How the Kowloon Walled City Worked

I'm Clayton Eckard, in 2022,

I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

“But here's the thing, Bachelor fans hated him.”

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Get to know AGO. Follow "Thinkstead" with AGO WOTA and start listening on the free eye-heart radio app today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of "I Heart Radio."

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here as well. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

“So let's get started talking about some stuff that you should know.”

And I guess we should do our semi-annual explanation, Chuck,

that the title of our podcast is never intended to make you feel bad

because you don't know something. It's not that we think you should know this already. We're saying we find this really interesting, and we want to share it with you. Hence, we want you to know about it.

Well, you should know about this because it's interesting, and we want to tell you about it. Not that you should already know about it. Yeah, that's second one. We just did that listener mail like two weeks ago.

I think we should do it every week. I'm going to start every podcast with that from now on, OK? That's a great way to retain listeners, I think. For sure. I mean, you should see the much I'm drinking right now.

It's like mash, mash, brown, green. It's disgusting. I don't know what's wrong with it, but I got a drink in anyone. Oh, is it not taste good either?

Not really. It's pretty bitter. Maybe that much is turned, bro. But does it-- it was powder. Does match a turn?

Because if so, I'm drinking turned, match a for sure. All right, well, we'll do a short stuff. Can a powder turn. Nice powder, sweet. But no, we're not going to do that today,

because we're talking about the cow loon, walled city, and Hong Kong, which is the most-- well, at one time, it was the most densely populated place on planet Earth. And just to give you, if you've ever been to New York City,

if you've ever traveled to the East Village, well, one of my favorite villages-- That's where I got engaged. Yeah, right there at the museum. New museum?

New museum? Not the waiting. No. That is the most-- and it doesn't feel like it when you're there,

but the East Village is the most densely neighborhood in New York City. And they have about 43,000 people living in the East Village. The Cow loon walled city is about the size of the East Village geographically, but there are one point--

“yeah, that's why they use the East Village and all the comps.”

1.25 million people living there, as opposed to 43,000.

OK, yes, exactly. But there were really only 33,000 people, but if you spread it all out over a square kilometer, you would have that many people to equal that density, right? That's right.

So that's-- I wanted to make sure to take that and just screw it up. The reason I did this because it's not the same size. Caloo and Wild City is like a fraction of the size of the square kilometer.

Yeah, it's-- I think it's like a little over three football fields. I saw that. I also saw four. I also saw four rugby fields or large soccer pitches. So all of those put together, imagine 33,000 people standing

there, like they literally have to be standing on one of their shoulders, who knows how many people deep it would be. And so this incredibly compact area of a few football fields or rugby or soccer pitches held buildings right up against each other

And if you went into this place, you would be like,

I-- this is like nowhere I've ever been in the world, and you would be right because there was no where in the world, like the Caloo and Wild City from about 1970 to 1990, yes. Yeah, like if you have a fairly small-ish lot that your house is on, let's say you have a single family house.

And it's on like maybe a half an acre if you're lucky. Like you're doing pretty great. That's a great life. This is a little more than six and a half acres, and there were 500 buildings back in there.

Not like even with those mind-blowing stats, it's like, go and look, there's a very famous photograph

“from, I think, a 1989 or 1990 National Geographic overhead”

that just gets it all across perfectly. You just look at it, you know, like that-- that doesn't even look like a village or a city, it looks like a single thing. And a lot of people have made that point

that these buildings were so close together, they were so interconnected. People just have hazard bridges between one building and another, so they didn't have to go down 14 stories and then back up, that essentially created one single organism

that that's kind of how Caloo and Wild City came to be seen when it reached its fully developed peak. Yeah, it had to be the inspiration behind the living quarters and ready-player one. If you've ever seen that movie in a red-the-book,

when I saw pictures of Caloo and Wild City

for the first time, I was like, oh, it looks like ready-player one.

Except it was real, this was an actual real place. So we encourage you at some point when it's safe to do so to look it up because the pictures were with a thousand words and we spent probably a couple of thousand trying to describe it. The thing that really rings home, I guess, to me.

OK. It's comparing it to Blade Runner, like a space in Blade Runner when Harrison Ford is eating noodles and Edward James almost comes up to take him away. Like, just that kind of look like the fluorescent light,

everything's packed together, there's people everywhere. Like, that's what it looked like. Like, there's no way that the designers of Blade Runner did not, or not inspired by Caloo and Wild City, I refused to believe it.

