Julia Wilkinson, “A Chinese Magistrate’s Fort,” in City of Darkness Revisited, eds. Ian Lambot and Greg Girard (Brighton, UK: Watermark Publications, 2014), 62.

4. Ibid.

5. James Saywell, “The Architecture of a Mini City,” in City of Darkness Revisited, 133.

6. It is transliterated as “Chaozhou” in Mandarin, part of the Guangdong Province.

7. Wilkinson, “A Chinese Magistrate’s Fort,” 72.

8. Lambot and Girard, eds., City of Darkness Revisited, 181.

9. Ian Lambot, “The New Edition,” City of Darkness Revisited, 2014, http://cityofdarkness.co.uk/category/the_book/.

10. Date of completion expected in late 2017.

11. Lambot and Girard chronicled the process of the crowd funding and the actualization of publication on their Kickstarter website. See Ian Lambot and Greg Girard, “City of Darkness Revisited,” Kickstarter, 2014, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1060791749/city-of-darkness-revisited.

12. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52.

13. The Walled City was, for example, regularly patrolled by members of a police task force from the very beginning. See Lambot and Girard, eds., City of Darkness Revisited, 250.

14. Saywell, “The Architecture of a Mini City,” in City of Darkness Revisited, 120–121.

15. Howard Y.F. Choy, “Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy,” Transtext(e)s Transcultures 3 (2007): 54.

16. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Postscript: Hong Kong-A Reflective Overview,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 500.

17. I use the term “transnational” in this context to situate Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong’s postcolonial memories. My use of the term, however, is based on its broad definition as it is used in interdisciplinary studies: “processes that extend across a specific set of state borders so that particular states become actors whose exercise of power shapes but does not contain cross-border processes.” In my examination, the “processes” refer to postcolonial memory making, in particular, through Kowloon Walled City photographs. See Nina Glick Schiller, “Introduction: What Can Transnational Studies Offer the Analysis of Localised Conflict and Protest?,” Focaal, no. 47 (2006): 4. Schiller assesses the genealogy of Transnational Studies and what has been at stake with the term “transnational” in academic disciplines. My thoughts on the transnational and postcoloniality are also indebted to the work of Rey Chow.

18. Choy, “Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy,” 54.

19. John Nguyet Erni, “Like a Postcolonial Culture: Hong Kong Re-Imagined,” Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2001): 389.

20. According to Saywell, the Walled City grew to be a cohesive and integrated place, not merely a haphazard structure. What is interesting about his assessment of the city’s architecture is that he too sees such characteristics as “a truly indigenous physical entity.” See Saywell, 134.

21. Peter Popham, “Kowloon Walled City—the Reality,” in City of Darkness Revisited, 12.

22. Popham argues that the use of the Walled City’s appearance in popular culture commonly exaggerated it as “hell on earth.” See Popham, 15: “What they all shared in common was finding in the appearance of the Walled City a perfect image of hell on earth, a modernist dystopia mixing filth, vermin, darkness, haphazard and perilous concrete construction and insane overcrowding into a single disgusting yet irresistible brew, a series of powerfully repellent images. It was the reinvention of the Victorian haunted house or the teeming Dickensian London slum in a late-20th-century register.”

23. Jon Resnick, “Popular Culture and the Walled City,” in City of Darkness Revisited, 190.

24. Ibid., 192. Currently, Koola & Viv, a videogame developer, is working on a cat adventure game called “HK Project” where the player is a cat exploring Kowloon Walled City.

25. Schiller, “Introduction: What Can Transnational Studies Offer the Analysis of Localised Conflict and Protest?,” 9.

26. Ibid.

27. Laiwan Pang, “Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema: Utilitarianism and (Trans)local,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007): 414.

28. For a list of such productions, including Korean artist Miru Kim’s project Naked City Spleen, that reference the Walled City, if not entirely inspired by it, see Resnick’s chapter, “Popular Culture and the Walled City,” in City of Darkness Revisited, 190–214.

29. Choy, “Schizophrenic Hong Kong: Postcolonial Identity Crisis in the Infernal Affairs Trilogy,” 56.

30. Ibid., 64.

31. In 1985, Hong Kong’s colonial government initiated the development of representative government, as “a way to prepare for an elected legislature after 1997.” As a result, “[f]unctional constituencies based on economic and professional fields were created, such that members of specific functional sectors could elect among themselves representatives to articulate their interests in the legislature. Those functional constituencies included, for example, the teaching, legal, accountancy, business, labor, medical, tourism, entertainment, agricultural and fishery sectors.” See Jermain T.M. Lam, “Consolidation of Democracy in Hong Kong under Chinese Sovereignty,” Asian Affairs 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 21–22. The current Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, for example, was “elected to the position in 2012 by the 1,200-member committee that decides the office, most of whom are not subject to popular elections.” See Lauren Hilgers, “‘We’ll Be Back’,” New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2015.

32. John Lin, “Umbrella Urbanism,” Architectural Review 236, no. 1413 (November 2014): 16.

33. Tai Wei Lim, “The Aesthetics of Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in the First Ten Days: A Historical Anatomy of the First Phase (27 Sept 2014 to 6 October 2014) of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution,” East Asia 32 (2015): 94.

34. Lin, “Umbrella Urbanism,” 16.

35. Ibid.

36. The recent use of makeshift space is also an expression of civil discontent. According to Edward Wong and Alan Wong, “[m]ainland business people and party elites have bought real estate, driving up prices that were already among the highest in the world. That has made housing unaffordable for many in the middle class, especially for recent high school and college graduates.” See Wong and Wong, “Seeking Identity, ‘Hong Kong People’ Look to City, Not State,” New York Times, October 8, 2014, Late edition, sec. A.

37. Grace, “Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong,” 468.

38. The Walled City becomes even more spectral in Ryuji Yamamoto’s black-and-white photographs that were taken in 1987 and first published in 1988. Yamamoto’s book, however, differ from Girard and Lambot’s in its aesthetic formality and narrative, which may be a topic for another occasion.

39. Lee, “Postscript: Hong Kong-A Reflective Overview,” 508.

40. Saywell, “The Architecture of a Mini City,” 138.