Demolished entirely by 1994, Kowloon Walled City has been a source of fascination, inspiration, and even hope to many. Come explore the city for yourself. You never know what you may find here.

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a new experiment! i’ve never made a scenario/setting before but i wanted to try my hand at it after watching some fascinating documentaries about kowloon walled city, including one about the japanese-only ps1 game kowloon’s gate. fascinating and freaky little game. go watch dungeon chill’s two hour breakdown of the game if you like that sort of thing too. :)

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Fun facts:

• Kowloon Walled City came to be within the confines of British Hong Kong on the soil of a Chinese-controlled military base that had been abandoned. The 6.4 acre spat of land was technically still Chinese, and the British had no jurisdiction there. And with the Chinese having abandoned the site, it became a perfect place for refugees to settle after the Chinese Civil War, as well as an attractive place for crime syndicates to run their usual activities, without any British oversight.

• At its peak, the city was estimated to have up to 50,000 people crammed within the tiny space. Experts in the 70s and 80s believed that overpopulation in the future would cause overcrowded urban centers to become the only living space as lifespans grew longer. Kowloon Walled City was considered a real life example of this supposed phenomenon, which inspired the dystopian genre now known as cyberpunk. Even though we now know that falling birth rates prevents this overcrowding in the majority of the world, Kowloon Walled City is still known by some as the original cyberpunk city.

• The city was known for both its seedy underbelly and its residents’ dedication to each other. While there was considerable gang activity within the city’s shadowy confines, along with drug-running, opium dens, and prostitution houses, the residents of Kowloon Walled City took up the majority of the population by far. They were known to be close-knit and fiercely defensive of one another, considering each other part of one big interconnected family.

• The city was only about half a mile away from the functioning Kai Tak airport, meaning the sprawling overcrowded buildings could not be built any higher than fourteen stories. Most of the city had grown up to that haphazard height via slapdash, amateur construction by the time of its eventual demolition. The construction was not subject to any building codes whatsoever.

• Kowloon Walled City has appeared in media like The Bourne Supremacy (1986 novel), The Long Arm of the Law (1984 movie), and Call of Duty: Black Ops. It has further inspired locations in media like Stray (2022 video game), The Legend of Korra, and Batman Begins.