Well, or I guess I could say it now. There've been lots of video games and movies that were based either on or very much patterned after this look, one of the black ops games is movie about a straight cat, or I'm sorry,

video game about a straight cat that could be a movie at some point. But yeah, I think it was. This is all to say, it was densely packed. Have we gotten that across? What was that movie that I told you to watch

about the cat, the animated movie about the cat? And then you said, I already saw it in theaters, was it called Flow?

“I think that was Flow, that was so, so great.”

That was such a good movie. I encourage everybody to go watch it. It's like almost 16 or 8-bit graphic looking. It's very bit mapped on purpose. And it really does a great job of making it otherworldly.

Yeah, it won the Oscar, and it looks that way, because a dude made it in his apartment. Oh, man, that makes it even better.

That is such an amazing movie.

Yeah, it's really great. The other movie that sticks out for me when I think of Caloo and Wild City is the merchandise movie Howard's End, right? Or far and away with Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Helen.

I saw that in the theater for some reason, too. Really, that's weird. I also saw Eyes White's shut in the theater, and I knew all of it going into it. And so it was my birthday, so I made my whole family go watch it.

Oh, that's a very fun end of that story. Yeah. All right, so we need to go back in history, though, if we want to talk about how the city came to be. And in order to do that, we need to go back

to the first opium war, which was a few years between 1839 and 42, where there was a trade dispute between Imperial China and Britain, where in Britain was like, hey, we love shipping in this opium from India to your addicted citizens, right?

And China was like, no, we like selling them opium ourselves. And so let's go to war over that.

“I think actually, China was executing addicts in the street.”

They were on a huge campaign to eradicate opium addiction from their population. And Britain was like, we're going to keep them addicted because we're making tons of cash off of that. Oh, for sure.

And this is after China had made a ton of money shipping tea. So there were trade relations already, you know, sort of, in-skanced. Yeah, and Britain couldn't get enough of China's tea, but China was like, we don't really want too much of your stuff

except our population wants the opium you're smuggling in. So imagine if like the war as cartel, like Mexico was like, nope, we don't want you supplying our population with drugs.

with you. And we're going to win. And now we have a treaty saying that we can sell your population drugs. And you can't do anything about it.

That was essentially the first opium war.

Yeah. And there was even a second opium war, the sequel.

“That's right, but another important thing”

came out of the first opium war, which was China was forced to seed some land on Hong Kong, which, you know, wasn't a big bustling place at that point, not much of anything at that point. And in order to sort of, you know, be close to them

and sort of keep an eye on what's going over there, the Qing dynasty said, all right, we have a military installation on just across the water from Hong Kong on the Kalun Peninsula and over the Kalun Bay, and let's build a big wall there

and just like fortify this little military installation. So they built a wall, 15 feet thick, 13 feet high. It housed about 150 soldiers. And that's where the name Kalun walled city came from from that wall.

Yeah, and today's modern Hong Kong is populated mostly on the Kalun Peninsula, but at the time it was the opposite. Hong Kong Island was the population. And this Kalun place was just a little nowhere as fell essentially.

And so China was like, yeah, we're going to keep this. We're going to keep it in eye on the brits like this.

And after, I guess the second opium war

led to the second convention of peaking where both the first opium war and the second one found China just giving into tons of demands from the brits from the Americans, from I think the French,

“who were all like, you have to open your markets to us”

because we want money from you guys. And one of the things that came out of it was the very famous 99-year lease that the brits had on Hong Kong from China, which is why the UK administered Hong Kong

for almost 100 years essentially throughout the 20th century. Yeah, so the other thing land-wise that came out of that second opium war was they seeded all of Hong Kong Island, the entire Kalun Peninsula to the brits.

But keep in mind, they still have this walled city, kind of right there, nearest to the coast within that territory. And so there was a little, I guess a little loophole that they, I don't know if they snuck it in there,

but it was in clearly written.

But there was a clause in there, basically,

that said it's so confusing, I'm not even going to read it. But the result was this weird, small walled city within this territory that Britain now controls was to stay there and to stay that way. And to stay Chinese territory.

