Kerim's Triptych ❧ Kowloon Walled City

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Welcome to a special Kowloon Walled City themed edition of Triptych!

1️⃣ Walled In

The idea for this themed issue came to me after watching Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In on a plane. A recent action film from Hong Kong, Twilight is a flawed film. There are hardly any female characters of note, it is full of old grievances that don't make much sense, and some of the fight scenes make even less sense, but I still loved it! Partially because it is a tribute to an earlier generation of Hong Kong movies, which often made as little sense as this one did, but even more so because of the way they recreated the famous Walled City of Kowloon. The sets felt like a character in the film, and account for a much of the film's charm. Here's an interview with the set designer and some shots of the work that went into recreating this famous bit of Hong Kong history.

2️⃣ Cross-Section

For many years I had this incredible cross-section illustration of Kowloon Walled City by Hitomi Terasawa as the desktop wallpaper on my laptop, thanks to high quality scans of this out-of-print book by Greg Jensen. I'm linking to the article on Colossal but be sure to click through to the full resolution panorama in order to really appreciate the detail in this incredible illustration.

3️⃣ City of Darkness

Greg Girard and Ian Lambot’s 1993 book City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City is a rich photo-documentary of life inside the community before it was torn down. This South China Morning Post article offers a preview of some of these wonderful photos (from a gallery exhibition in 2019), but the interviews with residents are just as valuable as the photos. Together they give a good sense of what ordinary life was like inside of the walled city. I recommend buying the book or searching for a scan on the Internet Archive, in order to read it in full.

Endnote

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