300,000 people packed into fourteen acres with no building codes or clear landlord

A legal quirk left a small patch of Hong Kong outside both British colonial and Chinese jurisdiction for decades, and squatters built upward without oversight until the Kowloon Walled City held an estimated 300,000 residents in a dense cluster of unlicensed high-rises, famous for chronic darkness, informal clinics, and small manufacturing shops wedged into every corridor. The Hong Kong government finally demolished it in 1993 after years of negotiation, and a public park now occupies the site.

— Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City — Watermark Publications, 1993
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