So this little tiny six acre, three rugby pitch, this patch of land would be Chinese, sovereign land in this British territory, essentially, is what just got set up from the 1898 treaty. All right, so it's a weird situation.

But that's what they're left with. Right after the British take over there, some Christian missionaries went in, they started to get populated at the wall city. They built a church, some big farmers came in,

they started squatting, people started squatting, 'cause it was protected by this great, I'm sorry, not the great wall, a great wall. That was when we were in Belize on vacation, we went up a Rio Grande, Emily Kipsing,

you go up the Rio Grande to get to the ocean. And I was like, how thick is the Rio Grande? And it was Rio Grande, but so the joke for the rest of the trip was, we're going up a Rio Grande. Very cute.

So there was a great wall, so that attracted squatters. - It did, and one of the reasons why is because there was this idea that, okay, this is Chinese territory. So that was already kind of a thought in people's head. That there weren't enough people there

in this Christian missionary church, kind of we're almost keeping an eye on things as far as the Brits administering Hong Kong work concerns. So they weren't paying much attention to it. And then World War II came along, and Japan occupied

big swaths of China, as we talked about in our unit 731 episode, and one of those swaths was the peninsula, the Coulomb Peninsula, and they tore down those thick, thick granite walls and they used it to build out Kai Tok airport.

“And I think it was already there as kind of like”

an airfields or laying strip, and they turned it into like an actual airport, and for many, many years for decades, Kai Tok airport was the airport that you flew into when you flew to Hong Kong. - Yeah, and it's, you know, they need

to be building, I love repurposing building materials. - Sure. - So when I heard that part, I was like, that's great. They don't need that wall there anyway, because it looks like it had a wall filter wrapped

up when you looked at it. - Right. - You know, that was kind of the funny thing. - Yeah. - Which is ironic, 'cause it looks like they populated

- That, yeah. - But it was just so, I mean,

“everyone knew how far out you could build,”

so it just kind of ended up looking that way. - Right, it was, and it was very densely populated. - That's what I've heard. - So after World War II, a couple of things happened geopolitically, that kind of gave rise

to the Cowloon walled city. The name stuck even though it didn't have the walls. - Yeah. - But a lot of the people who were refugees during the war made their way down to the Cowloon Peninsula,

and they were like, "We're not Brits. "We're Chinese, so we're gonna start squatting here." And the Brits were like, "No, you know you're not squatting here. "This is not Chinese, it's ours, it's part of Hong Kong.

"We basically own Hong Kong right now, so get out."

And they evicted all the squatters in 1948. By this time, there were like thousands of 'em. So it was a really big deal. And then the squatters just came back next week. - That's right, they came back the next week.

They tried to kick him out again, and they was a riot this time.

“And I feel like that's a pretty good time for our first break.”

- Okay, sure. - All right, we'll be right back. (upbeat music) - I'm Clayton Nackard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rows rejected. The internet turned on him. - If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would. - But what happened to Clayton after the show?

Made even bigger headlines.

It began as a one-night stand, and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. - The media is here, this case has gone viral. - The dating contract.

- Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you. - We're in search for it. - This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. - I'm Stephanie Young, this is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said cheese said,

and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. - I have done nothing to get pregnant by the (beep) Brassler. - Listen to Love Trapped on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

(upbeat music) - Next Monday, our 2026 I-Hart Podcast Awards are happening live in South by Southwest.

- This is the biggest night in the podcast thing.

- We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year, and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. - And the winner is... - Creativity, knowledge, and passion.

We'll all be on full display. - Thank you so much, I-Hart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. - Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific Free,

at feeps.com, or the Veeps app. - Ego, Oda is your host for the 2026 I-Hart Podcast Awards. Live at South by Southwest. - Hello, is anybody there? - Race by a single mom.

Ego may have a few father-related issues. - Are we supposed to talk about your day? - Her podcast, thanks dad, is full of funny, heartfelt conversations with actors, including fellow SNL and Lums, comedians, musicians, and more about life,

and they're wonderfully complicated relationships with their fathers.

“- I think it'll help, that's a good thing.”

- Get to know Ego, follow thanks dad with Ego, Oda, and start listening on the free I-Hart Radio app today. (upbeat music) - All right, so we're back. Calenwald City, without the wall.

