Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey there, this is Josh from Stuff You Should Know with a message that could change your life. The Stuff You Should Know Think Spring podcast playlist is available now. Whether spring has sprung in your neck of the woods yet or not, the Stuff You Should Know Think Spring playlist will make you want to get your overalls on, get outside, and get your hands in the dirt.
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Hey, and 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.
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Chapter 2: What was the significance of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong?
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 Kowloon Peninsula. And they tore down those thick, thick granite walls and they used it to build out Kai Tak Airport. And I think it was already there as kind of like an airfield or landing strip.
And they turned it into like an actual airport. And for many, many years, for decades, Kai Tak Airport was the airport that you flew into when you flew to Hong Kong.
Yeah, and it's, you know, they needed building materials. 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 on it when you looked at it.
Right.
You know, that was kind of the funny thing. Yeah. Which is ironic, because it looks like they populated that city with a wall and then took the wall down.
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.
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Chapter 3: How did Kowloon Walled City become so densely populated?
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All right, so we're back. Kowloon Walled City, without the wall, is being populated. They're getting kicked out. They keep coming back. There was a Chinese civil war following World War II, so that was one reason that people, you know, between the communists and the Nationalist Party, and that was one reason people were starting, you know, to get the heck out of, you know, in there, I guess.
And in 1949, you know, 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.
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Chapter 4: What were the living conditions like in Kowloon Walled City?
And what we ended up with, you know, you mentioned an organic structure. It was ended up called by architects an organic megastructure. 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 lover's 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 an avant-garde school of thought about just incredibly dense 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 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 Kowloon-Wald 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 Kowloon-Wald City were not exposed to sunlight at any point in the day.
Yeah. And that 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 costs twenty eight thousand American dollars.
And if you're thinking, all right, that 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.
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Chapter 5: How did the history of opium wars influence Kowloon Walled City?
And so they said, you know what, we're going to 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's 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 was not a very good look. So the Brits backed off. And it was another chance for China to be like, ha ha, we are really using Kowloon, Walled 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. Yeah. Signed in 1898. So you do the math. 1997 was that year on the horizon, just sort of sitting out there. I would have said 98. And the Brits, they knew this date was coming. China knew this date was coming. And they were like, all right, China was like, we've been making hemming and hawing about this thing being sovereign.
Like, do we really want this back in 1997? Do we want to inherit this thing? And on the Brit side, they were like, aha, like, we know what they're thinking over there. They don't want to 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. And I guess just as a, 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 too, 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 going to be resettled into a nicer life gratis with a little spending money.
That's right. So finally, on January 14th, 1987, they got 360 staff members from the clearance and squatter control from Hong Kong. And they they came down to Kowloon 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 are resettling. So we need an actual census. Right. Like no one has a clue.
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