A Vanished City (By Miyamoto Ryuji)

The Kowloon Walled City is gone. How many times did I go to Hong Kong to see it since that day in May of 1987 when I first set foot inside it?

Sometimes people create things which totally surpass the imagination. The Kowloon Walled City lay sandwiched between nations-having emerged out of the intersection of a number of historical contingencies. For innumerable people who suffered setbacks in the tumultuous history of modern East Asia, from the Opium War to the Second World War, to the formation of the People’s Republic of China and the retrocession of Hong Kong, this city was a final destination, a communal refuge on the farthest margins. People coming together to build this kind of walled city is not a rare eve in the long history of man. But most of those instances have disappeared without a trace. The Kowloon Walled City was a massive crystallization of the communal unconscious of the Chinese; a miraculous , uncommonly transcendent phenomenon of human ingenuity which just happened to rise up before our eyes.

Faced with something like this, all I could do was stare and to try to capture it in photographs. Taking pictures was the only method available to me. As I wandered through the Kowloon Walled City I kept asking myself what it meant to take pictures in a place like this. The Kowloon Walled City was the greatest and the last labyrinth of this century. For me, to walk its winding corridors was to walk through the riddle of human existence.

Unfortunately the Kowloon Walled City is gone. It has vanished from the face of the earth. Even as it languished in corruption and misery, this place always had something sublime and aloof about it. Never again will we be able to stare straight into its profound darkness and chaos. The Kowloon Walled City has become a city of legend, a city which lives on only in human memory.

(translated by Keith Vincent)