- Yeah. - Is being populated, they're getting kicked out, they keep coming back. There was a Chinese Civil War, following the World War II, so that was one reason

that between the Communists and the Nationalist Party, and that was one reason, people were starting, to get the heck out of, in there, I guess. - Yeah. - And in 1949, the Communists won,

they declared the People's Republic of China. And so that's when, in the 1950s, things really kicked off with refugees trying to get in there and build up up up. - Yeah, and if you were a refugee from China, that meant you were probably a nationalist

or at the very least, weren't a Communist, and you just needed to get out of there. But, it's far as you were concerned, better off living on this tiny patch of Chinese land, 'cause you still consider yourself a Chinese national,

then you were trying to assimilate into this British administered colony, that was really Chinese, but the Brits didn't treat it like that, right? And so these refugees became like this,

they almost like freedom fighters. And even the CCP, the Chinese Communist government, they were promoting them, they would give them supplies sometimes, they would give them food, sometimes they would send

keep fighting the good fight, you know, we've got your back.

“And essentially, anytime the Brits tried to make a move”

on these residents of Calu and Walled City, China would step in and be like, ah, that is Chinese territory. So no matter what these people did, the Brits' hands were tied.

And the whole reason why was not that China cared about them, but it was a thorn and great Britain side. There was this crazy, weird area that they did not have control over in the middle of this colony, that they had taken from China

and trying to took every opportunity

to basically twist that thorn in their side.

And they used every time that the people of Calu and were put upon as a chance to step in and flex their whatever authority they did have in the area still. - Yeah, so as a result of all this, the Brits were like, I don't even care anymore.

Like this is such a pain in the 50s and 60s, they took a real hands off approach and just kind of let what happened there, happened there.

“And that led to a real influx of people.”

And then that housing boom, they didn't have, it looks like the only building code they have was you can't build anything over 14 stories tall 'cause it's right there next to the airport and you don't want to get a wing

through your living room one day. So that was only building code around,

certainly the only one honored

because it was kind of anything goes inside there and what we ended up with, you mentioned an organic structure. It was ended up called by architects when organic mega structure. - Sure.

- Because these buildings would sink down into their foundation and start to tip, but they would tip over into the next one and that one was tipping toward it. So they ended up calling like lovers buildings

because at the top they were all kind of angled in and touching one another and it's sort of sweet if you think about it. - It is kind of sweet. It was also at the same time weirdly architects

in like the 50s and 60s, there was kind of like a avant-garde school of thought

about just incredibly dense, like community building.

And this is essentially a natural experiment and it kind of showed that a lot of those theories held up, kind of like the buildings held one another up, that people could just build out what they needed in ways that they needed in that spaces

that were livable without having to be spread out without having to have government oversight and all that kind of stuff too. Those buildings, especially when they were lovers buildings, pressed up against one another,

they became so dense that sunlight would not penetrate the street level in a lot of cases. In most cases actually like one of the premiums for a flat in the Calllloon walled city was one that was outward facing or faced on the internal courtyard

because they had sun exposure. Most of the apartments, businesses, dwellings, streets, alleys in Calllloon walled city were not exposed to sunlight at any point in the day. - Yeah and you sent this pretty good little YouTube,

it was like 15, 20 minutes long about this walled city that breaks it down and at one point I paused it because they had, I was wondering what these things cost. And I don't know what year this was that they gave us these numbers from,

but a 280 square foot flat cost $28,000 and if you're thinking, all right, that's 280, 28,000 that kind of makes sense. But that was without sunlight.

“I think the exterior facing 450 square foot flat”

was $60,000. - Yeah and I think that was in the 60s or 70s from a paper I saw. - Okay. - But still, one of the things I saw

is that a reason that this was attractive to a lot of people because over time the place didn't just attract Chinese nationalists and refugees from China had attracted people who were like, "I don't know, this is really cheap living in here."

You could get a flat that was about double the square footage of a government flat, like a council flat, public housing essentially you call it. And it had a kitchen and a bathroom and those were not guaranteed in the public housing flats

that you would maybe even pay the same or more for. So there was like real incentive to move into this place if you didn't care about living cheap to jowl with your neighbors amid trash and abandoned appliances and all sorts of other crazy stuff.

- Yeah, well there were some benefits though. If you lived in the Caloon Waltzitty, you didn't pay a electric bill almost certainly because you probably just like literally ran the electric yourself from the public utilities.

