Source: Orange News Public   Kangxi radical 118/Lee Dream

Not long ago, Briton Ian Lambot returned to Hong Kong, where he has lived for more than a decade, to talk business and to support the reprinting of Dark City: Days and Nights of the Kowloon Walled City by the China Bookstore. The book, which tells the history of the Kowloon Walled City before and after its demolition, was launched during the Hong Kong Book Fair last year and sold out in just six months.

"The publisher's staff told me the book was selling well, which surprised me." Lam Po Yin admits he did not expect such a large history book of nearly 500 pages, priced at more than $400, to sell so well in Hong Kong, a fast-paced city where efficiency is the order of the day.

In fact, it is not difficult to explain the reason for the outstanding sales, which is nothing more than the word "curiosity". This is located in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong "city within a city" since 1994, after the demolition, has attracted different areas of interest and attention: architectural scholars trying to analyze the urban area crowded and chaotic but do not interfere with each other's building clusters, photographers concerned about the streets of the city as well as the streets along the streets of the stores of ordinary people's lives, anime players to develop a new game on the Kowloon City Walled City adventure! Anime players have developed new games about their adventures in the Walled City, and film director Keith Dolores even used the Walled City as the inspiration for a fictionalized version of the island of Naros, a place of madness and evil, in his 2005 film Batman: Riddles of the Shadow.

"Everyone sees the Kowloon Walled City as the 'City of Darkness,' a designation that is like an advertising slogan, like calling Paris 'The City of Light'; New York 'The Big Apple '; Hong Kong as 'Asia's World City.'" In the article "Pop Culture and the Walled City," author Resnick (Jon
In other words, the "Kowloon Walled City" is now a cultural symbol that has been over-interpreted and even consumed. In other words, today's "Kowloon Walled City" (Kowloon Walled City) is like a cultural symbol that has been over-interpreted and even consumed.

However, when Mr. Lam visited the Kowloon Walled City for the first time in the early 1980s, the seven-acre walled city and the lives of the people in it were still a topic of conversation that people outside the city were afraid to avoid. Lam remembers that when he talked to his friends about what he had seen and heard in the Kowloon Walled City, they would ask him with wide eyes, "My God, what are you doing there?

These surprises are not unfounded, for the "unregulated" status of the Kowloon Walled City has been a long-standing phenomenon, and drug trafficking activities, unlicensed dental clinics, unauthorized antennae and illegally erected premises have long been an open secret there. After World War II, some homeless people slept in the vicinity of the Kowloon Walled City, and from the 1950s onwards, many civilians from Mainland China flocked to Hong Kong, making the Walled City another temporary residence in addition to Tiu Keng Leng and Yau Ma Tei. Afterwards, as the political and social situation became more stable, these shelters were demolished one after another, except for the Kowloon Walled City, which could not be demolished repeatedly, and this also involved the complex and subtle connection between the then British and Chinese governments.

These historical questions did not appear in the original version of City of Darkness, which Lin collaborated with Canadian photographer Greg Girard. These historical questions and academic discussions were not added to the original work until the reprint of the English version and the release of the Chinese version. This was an intentional move on the part of Lin Baoxian. In his view, more than twenty years have passed since the original publication of the book, and continuing to use oral history and visual methods to retrace the lost time is a bit thin, especially at a time when the discussion of the Kowloon Walled City is becoming more and more frequent.

Originally written in English, City of Darkness was published in 1993 by Pauline Lam's one-man publishing house, Watermark.
Launched by Publications, the book includes photographs of people and street scenes taken by Gillard and Lam, as well as an "oral history" project conducted by Emmy Lung, a history student at the University of Hong Kong at the time. In the early years of the 1990s, the trio traveled to and from the Kowloon Walled City, chatting with the city's dentists, salami store owners, housewives, and walled city missionaries, and writing about their personal experiences with this cramped and dimly lit space.

"After hearing more stories, we gradually realized that the original fortress was not what we had first envisioned." Lin Baoxian told me. In fact, people outside the city of the so-called "dark city" and the life of the people in the city there are many "misinterpretation", these "misinterpretation" from the stereotypes and imagination out of thin air.

An architect by profession, Lam's original reason for visiting the Walled City was simply that he found the buildings there interesting." You can't find another place like the Kowloon Walled City, where the buildings are so dense and crowded, but the lives of the residents are so organized." In Lam's view, if you look at the Kowloon Walled City as a self-sufficient community, its layout was not planned in advance, but with limited space and financial support, it miraculously and consciously formed a compact (or even "subtle") pattern. The rooftop of the top floor is both a playground for children and a good place for pigeon breeders to tame and feed pigeons; the antennae, which seem to be pulled randomly, are enough to transmit light from the ground all the way up to the 14th floor; and the floors, which have been arbitrarily added in order to save money and for the sake of convenience, have on the one hand blocked a large amount of natural light for the people who live in the space, and on the other hand unexpectedly enhanced the solidity of the building (despite the fact that it seems to be shaky on the surface).

"To tell you the truth, you may not believe it, we never encountered any trouble when we interviewed the neighbors within the Walled City back then." Lin Baoxian and his two partners were originally worried about questioning from the police and even mobbing from the triads, but none of it happened. Moreover, after going there more often, they got acquainted with some of the neighbors and became friends after a while.

"The people in the Walled City live ordinary, common lives, just like you and me, and that's what we wanted to document." In taking the photographs with Girard and writing the book, Lin Baoxian observed that space, and the trivial lives that the individuals in that space faced on a daily basis, from as level a perspective as possible. If you look closely at the photographs, you will find that Girard's photographs of the people were taken at a very close distance, which is very much a sense of the scene and the flavor of documentary photography.

"I can shoot architecture, but not portraits." Lin Baoxian laughed, thanks to a Christmas party that year, he met Girard, who specializes in portrait photography, or else this book of "image + text" would probably not have been published." Thanks to Emmy, we were able to bring the two of us closer to the interviewees." Although he has lived in Hong Kong for more than a decade, Lam cannot speak a word of Cantonese, but at most he understands a few place names and the usual Hong Kong term for foreigners - "gweilo".

Nowadays, LAM Po-yin has returned to live in the United Kingdom, and he only comes back to Hong Kong occasionally for a visit. When I asked him whether he intended to visit the Kowloon Walled City again during his visit to Hong Kong this time, he shook his head with a smile and asked me in return, "Do you mean that park?"

Indeed, apart from a model that simulates the landscape of the past, we cannot find any traces of the old walled city in the Kowloon Walled City Park built on the site of the demolition. For Lin Baoxian and others, their memories of the fortress ended with the demolition twenty years ago; nowadays, we can only try our best to search and collage our own imagination of the place name "Kowloon Walled City" through books, cartoons and photo exhibitions. Just as a thousand readers can see a thousand kinds of rivers and lakes when they look at the Water Margin, each person's collage of the walled city is also destined to be different. Perhaps, it is this kind of "different", "differences" and even "misinterpretation" of the mystery born, so that this disappeared for more than twenty years of the walled city, until today, still often by you! I think of it.

"A lot of people have cottage stories of their own." Limbaughian said, "I'm almost done telling my cottage story."