From Garrisoned District to Chinese Town: Land and Boundaries at the Kowloon Walled City, 1898-1912

Abstract

For most of its two-century-long existence from about 1810 to 1994, Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City housed built structures, but its classification as architecture has remained tenuous. Not until the years prior to its demolition did it receive sustained attention from architects and architectural historians as a dense, slum dwelling of informal multi-story buildings. However, the architectural nature of the six-acre area predated its late 20th-century state. From its founding as a Qing military outpost, it sustained various structural additions and renovations, including an imperial Chinese administrative complex known as a yamen [衙門] and an outer wall, after which the Walled City was named. Against the grain of scholarship that has focused on the Walled City’s postwar, informal architecture, this paper considers the site’s early years, arguing that the Walled City’s yamen [衙門] and outer wall played an outsize role in the region’s land management practices. These two architectural structures make legible the Walled City’s evolution from a Qing administrative zone to a crowded slum dwelling. The Convention of 1898 ushered in a British-led land surveying effort throughout the New Territories region of Hong Kong, followed by the creation of an intricate bureaucracy for managing land lots. This clash of empires thus saw the use of two forms of land knowledge—Qing land deeds and British cadastral land surveys—in Hong Kong. In between these systems existed the Walled City, its inhabitation falling outside the British conception of land division, but its historical contours very much shaped by the architectural boundaries that gave it its name.