There was all manner of plumbing and wiring routed from the outside coming in into the Waltzitty. So these buildings were wrapped in water pipes and sewage lines

If you were a business, you weren't paying any kind of business

taxes, so that was a big plus.

“But you didn't have stuff like trash pickup.”

And you had to deal with things like heroin dealers and brothels and the triad gang kind of running the show, which was mostly bad, but they also did some things to keep the place up. - Yeah, a good example that I saw of what life was like

and this that made it like people just got used to this stuff and it was everyday was that you would when you're walking on street level, you would carry an umbrella because of those exposed pipes. It would be leaking on you,

but some of those pipes were also sewage pipes, so those would be dripping and leaking too, because there was no code that was being followed. It was like I need a sewage outlet coming out of my house here, so I'm just gonna run this pipe right here

and that's that. So people just walked around with umbrellas on street level. Another one that I saw that people just got used to is that a lot of the street level areas were tunnels.

And the reason that they were tunnels is because overhead there was a mesh net that had been laid between buildings

“to catch the trash that people just threw out of their windows”

and the reason that they put the mesh netting was because if they didn't, then you wouldn't be able to get into the ground floor of any of the buildings because there would be so covered up a trash, and so these impromptu alleys

developed as trash built overhead

and the walls of the first floor of these buildings

were exposed on either side. People just got used to this, like this was just what life was like in Kaoulun, and in some ways it wasn't that much worse if at all, then some of the other poverty-stricken areas

of Hong Kong at the time. - Yeah, like if you're wondering why do people even live there or stay there, it's for exactly that reason, it wasn't so different from other poor places that it would have been a big life improvement to move.

And this was their home, it may look kind of crazy from the outside, but people really made a life there. There were hundreds of legit businesses that operated there. There were machine shops, there were a lot of machine shops,

as far as industry goes, a metal fabrication. And then food was a big one. There were lots of food factories and in that documentary they said,

there was always a feeling that like some of the food

that was made there was on the plates and in the bowls of some really high-class restaurants surrounding them. - Yep, the fish balls. So they were unregulated fish balls,

made in highly unsanitary conditions that just made it out of the Kaoulun wall city. 'Cause that's another thing too. A lot of people look at this from the outside and think like this is completely isolated

from the rest of Hong Kong, absolutely untrue. Those businesses were exporting out of the city into the rest of Hong Kong. People were coming from outside of the city into the city for things like dentists and doctors

who were all unlicensed, unregulated, which at first blush, you were just like,

“oh my God, why would you go to a unlicensed dentist?”

Well, they were already trained in licensed in China, but when they went to Hong Kong, those credentials didn't transfer over. And so rather than pay and become a licensed dentist in Hong Kong under British rule,

they just set up in Kaoulun wall city and set up practice without needing a license. - Yeah, and it was cheaper. Way cheaper. - There were schools, if you're like,

you know, did they've been functioned as like a regular society? They actually, for sure, did. There were kindergarten, there were schools. A lot of times it was like the salvation army

or somebody kind of running these things. If you were like, what about a playground or something like that? Some of these rooftops had, you know, playground equipment where kids could go.

Pigeon racing was a big thing. So there were gardens on the roofs. The ones that didn't have trash on them. And they were also keeping these racing pigeons up there. And, you know, there was actually some order.

It wasn't just like, you know, it might picture like constant chaos or something like that. It was more like something you see at a blade runner, just a really densely populated city, like actually functioning.

They had volunteer fire brigades. They didn't, you know, they didn't have municipal trash collection. And there was trash all over the place, but they tried, you know, they had volunteer trash collection teams.

They had night watch teams. There was a single male delivery person delivering to the entire city. So they were functioning. - Yeah, there was the officially

the neighborhood welfare association. If you bought or sold a flat, the neighborhood welfare association would witness it. So it was very much legal. And then the triads you mentioned,

they were running and they were manufacturing and selling heroin out of the city. They were running protection records and brothels and trust and child prostitutes and all sorts of terrible stuff. And then simultaneously,

Like, it was not just chaotic anarchy. It was an Arctic in the sense of like government regulation and oversight, you know, building codes and stuff. But it's not like you just walked over your neighbor's house and killed them and took their stuff.

