Return to the City of Darkness

Available for over a year

Return to Kowloon-Walled City, aka City of Darkness, so called because the sunlight rarely penetrated its dense layers of industry and life. A teeming Hong Kong megastructure constructed haphazardly, buildings leaning into each other, passageways punched through corridors no wider than the spread of one's arms. People cheek by jowl in a ramshackle, higgledy-piggledy world of furious, sweated energy. At one point, the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on the planet. Writer Paul French talks to former residents who grew up there, like Louisa Wong and Albert Ng, and those who meticulously chronicled its last months, like artist Fiona Hawthorne, then architectural student Suenn Ho and the photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, who created the definitive visual record of its existence with their book Kowloon-City of Darkness. The Walled City was frequently a place seemingly beyond the law. Autonomous, ungoverned if not untouched by Colonial authority and a refuge for the desperate, the dodgy and the poor. A rookery, festooned with cables, pipes and dripping water, teeming with sounds and the fetid 'dragon's breath' of furious energy and existence. Now, it has become a semi-mythic memory of old Hong Kong; celebrated on film, in manga and prose ,but once it was an astonishing, living entity. With the voices of: Greg Girard, Fiona Hawthorne Suenn Ho, Pastor Albert Ng, Guy Shirra, Louisa Wong and Chan Woonie. Readers: John Chan, Jon Chew, Betty Lo, David Tse, Kevin Ung, Charlie Wong Sound Engineer-Duncan Thornley Producer-Mark Burman A Storyscape Production for Radio 3.