And that was that. Like there was law in order. And it was the rule of the triads who essentially kept people from, I guess, descending into chaos if that was even a possibility.

- Well, they didn't want, it's kind of the rule of the street. They didn't want the real authorities coming in there. And if it got so bad, that would eventually happen.

It was, I mean, I remember when my friend bought his first house

in Atlanta in the mid '90s in a pretty rough neighborhood, like he got his house broken into and got some stuff stolen. And the guy that was the big, like, drug dealer dude in the neighborhood brought his stuff back. - Oh, wow.

- And like knocked on the door and said, "Here's your guitar, here's your amp, here's your stuff."

“And he was like, you know, I think the unspoken thing”

was like, he didn't want the cops in there. - Sure. Trying to keep his guys from doing dumb stuff like that to attract attention. - Okay, so yeah, perfect analogy.

That's exactly what the triads we're doing in there. And so yeah, if you just wanted to do heroin or something, I think it was largely smoked. You would come from outside Calumol City, maybe if you liked heroin, so much you'd stick around

and move there. But at the same time, if you were just some elderly person looking for a cheap place to stay, that was willing to live in an incredibly dense place, like there was room for you there too.

So it was a really, I saw that it was vilified and romanticized and it really should be either, neither of those should be done to it. It was just like every other place, multiple shades of gray.

It was just literally. - Literally. - Sure, it's just that the extremes on either side are so fascinating, especially when they, the whole spectrum is viewed

“that's what made Calloon City so remarkable.”

- Yeah, for sure.

I think that's a great time for a second break.

And we're gonna talk about what happened in Calloon City right after this. - I'm Clayton Nackard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. - Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.

He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. - If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would. - But what happened to Clayton after the show

made even bigger headlines? It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. - The media is here.

This case has gone viral. - The dating contract. - Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you. - We're in such part. - This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

- I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. - This season, an epic battle of he said she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. - I have done nothing to get broken by the (beep)

Brassler. - Listen to Love Trapped on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Next Monday, our 2026 I-Heart Podcast Awards are happening live in South by Southwest.

- Just the biggest night in the podcast thing. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. - And the winner is...

- Creativity, knowledge, and passion. We'll all be on full display. - Thank you so much, I-Heart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome.

- Watch live next Monday at 8pm Eastern 5pm Pacific Free. Itfeeps.com or The Veeps app. - Ego Loda is your host for the 2026 I-Heart Podcast Awards. Live at South by Southwest. Hello, is anybody there?

- Race by a single mom. Ego may have a few father-related issues. - Are we supposed to talk about your dad? - Her podcast, thanks dad. It's full of funny, heartfelt conversations with actors,

including fellow Estinella Lums, comedians, musicians, and more about life. And they're wonderfully complicated relationships with their fathers.

“- I think it'll help that's a good thing.”

- Get to know Ego. Follow thanks dad with Ego Adam and start listening on the free I-Heart Radio app today. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

- Chuck, we're back in, I just wanted to say before I forget,

again, 99% invisible, of course, did an amazing episode

of course, it did. - On this back in 2012, so.

- Yeah, and you could be like, oh,

“well, it's not what Josh and Chuck said.”

They said something different. Just go with Roman Mars interpretation. - Yeah, I just weirdly texted Roman the other day,

or yesterday, for the first time in a long, long time.

Like weirdly, you said something weird? - No, just weird that you brought him up that's twice that he's been mentioned in my life. And twice in a couple of days, and it had been a while. And he didn't text me back yet, it's come on Roman.

- Seriously, Roman, get your act together. (laughing) - So, yeah, so with Kelly and Walt sitting, let's go on along. Most of the stuff we've just talked about,

the 14-story buildings, lovers buildings, pressed up against one another, the trash tunnels. All that stuff is really taking place from about 1970 to say, 1992, okay? That's like the peak of the notoriety and infamy

and the way that people think of Kelly and Walt City, it was basically between those decades, right? And even before then, even before the 14-story buildings,

it was astonishingly going up in the city,

the brids were like, we really hate that Cowloon Walt City is sitting there. It's just like a thumb in our eye of the Chinese, just keep rubbing over and over again. We really want to get rid of it,

but their hands were tied, essentially. Despite that, they tried a bunch of different ideas to try to get people out of Cowloon Walt City so they could tear it down. - It was a toe in their teeth.

Perfect. - And you are on fire today. - I mean, can you imagine anything worse? - A foot in your Brunswick stew. - Ress, oh, wow, okay, that one's today.

- That one and everything, good, good. - Let's call back. All right, so if you don't know what that is, everybody, that's just gonna be a little easter egg

“for you one day, deep in the stuff you should know archives.”

- Thank you. - Deep in a pot of Brunswick stew. All right, in 1962, the brids started, or I'm sorry, they completed construction on a high-rise public housing complex

called the Tong Tao Estate, and they're like, all right, everybody, look what we built for you. Residents of Cowloon Walt City, get out of there, come on over here. We want to resettle to you.

This is much nicer, authority showed up. They had notices that they posted and handed people, and they were met with the Cowloon Walt City, anti-demolition, and anti-removal committee. You said, no thanks, we want to stay here.

- Yeah, and so they said, you know what, we're gonna tell China on you, essentially. And China stepped in, and was like, no guys, you're not going to do that. These people have a right to live here.

This is, quote, a gross violation of China sovereignty, and everybody should protest and strike, and they did, and the cops came in and there were clashes, and it became essentially an international scandal that the Brits were picking on these poor people

who were squatting in this poor area in a colony, the Brits were administering it. It was not a very good look, so the Brits backed off. And it was another chance for China to be like, ah, we are really using Cowloon Walt City

to the maximum effect. So the Brits, who still wanted to tear this down, they went back to the drawing board. - That's right, but what they knew they had was this 99-year lease signed in 1898.

So you do the math, 1997 was that year on the horizon, just sort of sitting out there. - How would it have said 98? - And then the Brits, they knew the state was coming, China knew the state was coming,

and they were like, all right, do China was like, we've been making him in and hung about the same being sovereign, like, do we really want this back in 1997? Do we wanna inherit this thing?

And on the Brits side, they were like, aha, like we know what they're thinking over there, they don't want it really inherit this thing either. - Yeah. - So they started some sort of more legitimate,

like agreeing with one another as far as talks go, as early as like 1986, when China was like, maybe we should actually talk this over now. - Yeah, and these were secret talks, right? So for China, this city had outlived its political usefulness.

I guess just as, I mean, they wanted to tear it down so badly that the Brits were willing to do this for China shortly before the handover in 1997. And so what they came up with is that residents would be offered financial compensation,

“pretty good compensation to I think about $300,000”

for a flat, that again, they'd spent maybe $30,000 on 20 years before, they would be moved into a high-rise public housing unit.

They're basically all gonna be resettled

into a nicer life grottis with the little spending money. - That's right. So finally, on January 14th, 1987,

and squatter control from Hong Kong, and they came down to Calen City, and they were like, hey, we need to get a, we need to know how many people are here. We need to know how many people were resettling,

so we need an actual census. Like no one has a clue. We've been guessing how many people live here based on ordinary numbers, and this is an ordinary place. So they cordoned off all 83 entrances and exits to the city,

went door to door, and did a census and counted people up and said, hey, this is the plan moving forward. You're gonna be resettled. And there wasn't a riot this time. They were still thinking like, oh yeah,

we're gonna tell China on you,

“'cause they didn't know those secret talks”

had been going on. - Right. - This time it was different

and the Chinese foreign ministry finally stepped up

and in a formal statement said in so many words, yeah, the time has come and we're giving this over to the British. They're gonna, they're gonna rid this place of its residences, and it was nice while it lasted.

- Yeah, so that was 1987, you said. It wasn't until 94 that Calenwald City was finally fully demolished, and it wasn't until two years before that that the last resident was finally evicted.

There was a few, there were a few holdouts, a lot of people were like, yeah, I'll take 300 grand in a new place to live. - Yeah. - There were some holdouts because I don't,

probably people of guesses, but we didn't say it overtly. There was a tremendous amount of pride among people living in Calenwald City. They did their home, yes. And it was a very special and unique home

and they were not going to find that anywhere else on Earth and they knew it, and so a lot of them were holdouts for a very long time and did not want to go. - Yeah, and I imagine attracted just like the initial attraction in the 50s and 60s, people that didn't want

to be under like the thumb of a government was still sort of a sentiment there. - Yeah. - They didn't want to assimilate to the larger sort of system because they had a system that they felt worked for them

in whatever way that was. So I have a lot of respect for the people that were like, no, I don't want to leave. I can't kick me out of my home. But like you said, sadly, the last person was evicted in 1992.

There were people burning you in jacks, setting off homemade firecrackers and stuff. A few people actually physically battled the cops a little bit, but it wasn't, you know, it was a pretty small resistance

and in July of '92 the last person left. - Yes. So there's nothing really left of Calenwald City. It's just the footprint. This footprint has been around for hundreds of years

and it will not go away. It's an indelible print on Hong Kong as a town, as an area on the Calenwald Peninsula. And even the Kai Tok Airport is gone now. They've moved the airport further away from the city center

because like you said, they had to be very careful descending. We've talked about it before. I don't remember, maybe like our air traffic control episode or something.

- Yeah.

- Where like you basically had to clear the 14 story

walled city and then suddenly dropped to hit the runway. It was really not well planned because there wasn't really a plan. So they moved the airport.

They got rid of the Calenwald City and now there's a park there and it's place. - Yeah, and I think they did that documentary. Say that original religious building is still there. It's like the only thing that's left

from the early days. - It was the office of the administrator of the city. - Oh, okay. - And yes, it's still there. They preserved it in the Calenwald city.

That was what that courtyard was. It was built around that original office from the Qing dynasty. - Yeah, that was it.

“That's the only thing from the early days that's left.”

It's like you said, it's a green space. There's ponds. It's quite lovely. They do have a table size scale model of what was there. But yeah, it's still that same shape.

Like if you do aerial shots, you know, it's really stuck to their parameters. - Yeah. - With the city once the walls were gone and with this park is it's the exact same shape still.

And, you know, like we mentioned, it's been in a ton of either directly sort of been the setting for movies like in Blood Sport from John Glenn, bed dam or been like heavily inspired by what the sort of the look they were going after

in video games and films. - I don't care what you say. Blood Sport was a good movie. - You know what? I didn't see a single John Glenn, bed dam movie.

- I saw a time, well, I should, I'll tell you this off of, okay.

But anyway, I finally saw Blood Sport

when I was, not like a couple of years ago and I was like, wow, this movie's actually really good. - I got to check it out. - Oh, you should check it out. That's what I'm saying.

- Yeah, that's my new deal. This is John Claude all the way. - Okay. - Okay. - Where's he been?

“- I remember he had like a podcast or a TV show”

or something for a while. - Yeah, the podcast.

- Yeah, I think he did.

- Or it would be celebrities?

- It was a, no, I'm sorry.

“It was like a TV show where it was okay.”

It was a mockumentary or pseudo reality where he played himself, but John Claude Van Dam actually was a spy in real life or something like that. - Oh, I don't, I haven't heard of that. - I think it was short lived.

- All right. Well since Chuck has dedicated himself to watching John Claude Van Dam movies all the time, that means obviously it's time for listener mail. (bell ringing)

- All right, so this is a rare rebutt to a listener mail. So a listener writing in it about another listener mail, because we had our Irish friend right in and point out that we were sort of engaging in Irishy Ratio, right?

So, hey guys, while the emailer was correct that Shackleton was born in County, Killed Air, Shackleton himself would have considered himself British. He was born in Ireland while it was under British rule and moved to Great Britain when he was 10.

He served in the British army and was awarded many British honors. I myself am a proud Irishman, but I don't think you were wrong in calling him British. - Wow.

- I'm happy to accept that he was correct if there was a quote, which shows that he considered himself Irish.

Ireland in nationality is always a tricky subject.

I hold the UK driver's license in an Irish passport. I've one child technically born in the UK and one born in Ireland with just 80 miles between the hospitals and them both being on the same island.

I keep up the good work, guys. Been listening for years and all of the show. As from Jamie Fennigan and we're not gonna wait into this any further Jamie because I know that stuff is very tricky.

- Yeah. - So we have read the original email and now the rebuttal and we're gonna leave it to you guys to work it out. - Nice.

“- I think that's a great idea and that was from Jamie, right?”

- Yes it is.

- Okay, well thanks a lot Jamie

and if you wanna be like Jamie, you can send us an email too. Send it off to [email protected]. (upbeat music) - Stuff you should know is a production

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